Developer CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 follows several trends relatable to other video games. It has a ton of unused assets lying around in its code, and it has a prevalent modding community, something customary to most high-profile titles featured on the PC. When put together, these two aspects allow fans to give Cyberpunk 2077 some rather unique mods, such as Hineytroll's recently released Ghosts of Night City.

Ghosts of Night City is a mod that allows players to view the placeholder models resting inside Cyberpunk 2077's code. The mod essentially allows fans to look at some of the "first drafts" for Night City's most important characters, including — but not limited to — Judy, Lizzy Wizzy, Jackie, Rogue, and Panam. Unsurprisingly, some characters look completely different from their final, polished designs. On the other hand, some placeholder designs don't look very different at all.

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Hineytroll also created other mods that allow players to actually utilize different character's placeholder models while playing. In other words, players can choose to play through Cyberpunk 2077 with different characters' placeholder designs if they prefer them to the final look — or if they just want to try something new. They can even change the models of some of the NPC crowds to their unfinished appearances, although doing so might be a little jarring, as their textures won't be the same quality as everything else.

 

cyberpunk placeholder character models

Along with providing interesting visuals of the game's unused models, the mod also allows for a nice change of pace to take place in Cyberpunk. While the character models obviously won't be up to snuff with the rest of the game's more polished visuals, the drastic differences some of the placeholders have from their final products might make them worth playing around with. For instance, Adam Smasher's placeholder makes him completely human instead of the mechanical monstrosity his final design makes him.

Players can find the Ghosts of Night City mod over on Nexus Mods, along with several thousand other unrelated Cyberpunk mods. Players have played around so much with the game's code at this point that some even discovered evidence of unreleased quests, possible hints of what might be in store with Cyberpunk's upcoming free DLC. Whether or not such a thing turns out to be the case — time will tell. In the meantime, it'll be interesting to see what other things modders discover in the game's code.

Cyberpunk 2077 is out now on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One — PS5 and Xbox Series X versions in development.

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Source: EuroGamer, Nexus Mods