Cyberpunk 2077 is finally here. This CD Projekt’s long-awaited role-playing game(RPG) had kept fans waiting for a long time since its initial announcement in May 2012 when the first Cyberpunk 2077 trailer was released.
Finally, the Cyberpunk 2077 release date is slated for December 10, 2020. And it’s all the rage in the gaming community. So without further ado, let’s dive into the specifics of the game.
Do you have a fever? If not, just check out the official Cyberpunk 2077 wallpaper. And that’s just the start!
Cyberpunk2077 gameplay
In the year 2077, America has been ravaged by an economic crisis culminating in a nuclear conflict. The once-great continent has been broken up into pieces and is in open conflict, devolving into lawless war zones. Following this people from all over have converged on the already overcrowded Night City, one of the world’s last great metropolises.
With a plethora of the best of resources and intelligence and home to manufacturers of cutting-edge technologies, Night City continues to offer the promise of a civilized future.
But in the city streets, a brutal affray for control of the city rages on. Gangs, corporate agents, hustlers, religious cultists, politicians, and all manner of delinquents strive to outplay one another. Ordinary people always get caught in the crossfire.
In this city consumed by endless conflict and lust for power, maybe only an outsider can get the job done. And that’s where you come in: An urban mercenary; a cyber-enhanced gun for hire.
With the right combination of gear, skills, and street-cred, you can thrive as a ‘merc’ in this lawless world. With the money you earn here you can buy an array of weapons and enhancements in the hundreds and turn yourself into a living weapon. Combine the right skills and gear to become a gunslinger with inhuman reflexes or a stealthy net-runner with the ability to command all the tech or practically anyone in between.
Welcome to the next generation of open-world adventure. Immerse yourself in this high-stakes, thrill imbibed, dopaminergic burst of an adventure. The choices you make will shape your story and influence how the events unfold.
This is Cyberpunk 2077.
The missions are a massive delight in the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay. Some are ostensibly hilarious, while some are profoundly emotional, and some are intensely dark. In most RPGs, like The Witcher 3 or Skyrim of CD Projekt, the strength of the game doesn’t lie in the main story but is enveloped in the side missions around it. With Cyberpunk 2077, the game developers have taken that philosophy to heart and built an entire game around it.
Apart from the short yet compelling central quest, which can be completed in about 20 to 24 hours, the vast majority of what you can do in Night City is entirely optional but often still extremely impactful on your journey. Not everything is a matter of life and death, sometimes it is a matter of style:
Choosing your completely customizable look, choosing your ride, your pastime, who’s at your side. Choosing how you spend the blood money you earn by completing the various quests the game has to offer.
But this modern freedom-oriented structure isn’t without its own faults, like a bunch of distracting bugs. There are also some NPCs(non-player characters) that are obviously stuck at a single place throughout the entire sequence.
Yet, even with these minor issues, Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay is one of a kind and surely a complete package of thrill-inducing adventure.
Cyberpunk 2077 main story-line
Cyberpunk 2077’s world is such an aesthetic joy that it feels almost disrespectful to fast travel or skip drives in Night City. Sporting a vibrant palate of impressionable colors, fashioned in a dystopian setting with characters to match the tone, the game has transformed into its own living entity.
In gameplay, you are V – the player-controlled protagonist whose gender, appearance, skills, and history are fully customizable and have an impact on the story.
In this world, you have stolen a microchip so advanced that selling it can set you up for life. But when the steel container of the chip gets ruptured, you are left with one alternative to protecting it: slotting the chip into your head.
As it turns out, the chip is imprinted with the digitized soul of Jhonny Silverhand: A dead punk rocker-boy with violence and revenge on his mind. His aim – to bring down the megacorp that builds this chip.
What’s in your head has the ability to shift the balance of power in Night City and the powers that be can’t wait to get their hands on it.
An additional bonus: the character of Jhonny Silvehand is played by none other than Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves, who has been involved in the project since the E3 expo of 2018.
Cyberpunk 2077 hacking tips
While on a stealthy run as a netrunner, or just enjoying a hacking minigame, you are sure to pick up some skills that will establish you as a cyber-warfare expert. Here are some tips to help you propel in that direction quicker than most:
- Always check for hacking requirements for the type of hack before you jack in.
- Invest in ‘intelligence points’.
- Never stop scanning – The scanner mode can be activated by holding Tab. Anything from doors to people can be scanned, providing more information as you explore the area and tells you what you can manipulate.
- Make the most of your cyberdeck – The cyberdeck will let you equip quick hacks to distract enemies, mess with their cyberware, take control of surveillance cameras, and much more.
Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements
It’s been known for a while that Cyberpunk 2077 will have support for ray tracing and DLSS2.x.
Unsurprisingly, if you want the full high-octane experience, you’ll need one of the best graphics cards – at least a GeForce RTX GPU(graphical processing unit). Cyberpunk likewise requires DirectX 12, though Windows 7 is upheld as DX12 has been ported to it.
With a stroke of fortune and a little bit of money, any of the latest GPUs should suffice. But if you want the A-game, you’ll need the GeForce RTX 3090, and the GeForce RTX 3080 /3070 will also suffice. The new AMD Radeon RX 6800 cards don’t show up on the list, but we can chalk that up to its late release date of November 18.
Let’s take a look at the official Cyberpunk 2077 PC requirements. CD Projekt and Nvidia provided a slate of minimum specifications as follows:
- Core i5-3570K or FX-8310
- GTX 780 3GB(or RX 470 4 GB)
- 8GB RAM
- 3GB VRAM
- 70 GB storage
- Windows 7 or Windows 10 64-bit
- Target: 1080p Low
So that’s the minimum standards you need to have in your cyberdeck, to barely get you started on this journey. With the specification of 1080 low, it doesn’t specify what FPS(frequency per second) it would provide, 60 fps or 30 fps. But to venture a guess, it would look more like 30 fps.
On the high end, well, the sky is the limit.
Besides PC, you can also play Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4, Xbox One, and Stadia. And soon, the CyberPunk 2077 PS5 and Xbox series X|S will be available by an unspecified date in 2021.
The Cyberpunk 2077 pre-download had started from as early as July, following the official ‘Cyberpunk 2077 screenshots 2020’(the final real-game version) release in the same month, only adding to the excitement surrounding the game.
Development
The development of this game by CD Project Red began as early as 2011. Cyberpunk 2077 began pre-production with approximately fifty staff members. In March 2018, a new studio opened in Wroclaw to aid the production. CD Project Red partnered with Digital Scapes to craft additional tools. Also partnering with Nvidia to achieve ray tracing in real-time, QLOC for quality assurance, and Jali Research to aid the procedural generation of lip sync for all ten localization.
Originally planned to include multiplayer facilities, this was first assigned to research and development and later scrapped for a separate release. The first-person perspective was chosen to enable the players to immerse themselves completely in the gameplay.
Cyberpunk 2077 features full nudity. Game director Adam Badowski said that this helps encapsulate the theme of trans-humanism. The script was originally written in Polish and a separate team translate the dialogue into English. The quest designers, who managed the creation, empowered the players to choose the request in which the missions are embraced. The parts of the main story that were not used as such, were repurposed into side quests.
The main inspiration for Cyberpunk 2077 is Mike Pondsmith’s ‘Cyberpunk’ science-fiction franchise which first came out in 1988. Pondsmith joined in on the project for consultation in the year 2012.
The wait is over
When you get your hands on the game, the scope and scale of the world-building might make you anxious. Even the most inoffensive of enemy encounters has a story behind it, which makes exploration fundamentally awesome. With the meticulous attention to detail and the intricacies woven into the gameplay, you never know what you might stumble on to next.
A dash with the feared Dex DeShawn or a thrill ride with your new best friend Jackie Welles. Even rowdy racing missions are good fun. Curious gamers are met with rewarding surprises at many turns.
The fun you can have and the value you can derive out of Cyberpunk2077 is irrefutable. The overall package is well-worth investing, especially if you want to leverage the game’s remarkable fidelity to take advantage of your next-gen console or graphics card.
So what are you waiting for? Go get Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam or GOG or any of your favorite platforms, and get gaming already!
By Aditya Umale