We don’t have much longer to wait, though: Cyberpunk 2077 will be out in September. In the meantime, we’ve dug through nearly a decade of announcements, interviews and demos to bring you all the important details about character creation, combat, romance, the story, and Keanu Reeves (he’s in it, if you hadn’t seen). Here’s what we know about Cyberpunk 2077 so far:
Cyberpunk 2077 release date
Cyberpunk 2077 will release on September 17, 2020 for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia. On PC, it’ll be on Steam and GOG.
Cyberpunk was going to release on April 16, but CD Projekt RED announced in January that it needed “more time to finish playtesting, fixing and polishing”. The delay happened prior to the coronavirus pandemic that has forced developers to work from home, and CD Projekt says it is still on target for September.
“Our plans haven’t changed—we’re steaming towards the September release of Cyberpunk,” the developer wrote in a recent update.
The bullet points
- What is Cyberpunk 2077? An open-world sci-fi RPG from the creators of The Witcher 3. It’ll be even bigger than that game, with driving and explorable buildings in a fictional California sprawl called Night City.
- Can you create a character? It’s similar to the Mass Effect series in that respect. You’ll be playing as a specific character named V, but you can customize how they look and choose from one of two voice actors, Cherami Leigh or John Flanagan. You’ll have stats, too, and dialogue options that affect outcomes.
- What’s the combat like? It looks like there are lots of conflict resolution options—eg, talking, hacking, sneaking—but Cyberpunk 2077 is at least in part a first-person shooter. It looks similar to immersive sims like Deus Ex.
- Can you do a non-lethal run? This wasn’t always true, but after feedback in 2018, CD Projekt RED gave “pretty much every gun” a non-lethal setting, lead quest designer Paweł Sasko told us.
- Who is Keanu Reeves’ character? Reeves is playing Johnny Silverhand, a well-known character from the original 1988 Cyberpunk tabletop game. He’ll be hanging out in V’s head as a “digital ghost,” so you should see lots of him throughout the game.
The latest gameplay videos
CD Projekt livestreamed a 15-minute Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo in 2019, which includes parts of what was shown at Gamescom that year—you can watch that on YouTube here.
After the video premiered, a few of the developers had a chat about world design, sidequests, and character creation on the livestream.
PLAY SOUND
There’s also a longer, 48 minute demo that was first shown at E3 2018 and later released online.
When will we see another Cyberpunk 2077 trailer?
Probably in June. E3 isn’t happening this year, but CD Projekt will be running an event called Night City Wire on June 11.
What exactly are they showing? Will Keanu be there? We don’t know, but we’re betting this will be another extended look at gameplay. That’s how CD Projekt has been doing things so far at E3, although in the past it has shown demos behind closed doors and then streamed them later. This time, there’s no E3 and no one’s allowed to be behind closed doors with each other, so CDP will probably just skip straight to the livestream, especially with the release date just a few months away from June.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 an FPS?
We know that you have at least one teammate: His name is Jackie and he’s a real badass. During one boss fight, he picked up a car and used it as mobile cover. In another fight, he charged straight through a wall to tackle an especially tough enemy. He appears to be a main character.
In part, yes. We were a bit surprised when we saw the first Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo, which revealed that combat centers around first-person shooting. We expected guns—of course there are guns—but we were envisioning a third-person action game, maybe more like Dishonored.
That said, V’s combat style looks pretty malleable. In the 2018 demo she was an agile cyberninja. She could run and slide to cover and also trigger a slow motion bullet-time mode. She also had a quick dash that let her burst in a specific direction. When bullet-time and this dash were combined, she could quickly flank enemies and deliver fatal killshots.
But here are some other cyberware upgrades and tools we’re aware of:
- A Kiroshi Optical Implant that lets you zoom in on objects and also analyze the environment, seeing enemy levels and getting detailed information about them.
- A Subdermal Grip which increases gun damage.
- An implant that let V ricochet bullets around corners to kill enemies behind cover.
- Mantis-like sword arms.
- Remote control robots.
At one point in the first demo we saw, V sneaked up on an enemy and put them in a chokehold. From there, she could hack into that person’s cyberware and access data about them, some of which is just for lore. If enemies are connected together by a network, though, a bunch of new options open up. In this instance, V hacked one enemy’s gun to make it stop working without him realizing. She killed the person she had put in a chokehold and then attacked the two remaining bad guys. As she finished off one, the other tried shooting only to realize his gun was jammed. His confusion created an opening for V to get in close and finish him off.
