Before Cyberpunk 2077 came out in December 2020, it looked like it had the potential to be the next Skyrim. Like Skyrim, it was a huge first-person open-world RPG. Like Skyrim, it was the highly anticipated next game from a beloved RPG studio. Like Skyrim, it was a game that millions of us couldn’t wait to play.

Fallout 3 and The Witcher 3 share some similarities in that they both set the stage for where Bethesda and CD Projekt Red would go next. Both were the third game in a RPG series that took the franchise beyond their niche audiences and into the mainstream. Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 are both games produced by developers that, at the time, were at the top of their game.

Most importantly, Cyberpunk 2077 (like Skyrim) came from a studio with roots in PC development, and that promised a certain degree of modability. Skyrim has lived on for 14 years, in part, because it’s a great RPG. But its legacy has been defined by what fans have done with the game as much as it has been defined by Bethesda.

Cyberpunk 2077 Could Have Been The Next Skyrim

To the extent that, if you want to get into Skyrim, many players will tell you that you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t play on PC. The Forgotten City, a great mystery adventure game, began life as a Skyrim mod, before the dev team spun it off as its own thing. The fanmade Oblivion remake, Skyblivion, was created using Skyrim’s mod tools. There are a near-endless number of smaller mods that add new locations and quests, expand the selection of in-world assets, change the aesthetic, make the game more hardcore, deepen the snow, and on and on. People treated Skyrim as a platform, not just a game.

I fully expected Cyberpunk to snatch this crown. Especially given that, prior to release, CD Projekt Red’s post-launch plans included two big expansions and an online mode — that sounded, to me at least, like a futuristic take on GTA Online. Those additions would have kept Cyberpunk 2077 on players’ minds for years, but the launch was so messy that CD Projekt Red spent years cleaning the game up instead. It’s a good game now, but it lost out on any momentum a successful launch would have given it.

So Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t get the same kind of modder attention that Skyrim did. Though the game has mod support and a community that remains active, it wasn’t the successor I expected nor hoped it to be.

But Baldur’s Gate 3’s Differences Helped It Succeed

No, as my colleague James Troughton recently argued, that successor ended up being Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s the RPG that has kept an active fanbase for a year-and-a-half on the strength of its open-ended roleplaying and lovably flawed characters alone. Players began modding the game early on, but official mod support was added last year, and modders soon cracked custom campaigns, allowing fans to create their own adventures in this world, like the forthcoming, eagerly anticipated Path to Menzoberranzan. New players will continue to discover Baldur’s Gate 3’s stellar base game, but this kind of user-generated content will keep them coming back for years to come.

Players flock to Baldur’s Gate 3 for its characters, its strategic combat, and its compelling narrative — not factors that often get mentioned when discussing Skyrim’s long-term success. In fact, expecting Cyberpunk 2077 to be the next RPG to enjoy a Skyrim-esque post-launch life, kept afloat by committed modders, may have been a simple bias based on how we had seen this play out before. Skyrim was a big, first-person, open-world RPG so we expected a big, first-person, open-world RPG to take the crown. But Baldur’s Gate 3’s differences are part of what helped it succeed.