Welcome to Night City. Another view of Night City's density. Samples of the game's unfinished character-creation system. For this demo, the character "V" is designed as such. Backstory options. The opening sequence has us storming an apartment complex. This demo includes copious use of the C-word. We got to this apartment a little too late for some victims. We connect to this victim to learn more about her status. She's worth a lot of money, so a private medical team airlifts her out. Your character kicks this dude out of bed the morning after the demo's opening mission. Time to get the day started. Let's open the blinds… …to reveal our hometown. Armory in the apartment. Different stats for different duties. Walking out of our own apartment. Convenient gym/battling center just downstairs from our pad. Vendors aplenty. We'll run a job for this gentleman. He asks us to put a chip in our head to preview our upcoming mission. Getting high on his own implant-fueled supply. Shop using a UI inside of your optic nerve. New UI thanks to this dude's upgrade. Handy. Driving occurs in both first- and third-person views. The demo takes a non-combat path through this encounter. And here we are. Deal's starting to go south. Decisions, decisions. The virus you put into this compound fried this poor computer-attached man. Put points into various skills to hack, engineer, and otherwise get through non-combat sequences. Guide these bullets' ricochets to take out foes around corners. Another peek at the impressive ricochet UI. Your many-barreled shotgun did this to a foe's legs. New smart weapon found near the end of the compound. Aim at weak point for massive damage. At the end of the day, the Corp wins. Or does it?
The upcoming video game Cyberpunk 2077 took this summer's E3 by storm with a behind-closed-doors reveal that set tongues wagging. Now, two months later, the game's developers at CD Projekt RED have deemed this hour-long gameplay slice worthy of public consumption.
We've reviewed the footage, which the developer posted on Monday on its own Twitch feed and then encouraged other users to re-stream, and we can confirm both its similarities and differences to what we saw back in June. In short: differences in combat, movement, and tempo appear to indicate this is a real-time-rendered demo—albeit one that adheres to a strict path.
Because the demo follows an identical path, our original June report still offers a solid summary of what CDPR wants us to expect: a first-person action-RPG in which conversations and decisions drive the plot as much as sheer guns-and-gadgets combat (with a pinch of stealth and behind-corners tactics, for good measure). Electronic implants fuel a litany of on-screen UI icons, as if your character has next-gen Google Glass devices installed in their brain and eyes.
Surprisingly, this reveal video mutes some of the cooler visual moments we saw in June. During our private sequence, we got a much better behind-closed-doors look at how the demo's opening gunfight destroyed an apartment's walls, while Cyberpunk's opening town and its massive crowd of denizens are breezed through a little more quickly than what we saw. Even so, other moments in the demo take their time demonstrating how robust and interactive the city's crowds may turn out to be in the final game.
The video's best quality is that it takes some mystery out of the equation and delivers what we reported earlier this summer: a demo that looks feasibly current-gen in many respects. When a given sequence features only a few non-player characters (NPCs), the level of detail, animation, and reflective neon lighting look quite attractive, though certainly doable on a standard PlayStation 4. The question is whether the game's streets, littered with apparently detailed NPCs who can be interacted with at a moment's notice, will scale in terms of memory demands on aging current-gen consoles.
In the meantime, CDPR's vision of violence, choices, nudity, cursing, and faces crammed full of LEDs is now finally available for you to scrutinize and question—and we've posted a gallery above in case you want a taste before you can sit down with the full video. This may be the only taste of Cyberpunk 2077 we get for some time, as CDPR has yet to announce a release window of any kind.
Listing image by CD Projekt Red
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Ars Technica
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