V'S A CROWD
n the new CGI trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, unveiled at Microsoft’s Xbox E3 Briefing, main character V is having a bad day. His partner, Jackie Welles, is dead. His fixer, Dexter DeShawn, has betrayed him. When he regains consciousness, he’s lying in a garbage dump. “Wake the fuck up samurai,” says a voice. “We have a city to burn.” The source of that voice? It’s Keanu Reeves.
Cue rapturous applause as Reeves appears on stage to talk about his appearance in CD Projekt Red’s next RPG. It was an exciting surprise in an industry event that rarely keeps a secret for long.
But who is Reeves’ character, and why is he so interested in V?
“Keanu Reeves in our game plays the role of Johnny Silverhand,” says Paweł Sasko, lead quest designer for Cyberpunk 2077. “Johnny Silverhand is the frontman of Samurai, a chrome rock band from 2020, from the original [pen-and-paper RPG] book. Now, Johnny Silverhand is a primary character in our game, and the player, V, has him on a chip in his head as this digital ghost.”
Johnny will be a presence throughout the game, although it’s not clear what his motivation is for helping V. “The thing is that Johnny Silverhand has his own agenda,” says Sasko. “He used to be a fighter for freedom, but in the eyes of corporations he would probably be called a terrorist.” Sasko characterises Silverhand as someone with a strong vision of how the world should work, “He’s a true cyberpunk. He’s the guy who goes against the system, against the corporations, and against the city that’s just an embodiment of this.”
Which brings us back to his line in the trailer. Silverhand clearly wants something, and is trying to influence V to help achieve that goal. “It starts this interesting dynamic between them,” says Sasko. “And he has his own role that develops throughout the game. ‘We have a city to burn’. He means something very specific by that.”
The damaged biochip implanted in V’s head does more than just allow him (or her) to commune with a digital ghost. It also supposedly contains the secret to immortality. This is one of the driving plot points of the brand new behind-closed-doors E3 demo – a 50 minute developer playthrough of a never before seen chunk of the game.
To find out more about the chip, V travels to Pacifica. Planned as Night City’s luxury tourist destination, the district sits decrepit and impoverished after the corporations pulled their support. It’s now the home of the Voodoo Boys, an insular, secretive gang obsessed with cyberspace. V wants to meet their leader, Brigitte, in the hope that she can reveal more about the biochip.
The demo starts as V walks up to a mirror – letting CD Projekt Red run through some of the character customisation options. As revealed last year, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have a defined main character. You can pick their gender, their appearance and even their origin story. “You start by picking your life path, so Nomad, Corporate or Street Kid,” explains Sasko.
“That gives you some predefined number of things – your equipment and background and so on.”
Your life path also affects how you interact with characters. Some dialogue choices are locked to a specific life path. Others are locked behind skill proficiency, meaning a character adept at hacking will have different choices to one who’s very good at punching.
“That helps out because it opens a new branch in the story. Sometimes it’s a small thing. Fairly often it’s something bigger, because we always try to make sure there’s enough meat that the players are rewarded for investing in it.”
Customisation done, V steps away from the mirror. “Really think they give a rat’s dick about how you look?” quips Silverhand.
URBAN SPRAWL
Later in the demo, V meets up with a Voodoo Boys contact, Placide. He leads V through the streets of Pacifica towards the gang’s HQ. The district itself feels different to the dense urban skyscrapers showcased in last year’s demo. You can see the rough shape of its original purpose – a suggestion of vibrancy that never truly materialised.
We also get a sense of the day-to-day lives of its current inhabitants, thanks to an upgrade to V’s scanner that translates the Haitian Creole spoken by its residents in real-time.
Placide stops to point out a giant building in the distance. The Grand Imperial Mall, once envisioned as the main attraction of the district, is now a half-finished monument to corporate greed. It’s recently been taken over by the Animals, a gang of juiced-up beefcakes who value strength above all else.
It seems like a quest is starting to form.
Sure enough, back at the Voodoo Boys HQ, Placide states that he’ll only let V speak to Brigitte if he helps solve the Animal problem. After jacking into the Voodoo Boys’ subnet – allowing Placide to watch V’s every move – he explains that someone has been supplying the Animals with military-grade gear. V’s job is to find out who’s driving the van that’s been making the deliveries.
Even this basic scene, which ultimately serves to give the player a new quest, is fraught with tension. Not only is Placide pushy and demanding, he’s clearly hiding something, likely related to a commotion in a nearby room. The player has plenty of opportunity to call him on his bullshit, and to demand an explanation for what’s really going on, but doing so might only serve to piss off the person we’re reluctantly helping.
But maybe that’s worth the risk. Sasko summarises Cyberpunk 2077’s philosophy as ‘freedom’. “If the player feels like they should be able to do something, they probably should. We are always doing our best to let you do it in our game. If a character pisses you off, there’s probably an option to shoot him and all kinds of things like that.”
Naturally that freedom extends to how you execute your missions. On reaching the Grand Imperial Mall, we see V attempt some stealth, sneaking past gang members before coming to a corridor guarded by a camera. As a Netrunner, this V can make use of a cyberdeck to hack into a nearby access point, gaining control over some of the buildings systems. Not only can V disable the camera, but, in the next room – a gym various members of the gang are working out in – he’s able to turn the apparatus against them.
One of the Animals is in a boxing ring, sparring against a training bot. V tweaks the bot’s difficulty setting until it punches the gang member to death. Around the corner, he hacks into a weightlifting bench so that it crushes the Animal working out on it. Upstairs, V hacks a vending machine, causing it to light up and distract a couple of guards. This seems tame in comparison to the previous shenanigans… right up until V pulls out his razor sharp nanowire and slices them to bits.
MIND CONTROL
Clearly Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t shy
away from violence. In a later section, V uses the nanowire to hack into one of the Animals, gaining access to their internal network. Thanks to this, and a software daemon purchased and installed earlier in the demo, V is able to turn the guards against themselves, forcing one to remove the pin of their grenade, and another to shoot themselves in the head. It was, I have to say, a bit much.
Not every playthrough will be this grisly, however. “We have a completely nonlethal path throughout the whole game,” says Sasko. Of course this is a dangerous, violent world, so you have to harm people sometimes. But you don’t have to kill anybody. Any of the quests, street stories, open world content – you can go through the whole thing killing nobody.”
To support this almost every weapon and cyberware installation will have a nonlethal mode. “The only exception is weapons that are lethal by definition,” says Sasko. “So let’s say you shoot someone in the face with a bazooka. You shoot his head off. That’s typically lethal. There are weapons that are so lethal that it cannot go any other way. But everything else actually has a nonlethal option.”
CDPR skips back and shows how the section would look with a completely different build. This V is a Solo. Unlike the Netrunner, she doesn’t have access to a cyberdeck, meaning she can’t hack the access point to disable the camera at the start of the level. Instead, she has plenty of combat skills and a pair of cyberarms. Thanks to her strength, she can pry open a door that the Netrunner couldn’t get through.
After being spotted by one of the Animals, she dispatches her foes using throwing knives, broken bottles and, when all else fails, just her very lethal robo-arms. Where the Netrunner V hacked the turret guarding the van that he was sent to investigate, the Solo V just rips it out of its mounting and uses it to gun down everyone in sight.
“In The Witcher III we did focused, branching storylines in the open world,” says Sasko. “In this game, we’re actually adding to it with branching gameplay. And that also impacts the story.
“You can go through the quest and do the choices the same way you can do in The Witcher III, but that’s the basic level for us. The character you are – your life path and your build – impacts the story, and impacts the paths you’re taking when you’re playing in a given part. For instance, you saw, in the Grand Imperial Mall, you could go through
different barriers different ways. And when talking to characters, having different skills impacts what I can pick. So that even branches out. It’s like natural evolution from the first Witcher branching story and open world. Now it’s also branching gameplay.”
What’s most interesting to me about the different builds shown is that it’s not an either/or situation. Classes are designed to be fluid – another example of CDPR’s philosophy of freedom – meaning that if you want to play as a Solo that can use a cyberdeck and hack into access points, you can. The classes, skills, software and cyberware installations offer incredible scope for defining your preferred playstyle.
CHOOSE WISELY
Of course, your actions and dialogue choices will impact the outcome of quests and your relationships with the people you meet. Even your relationship with Silverhand will change based on your actions.
After reaching the van, however players ultimately choose to do it, V discovers that the person arming the Animals is an agent of NetWatch – a government agency looking to destroy
“YOU CAN GO THROUGH THE WHOLE THING KILLING NOBODY”
the Voodoo Boys. The agent attempts to parlay, explaining that Placide is just using V to stop the agent’s cyberattacks from taking out Brigitte and the gang – perhaps the reason for the commotion back at Voodoo HQ. Worse still, the agent suggests that Placide is planning to kill V after the job is done. There are a lot of ways this could go – including joining up with the agent. But, in the demo, V decides it’s better the devil she knows.
She attempts to put a stop to the NetWatch attack, but is immediately double crossed by Placide. He uses his connection to V to shut down the attack himself – killing everyone connected to it in the process. But V doesn’t actually die – possibly due to that chip. At Silverhand’s suggestion she goes to confront Placide. Instead, she meets Brigitte. The final sequence of the demo sees Brigitte fulfil her end of the bargain, leading V into cyberspace and to the Black Wall that acts as a bridge to the deep net. Brigitte explains that nobody has returned from beyond the Black Wall, but that Alt Cunningham – Silverhand’s ex-girlfriend, and the first Netrunner to become a fully digital entity – will be the first. The wall buckles from the other side as something violently crashes into it. And then the demo ends.
When I first saw Cyberpunk 2077 last year, it seemed beyond impressive, to the point that it felt like something that I wouldn’t be playing for many, many years. This year, with this demo, it seems more achievable in its size and scope. Its RPG systems are familiar. Its immersive sim combat is easy to understand. It reminds me of Deus Ex, but with more choice, freedom and Keanu Reeves. That’s an excellent thing to be.