Everything you need to know about Cyberpunk 2077

The dystopian future has already arrived, even if nobody realised it, and now we’re blank-faced consumer drones to the megacorps and vaccine microchip production lines.

According to developer CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077 is “an open world, narrative-driven role-playing game”, and features a first-person perspective, “sexual pleasurement” and “exposure to death corpse”, Keanu Reeves as your personal holo-bro, noodity and custom pubic hairstyles, and other things but not flying cars.

The protagonist – that’s you! – is an urban merc, can be male or female, and is named V. Just V. You can customise almost everything about your character, like haircut, tattoos, and even traumas from your childhood, and you’re not limited to a single preset class. Instead, you can dip into whatever you want – be a techie by day, a netrunner by night, and a superstar on social media. Actually, I made up the last one, but it totally could be in the game.

Cybernetic enhancements! Neural reflex boosters! Infra-red optics! Memory chips! We’ve got those and more.

It’s set in Night City, a sleazy neon metropolis divvied up into six “distinct” districts, including the corporate City Center, the slums and black market zone of Watson, glamorous Westbrook, suburban Heywood, mob-rules Pacifica, industrial Santo Domingo, and the dusty protein farms of the Badlands. You start with an apartment in Watson with a garage where you can gear up, and you can get new, different apartments and vehicles through the game.

Much like The Witcher series, Cyberpunk 2077 is a “mature experience intended for mature audiences”. So expect swears, ultra violence, sex, and drugs. And romance, if you’re old-fashioned like that. For streamers, the game also features a nudity filter so you don’t get sent into Twitch time-out.

Cyberpunk 2077 features three character classes – the hacker Netrunner class, engineer Techie class, and melee Solo class – but you’re not limited to just one, and can choose perks from whatever class you’re in the mood for in the moment. Basic character stats include Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical, and Cool, and extra skills can be acquired by visiting one of the in-game “ripperdocs” to purchase and upgrade V’s cyberware implants. Completing the game’s main missions banks XP and stat improvements, and the optional side missions increase your “street cred”, and unlock new vendors, locations, and other content.

The game uses a third-person, interactive dialogue system that “gives players maximum control during conversations”. For example, you can compliment an uncooperative NPC to try and make nice. Or, like, shoot them because who even has time for that kind of fake shit. It’s up to you, V. Don’t mess up. Or mess up, because that’s probably more fun. It is, however, entirely possible to finish the game without killing people, if that’s your thing.

Some sort of multiplayer is in development, but the game is shipping out with only a single-player campaign.

Cyberpunk 2077 launches on PC, and multi-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles on 10 December. Although the razzle-dazzle next-gen versions of the game won’t be out until next year, the game will support saves between different gen consoles in the same family. On Xbox, Smart Delivery will auto-upgrade your version of the game if you’re moving from Xbox One or Xbox One X to Xbox Series S or X. For PS4 to PS5, it’s more complicated and requires some manual intervention –  you can connect to your PlayStation Plus account and upload your saves to the cloud, or transfer data via a wired or wireless connection, or use external storage to copy and transfer saves within the same PSN account. You won’t be able to move a save from an Xbox to PlayStation console, though.

This article was originally published in 2018 but has been updated with new info.

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