Cyberpunk 2077 is almost here. The futuristic open-world game was delayed from its original spring 2020 launch, but it has only been moved back a few months to September, opening the doors to Night City, a sprawling metropolis from the studio of CD Projekt Red. If Cyberpunk 2077 is anything like The Witcher 3, the studio’s last big-budget release, gamers are in for a treat. The world of Night City looks amazing, bringing gamers into a cyberpunk dystopia like this for an experience that promises to be story-driven and unique.
But, the game’s hype has translated into memes, and, with the endorsement of Keanu Reeves himself, Cyberpunk 2077 is a meme feast so far. Here are some of the best Cyberpunk memes so far. Spoiler alert: Keanu Reeves is in most of them.
Updated January 15th, 2021 by Anastasia Maillot: Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is out, a whole host of new memes have spawned from the actual release and gameplay itself. Fans have had ample time to explore Night City and all of its missions, which has made the community even more vibrant when it comes to memes.
While the game's release wasn't without its hiccups, it's still become one of the major titles of this decade already, in both good and bad. It might not be perfect and still requires some tweaking to fix all of its bugs, but there's plenty that people have been able to relate to during their time in Night City.
15 The Most Important Part Of Customization
Character customization was one of the most exciting parts of the game when it was still being teased by CD Projekt Red. So many aspects of V could be changed according to preferences, even their genitals. In fact, this quickly became one of the more talked about aspects of customization.
While the options now aren't anything too special, it's still a quirky aspect of the game that fans can't help but to both love and hate. Is it completely unnecessary? Yes. Does the community still want it in the game? Absolutely. Should it be in the game? Yes, for the laughs.
14 Points Well Spent
At the end of the day, Night City is an imaginary world and all of its characters are but coded NPCs. Still, players can't always help themselves when they become truly immersed in the story and the quests of the game. As a result, it's easy to grow attached to some of Night City's wacky characters.
Brendan is one of those people, if one could call it that. It's essentially a talking vending machine who likes to have a chat with humans. V has a chance of helping Brendan by pushing a dumpster away from it to make sure it can speak to people on the street. This is probably the best excuse a player would need to level up their body skill.
13 Clowning Around Night City
There's two ways and two ways only when it comes to dressing up V in Night City. Either players choose the clothes that look the coolest and fit the best on their character, despite their horrible stats and low armor, or they pick the colorful clown clothes that definitely don't fit together, but which make V stronger.
On a first playthrough, it's natural to go for the latter, but it can get frustrating for players to see their clown-like V in the mirror or a few select cutscenes. Maybe this is the real reason CD Projekt Red decided to go for a first-person perspective.
12 A Very Bad Morning
Another immensely well-done part of the game is the music and its soundtrack. It's evident the developers really paid a lot of attention to this detail and picked only the best tunes to add to their radio channels. Many of the songs were also made specifically for the game, with custom lyrics and melodies.
A lot of fans have praised the music, but it can also be annoying to jam to a great song only to have Stan scream "Goooooood morning, Night City!" on top of it. It hits a bit too close to reality.
11 Your Favorite Fixer
Anyone coming to Cyberpunk 2077 from Fallout 4 will recognize Reginal as this game's Preston Garvey. She always has a gig or a cyberpsycho sighting lined up for the player, which makes her just a little bit annoying. In fact, Regina seems almost as obsessed with cyberpsychos as Preston is with settlements.
The good thing about Regina is her special, unique pistol called Skippy. The main point is to actually give it back to Regina after discovering it, but who would ever want to do that when this pistol is so incredibly powerful? Sorry, Regina, you're never getting Skippy back.
10 Forever Waiting For V
It seems almost every act of the game starts with a meeting. Whether it's Jackie or Takemura, the player always needs to meet them up to get the main quest of the act going. However, who has time to do that when Night City is just bursting with possibilities and opportunities?
Just like in many other open-world RPGs, the players often tend to go for minor quests or just walk around and explore. No harm in that, other than the NPCs waiting for V to arrive might get a little antsy.
9 A Futuristic Powerhouse
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s futuristic brain/computer interface, seems plucked right out of Cyberpunk’s world. The ability to control things with only your mind? Oh yeah, perfect for a dystopian, mechanical city—and ripe for a meme.
In early Cyberpunk content, it seems likely that a similar type of futuristic interface might be used for in-game menus or HUD—no Elon Musk involved though. That being said, the game is set to rely on body modifications in order to level up characters. Get ready to customize literally everything about your character.
8 Keanu is in the House
This one is a bit on the nose and celebrates the fact that CD Projekt Red is in charge of this futuristic cityscape and not a... certain other developer known for their love of microtransactions. CD Projekt Red stuck to DLC releases for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and seems likely to skip low-value microtransactions that many gamers find annoying.
7 You Might Need a Bigger Engine
Even if you don’t try Musk’s Neuralink—spoiler: you can’t use it for gaming anyway, unfortunately—you might want to re-evaluate your gaming rig before Cyberpunk 2077 drops in September. From screenshots, it looks like a visual feast of multilayered environments and high definition gunfights. But we don’t even have a full idea of what the final graphic situation might look like.
6 Graphical Mayhem
It's all too easy to be jaded when it comes to video game pre-orders. With publishers seemingly so eager to sap up your money before delivering a worthwhile product, many have simply given up and long ago chosen to wait for reviews to come out before deciding to buy.
Cyberpunk 2077, however, has sold tons of pre-orders despite its several-month delay, and even those who've sworn off pre-ordering are breaking their moral codes to get in on the ground floor.
5 Will John Wick Please Stand Up?
Cyberpunks birthed a avoid fandom already months before the game released, and perhaps one of the most *ahem* breathtaking moments of CD Projekt Red’s prerelease has been Keanu Reeve’s reveal as he strode onto the stage and called the studios upcoming release “breathtaking.”
With typical Keanu flair, he responded to a fan’s accolade with“you’re breathtaking," and the fan then received a free copy of the game. You can't make this stuff up. But breathtaking is an apt word to describe the sprawl of Night City, a game world set in the Free State of Northern California.
4 Celebrity Endorsement
CD Projekt Red could have coasted off its stellar track record. The Witcher 3 was one of the best games of the last ten years, and the studio is known for deep, story-based worlds that are, as Keanu would say, breathtaking.
But, with Keanu... well, with Keanu, Cyberpunk 2077 is a different creature entirely. He’ll be by gamer’s sides in the fight against Night City’s corrupt leadership. The world of Night City is run by corporate powers who’ve plunged the city into near totalitarian chaos.
3 ...And More Keanu
Reeves will play Johnny Silverhand, a firgurehead of the Samurai band in the world of Night City. But that’s not all; Silverhand is kind of like a digital ghost—think Halo's Cortana—and he’ll accompany gamers through the dark game world.
But Silverhand is a longstanding fixture of Cyberpunk’s world, as, before its video game port, the game was a table-top RPG. Gamer’s are set to meet Reeves as he wakes them up from a coma, and, in what is now a famous line, says there’s a city that needs burning.
2 High Tech Worlds
In the meme world of Cyberpunk 2077—which is still in its infancy—this is the best meme trend, parodying the vast, technologically advanced universe of Night City with photos of people using everyday tech in wacky ways.
The real world of Cyberpunk will not be as ordinary, but, for now, watching a cell phone under a storage bin is as Cyberpunk as it gets.
1 The Wait Is Killer
All in all, memes about Cyberpunk point to the excitement building around the game. Excitement for a game that’s been touted as “the most expansive RPG to date” which will include thousands of ways to customize your character, and a multi-layered story that spans over 50 years.
The game will be out September 17th after a hefty delay, and excitement is already at a boiling point, as potent as the acid rain and lack of oxygen that’s inherent to life in Night City.