E3 2019 Quick-Look: Cyberpunk 2077

24 Jun 2019
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While out at E3 this month, I had a chance to sit on the floor of an over-filled theater space to see about an hour or so of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 in action.

At the Xbox E3 2019 Briefing, we had a breathtaking look at the new trailer for the game which revealed Keanu Reeve’s character Johnny Silverhand. After acquiring a chip which is said to contain the secret to immortality, the main protagonist, V, starts to see Johnny Silverhand as a sort of ghost who will talk to him during the game.

As they took us through a portion of the character creation system we got to see some of the options that players will have when making their character in Cyberpunk 2077. One of the more important options is the “life path” of your character. You can give your character a nomad, street kid, or corporate background. This decision can have an impact on things like the types of dialogue options that are available to you as you play.

Cosmetically, there are a nice handful of options both in the character creator, and during the game itself. For example, while creating their character, players will have the option to adjust things such as the surface wiring that you can see on their skin. In the game itself, you can layer shirts with coats to give a breadth of options in how you can style your character.

In Cyberpunk 2077, there are a total of six districts in Night City. For this demo, we visited Pacifica- an area with a large Haitian population. In the demo, V is tasked with traveling to a nearby Mall and helping to remove the gang that has recently taken up occupation. It’s here that V jumps on a motorcycle and drives from the quest location down the highway, giving us a street view of what Pacifica offers before eventually reaching the mall. There won’t be any loading screens when exploring Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.

During the demo, we got to see how the game could be played with different set-ups as they often switched between two pre-made characters that had different abilities unlocked. Another point that was made regarding your character in Cyberpunk 2077 is that there is no class system. Instead, the developers want to give players the ability to mix and match their abilities so that they can create a playstyle that best suits them. If you want to go into all of your encounters guns blazing, you can. It isn’t usually recommended, but you can. On the opposite side of that, the game can be completed without killing anyone as well.

As V infiltrated the Mall, he was able to do stealth take downs and environmental take downs as well. He also had some firearms at his disposal, though my favorite weapon by far was the Nanowire- a orange, glowing whip of sorts that would easily slice through any enemy you decided to use it on.

By the end of the presentation, my leg was asleep, but I came away continuing to be impressed with the scale and style of what CD Projekt Red is doing with Cyberpunk 2077 and I can’t wait until I can play it for myself.

Cyberpunk 2077 will release next year on April 16th for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.