Easily the most anticipated game of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 has been gracing us with tons of information and sneak peeks this year. From E3 to Gamescom, rich gameplay footage has given us a bit more insight into what the game promises for us exactly and what we can expect come next year's April. If you're still on the fence yourself about whether or not this upcoming open-world cyberpunk RPG from CD Projekt RED, the makers of The Witcher series, is for you or not, we've prepared this handy list of five features we're incredibly excited to get our hands on and five that has us biting our nails in worry.
10 We're Excited: Cyberware
Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn't be a complete game without the possibility of cyberware. These are various cybernetic additions you can put on your body to enhance it for combat, for cosmetic needs or even for medical purposes. A Ripper Doc can be visited to browse a selection of available cyberware. The enhancements can vary from optical scanners that give you the ability to scan any target for more information to special sensors on your hand that allows you to connect to your weapons, view ammo count and have increased damage on connected weapons.
9 We're Worried: Heavy FPS Game
Cyberpunk 2077 is a rich game with lots of diverse gameplay, but ultimately it all comes down to combat. Sure, there's a way to get through the game without killing a soul, but it won't be the easiest route.
If your aim isn't the best, there are special pistols that will help you with that. However, these weapons will do significantly less damage than most guns. If you're not particularly into first-person shooters yourself, then Cyberpunk 2077 might be a hard one to get into despite its atmospheric gameplay.
8 We're Excited: Combat In Vehicles
One challenges in games featuring vehicles and combat is merging the two together. It's pretty hard to focus on driving your car through high speed traffic when you also need to worry about a vengeful group of gang members driving before you in an attempt to kill you. Luckily, in Cyberpunk 2077 the automatic drive function allows you to seamlessly shift from driving to peeking your head from the window and shooting at the target. This makes high speed car chases so much more fun to play when you know you can focus on the right thing and feel like an absolute badass doing it.
7 We're Worried: Risk Of Repetitive Quests
Like most open-world RPGs, Cyberpunk 2077 will feature a main quest, but also numerous side quests. It's yet unclear how many quests will be included in the game in total, but we can assume there will be plenty judging by the sheer size of the world and the amount of characters we've seen so far. However, with V being a mercenary and with how earning money to unlock different augmentations and additions to your kit is important, many of the quests might become quite repetitive mercenary quests or follow similar, linear paths. Hopefully, the developers give us the most amount of quest variation as possible.
6 We're Excited: First Person Cutscenes
Cutscenes are an essential part of a game, as they build the story and help us get immersed into it. When Cyberpunk 2077 announced it had made the decision to ensure all cutscenes would be in first person, we were pretty happy with this decision.
The whole point of this game is to feel like we're really there and experience this rich and diverse world. It'll be interesting to see if VR is going to be enabled for players, which might make the game especially interesting when getting a new cyberware installed.
5 We're Worried: Limited Lifepaths
At the beginning of your journey, before you even enter Night City, you need to choose your character's lifepath. This is an attribute that will influence your story and some of the choices you'll be able to make, as well as some of your interactions with the world. So far there are only three options to choose from: Nomad, Street Kid and Corporate. While these no doubt embody the key archetypes the game, it feels like there should be just a few more options to bring in a bit more nuance to your character. It's unlikely there will be more lifepaths, but at least there will be three different ways to complete the game.
4 We're Excited: Massive World
There's few people who don't get excited when hearing the word "open-world". But what if we told you that not only is Cyberpunk 2077 going to be open-world, it'll also have six different areas for you to explore? In true cyberpunk fashion, you can visit a corporate owned City Center region. Alternatively you have an immigrant suburb called Watson, luxury hotspot Westbrook, a more suburban area known as Heywood, gang territory Pacifica, industrial area Santo Domingo and finally the surrounding Badlands. You won't be bored for a while, that much is certain.
3 We're Worried: Very Mature Content
It shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone that a game featuring gun fights and a seedy city filled with crime and possibilities is going to be stock full of mature content.
However, if you plan on playing this game near your younger siblings or your older family members, beware that the developers have confirmed the game will feature full nudity and tons of cussing, as well as graphic violence. This isn't that big of a surprise after The Witcher series, but it's important to keep in mind, especially if you plan on gifting the game to someone. Mature audiences and players only.
2 We're Excited: Highly Customizable Character
Creating a character and beginning your journey in a new game is one of the most exciting feelings, and Cyberpunk 2077 definitely has us anticipating with all the features it has announced. The main character V will be genderless, meaning you can choose between a male or female body and define your sexuality yourself. You can customize your appearance to your liking, and even pick between a few different voice options for your character. Finally, you get to choose your stats, which include Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical and Cool, and from those you can create the character build you'd like. Some of builds we've already seen are the NetRunner which focuses on hacking, Techie which specializes in machinery and Solo that has a strong combat preference.
1 We're Worried: Demanding PC Requirements
With all these features coming for the game and with how immersive the world looks to be, the question needs to be asked: how much will it cost your computer to run? For console players this won't be such a big headache, but PC players eagerly pre-ordering the game this can be a legitimate concern. So far the developers have been using a pretty strong computer to showcase their game, with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card, an Intel i7 core and 32 GB of RAM of 3000 MHz. Thankfully, reports state that the game has yet to be optimized and won't have such tough requirements, but if you want to experience Cyberpunk 2077 in the highest of quality it's probably best to also invest in a PC upgrade before splurging on the game itself.