Cyberpunk 2077 wall-running parkour nuked from final game

Cyberpunk 2077's wall-running feature has been nuked from the final game. Why? It was a design decision and the mechanic just didn't fit the overall gameplay flow.

First-person wall-running is weird and doesn't always fit. Case in point: Wall-running in Mirror's Edge felt disorienting and was a big reason why I didn't continue playing the game. Now it looks like CD Projekt RED feels the same because they've removed that specific parkour maneuver from Cyberpunk 2077.

"Ah, the wall running! That is something that we removed due to design reasons, but there's still going to be a lot of flexibility in how you move, that's for sure," level designer Max Pears told GameReactor.

We saw a brief snippet of wall-running in the early 48-minute gameplay demo shown at Gamescom 2018, but since then there's been no footage. V. jumped and adeptly sprinted alongside the wall and clung with her mantis blades like a deadly gargoyle waiting for prey. The wall-anchoring is pretty neat, but the animations to get there were just...odd. Luckily those animations have been nixed.

Also remember Cyberpunk 2077 has a specific resource threshold like any game. There's a limited pool of targeted memory that can be filled at any given time, especially since the game is on current-gen hardware. So CDPR has to scale the experience so it's not dramatically different on all platforms despite the performance disparity between, say, PCs and consoles.

The design and play aspects are just as important to consider as the resource management aspects, and I'm curious how wall-running affected this part too.

Cyberpunk 2077 will release November 19, 2020 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. It's also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X as a free next-gen upgrade for anyone who buys the current-gen version.