CDPR revealed in a recent interview that they never intended to have V and Jack on more missions in Night City because "it didn't have real tension" and the team sped up the pace of this part to get it into the main line quickly. (Warning: The following contains spoilers)
Although Jack appears in almost every pre-release cyberpunk 2077 trailer, he doesn't play much in the game. The six months that protagonist V spent with Jack quickly skipped in the form of a montage, leading some fans to believe that CDPR was originally intended to make these missions playable in the game, but was later removed.
In an interview with Story Mode, veteran designer Paweł Ochocki countered the speculation. He called the chapter one of the "most controversial moments" in the game for fans, but the studio's intent was simply to get Johnny Silver Hand to pop into V's mind.
Paweł Ochocki said: "We always thought that this sequence was like this, we wanted to speed up the development of the story. From a script structure point of view, if we had V spend six months with Jack and then the real action would have begun, that would have been too long. ”
According to him, when you get a chip from Johnny's Silver Hand and insert it into your head, Cyberpunk 2077 starts to get interesting. "Expanding the game before this part of the content doesn't fit what we want to tell you later," he says. Complete missions with Jack all over the city... It's just an open-world mode that doesn't set specific goals or conflicts for the characters, like this guy wants to make money – and there's no real tension. Once you die and that cyber terrorist of the past comes to your mind, the tension will arise. ”
CDPR doesn't want to repeat a GTA-like pattern in Cyberpunk 2077, it aims to be an immersive RPG about the protagonist and his inner conflict. But before the game was released, the marketing publicity made many players feel that they had a lot of connection with Jack, so his absence from the game was very strong afterwards.