New Player Help | Cyberpunk 2077 Wiki

Character Development

General Information

• You begin to build a character by assigning points between 5 core stats — BODY, REFLEXES, INTELLIGENCE, TECHNICAL ABILITY, and COOL.
• Progression is deep and flexible, using blends of skills, perks, abilities, as well as Cyberware and Weapons that will cater to your playstyle.
• Each skill is governed by an attribute, which dictates how high a skill can be at any time.
• Each skill has its own perk tree. Perk points can be put into any perk tree to encourage experimentation and versatility in playstyle. This feeds into the fluid class system, where you build a playstyle from the ground up, tailored to your own preferences.
• Choose a starting Life Path— Street Kid, Nomad, or Corpo and play its associated backstory; each comes with its own quests, characters, and starting locations, offering three unique perspectives into Night City.
• Each life path opens up specific dialogue choices and advantages throughout the game, taking cues from your chosen background.

Starting Attributes

When you build your character, you have an initial spread of points to allocate between five core Stats:

• Cool: Self-control and willpower; improves stealth and speed at which NPCs notice you, increases critical-hit damage, improves effect-resistances.
• Body: Raw physical power; improves health, reduces bullet spread, increases melee damage, and max stamina pool.
• Reflexes: Coordination and speed; increases the critical chance, attack speed, increases evasiveness (how easy it is for NPCs to hit you).
• Intelligence: Intellect and memory; reduces hacking difficulty levels, shortens daemon upload duration and memory pool.
• Technical Ability: Technical aptitude, grants armor, increases the chance of harvesting craftable loot.

Attributes will also provide passive stat boosts as you level up — such as increasing maximum health, stamina, improving critical chance, and more.

Attributes & Skills

Attributes are also integral to leveling up other skills; they have a close relationship in the progression system. You gain skill proficiency experience as you perform certain actions, which levels up specific skills. Take handguns, for example. As you use handguns, you’ll level up your Handguns skill. The twist is that you can only level up a skill as high as its governing attribute.  For Handguns, that’s REFLEXES. If Reflexes is sitting at 6, then your Handguns skill can only level to 6. If you want to raise its level, you’ll have to put more attribute points into reflexes in order to raise the cap.

Perks

Each skill tree also has its own selection of perks, too. Perks will require a certain number of attribute points before becoming unlocked, and perks further down a skill tree will require more points being put into the skill’s governing attribute.

Leveling Up

Completing jobs and other activities will give experience points (XP) that increase your level. Every level you gain, you earn a Perk Point that can be spent to unlock a Perk within a Skill tree.

Every three levels you gain, you earn an Attribute Point that you can use to improve one of your core Attributes.

You can level up a Skill by performing actions related to that Skill. After all, practice makes perfect!

Street Cred

Separate from character level and leveling up is Street Cred. Think of it as a type of renown system. You earn Street Cred by competing gigs—given to you by the numerous fixers of Night City. Completing more gigs raises your Street Cred. The higher your Street Cred, the higher V’s reputation grows in Night City, unlocking access to higher quality gear from merchants, new merchants with a higher level of stock, and more lucrative gigs from more respected fixers. As a mercenary looking to make a name in Night City, Street Cred holds a lot of weight

Class System Fluidity

A fluid class system means having full control of a playstyle and ending up with one that feels built from the ground up, suited to your tastes. Cyberpunk 2077 allows you to approach its world in a variety of ways, which can be discovered by customizing V with a mix of all of the above elements, listed below are a few examples of builds that you can come up with:

• Cyber Ninja: If you invest in upgrading Reflexes and Cool, you'll be able to focus on executing stealth, silent kills, the use of throwing knives, and poisoning enemies. When direct confrontation is needed, you can use your Blades skill to slice through your foes. To enhance the feeling of 'invisibility', you could also invest in Breach Protocol, allowing you to hack cameras and turrets in the surrounding area so you’re never caught by surprise. Or, if you choose to be more of an aggressive ninja, powerful Cyberware such as Mantis Blades will allow you to massacre your enemies up close and personal
• The Brawler: Investing in Body and Intelligence might seem like a strange combination, but it makes for a solid damage-dealing build. You’ll be very durable and healthy, with a good boost to your fist-fighting abilities, but close combat can be dangerous as you need to reach your target first, which isn't easy when they keep shooting at you. But that's where hacking comes in handy. Apply various damage-over-time effects on enemies through certain quickhacks to create a window of opportunity, allowing you to rush in and crush them with cyber-enhanced fists. If you’re not a fan of hacking, however, you can always install a Berserk module. As an active ability, this allows you to survive through almost anything, making you near-invincible for a short duration, while also making your hits even harder.
• Tech Gunslinger: Investing in Reflexes and Technical Ability will allow you to specialize in Tech Revolvers, using their capabilities to their full extent. This means you can use Tech guns to pierce through walls and cover, making enemies vulnerable to your offense no matter where they hide. To make them even easier targets, you can invest in some quickhacks which disrupt their locomotion and cyberware, leaving enemies rooted in place like sitting ducks.

Life Paths

Life paths are playable introductions to Cyberpunk 2077. They are less about building your character from a playstyle and stats perspective, and more about choosing the type of character you want to step into the shoes of. It's an important part of building your V, and which life path you want to experience is the first choice you'll make when starting the game.

V has three potential backstories, each one giving you a taste of the dark future from a different status and perspective. Every life path features its own characters, introductory Quests, and starting Locations. Your choice will most directly affect the beginning of the game, but you'll find longer-term ramifications as you get deeper into Night City - including opening up specific dialogue options and new opportunities further down the line.

Life Path Advantages

Your life path doesn't only affect your introduction to Cyberpunk 2077. V's roots will be visible throughout the game, often through specific dialogue choices. The three paths demonstrate three very different ways of living in and around Night City, so naturally, each one has different areas of expertise.

• Corpo: V has spent years maneuvering through the competitive back-office scene in Arasaka, so you have the first-hand experience when it comes to dealing with corporations. This means knowing how corpo agents operate; how they manipulate people. A "Corpo V" is far less likely to be caught out by shady corporate tricks, seeing past bluffs that would otherwise land you in hot water. You can even turn the tables thanks to your cutthroat corpo knowledge.
• Nomad: Nomads come with the experience of living in The Badlands, where they often work as security for cargo making its way to and from the city. So a "Nomad V" can use that knowledge in jobs that require this type of organization - or they can use past experience as a bargaining chip in negotiations with, say, a corporate agent who only really knows how things work within the safe space of Night City boardrooms.
• Street Kid: V's background as a Street Kid helps you navigate your way around some of Night City's more rough-cut residents. Gang members that might be distrustful of a Nomad outsider might be more open to talking candidly with a V who's "been there, done that" in the world of street gangs and dirty jobs. That street knowledge can help gain access to information that you'd otherwise have to spend bullets to get.

Destructive Arsenal

General Information

• Guns fall under three categories: Power, Smart, and Tech.
• Cyberware is installed in dedicated body slots by Ripperdocs in Night City.
• Cyberware can be passive, active, or triggered.
• Some weapons will require Cyberware to reach their full potential.
• Weapon rarity identifies how well made a weapon is. The more you progress, the greater variety of weapons will start to populate the world.
• Quickhacks: Using daemons installed in your cyberdeck allow you to interfere with enemies, security & surveillance systems, and more.
• Crafting allows you to make your own weapons, armor, and consumables by harvesting ingredients and blueprints.
• A crafted item’s stats are linked to your Crafting skill and associated perks. You can craft upgrades to a weapon and make it viable throughout the game.

To thrive amidst Night City’s underbelly, you’ve gotta get yourself equipped. The dark future is flush with weapons and cyberware, so there’s plenty to choose from to suit your particular approach to conflict-resolution. In Cyberpunk 2077, guns fall into one of the three categories:

• Power: On the more conventional side. Power weapons fire bullets propelled by gunpowder, but they have an extra trick up their sleeve: bullets can ricochet off surfaces to make hitting a target hidden by cover much, much easier.
• Smart: Tired of enemies ducking, dodging, and hiding from every shot you fire? Smart weapons fire projectiles that lock onto, and track down, targets even if they’re moving or seeking shelter.
• Tech: Using powerful electromagnetic force, Tech weapons fire projectiles at insanely high speeds, ideal for piercing through armor and other defenses—like concrete walls, let’s say… 

Weapon Rarities

As V  becomes more powerful and skilled, you’ll notice that weapons dropped by the fallen enemies are color-coded. The colors are a visual representation of the rarities of items in our game. They range from Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic through Legendary and Iconic. The higher the weapon quality, the better the statistics of the weapon. They can also be sold at a higher price to vendors. Higher quality weapons can also house more room for modifications, which can make them more powerful or allow them to be adapted to suit individual player tastes.

Legendary & Iconic Equipment

There are over 50 Legendary and Iconic guns waiting to be found in Night City. Each one has individual abilities created specifically for them. These weapons can be acquired in different ways; some need to be specifically crafted after collecting special schematics in the world.

These are sprinkled all over Night City, with some only discovered by taking on side content. Players can also receive Legendaries and Iconics from grateful characters after helping them with certain problems...or taken from their cold corpses after sending them to the afterlife. Whichever works for you.

Quickhacks & Cyberdeck

Your cyberdeck allows you to install and run numerous programs referred to as daemons, which can then be uploaded directly into enemy combatants in the form of quickhacks. These daemons can provide advantages for reconnaissance, create distractions, or directly damage enemies or manipulate their behavior. As cool as this looks, your cyberdeck has an install limit, so choosing your cyberdeck loadout can become an integral and powerful part of your playstyle. Tactical use of quickhacks can be an effective alternative to direct combat, a way to gain the upper hand before taking on an encounter, or another means of sowing mayhem amongst foes. Listed below are a few examples of Cyberdeck Daemons:

• Ping: Sends a signal to the target which then spreads to the whole network, revealing the location of enemies and devices connected to that particular network.
• Short Circuit:  A basic daemon which provokes an overload in the target’s cyberware, thus dealing electric damage to the target.
• Suicide: Cyberpsychosis program that forces an enemy to commit suicide with their own weapon.
• Reboot Optics: Resets an enemy’s optical cyberware, causing partial blindness for the duration.
• Sonic Shock: Sends a high-pitched noise directly to a target’s communicator, turning the target deaf for the duration and disrupting communication with the rest of their squad.

These are only a couple of Cyberdeck Daemons that you can execute in the game, apart from purchasing or obtaining these as rewards, players will also be able to craft/loot higher tiers of daemons. These can be incredibly powerful if used smartly and can help maximize specific character builds. Or even open up new builds to players.

Cyberware

V starts with a few standard implants, the ocular mod that displays vital information in the form of a HUD, for instance. Beyond that, it is up to you to decide what else to install. Cyberware is a crucial part of the game’s world, and a key factor in how you build your character, so expect to make numerous trips to the Night City’s obliging Ripperdocs. Cyberware falls under three categories of functionality:

• Active: Requires player input to activate, much like using other weaponry.
• Triggered:  Activates when certain conditions are met; e.g. when health level falls below a certain percentage.
• Passive: Provides benefits and/or buffs immediately after installation, requiring no further action or prerequisites.

Cyberware is installed in dedicated slots located on different parts of V’s body, allowing you to have multiple effects running simultaneously. Some cyberware will have multiple fragments, with each fragment providing different effects, further widening your options for combat and traversal.

Breach Protocol

Hacking into Night City’s numerous networks means successfully solving the Breach Protocol hacking minigame, which will pop-up when you make a hacking attempt, as long as you meet the requirements to start the hack in the first place. The Breach Protocol minigame offers the player a chance to upload one or multiple programs into the network, be it a device network at an access point, or a group of enemies. Each uploaded program will have different effects, so carefully planning for the preferred result is key.

To upload a program, you’ll have to find the correct program character chain on the board,  denoted by a letter/number combination linked to the said program. By selecting the characters from the grid in the exact same order listed in the program you’re trying to upload, the hack will be completed successfully. Note that several programs can be chained this way, so the number of programs uploaded per minigame will depend on the skill of the player versus the time and space constraints.

Crafting

Your ability to craft is determined by the Crafting skill, which in turn is governed by the Technical Ability attribute. By crafting more items, your Crafting skill will improve, resulting in better stats and item levels for the items you craft. While the crafting system is easy to jump into from the start, you gain access to crafting during the prologue—in order to get the most out of crafting and maximize the effectiveness of your crafted weapons, consumables, and equipment, you’ll need to invest perk points into the Crafting skill perk tree.

Crafting to Upgrade

You’re not limited to simply crafting new items in Cyberpunk 2077. The crafting panel enables you to upgrade your items, too. Upgrading an item you already have in your inventory allows you to improve its level, which raises its stats. As you become more proficient in crafting—and invest in crafting-specific perks—upgrading owned items can become a viable, long-term alternative to creating new items from scratch.

Ingredients & Blueprints

Crafting new items takes place in the crafting panel in the character menu—no crafting table necessary. To craft particular items, you’ll need the right ingredients, and these can be found through loot, bought from vendors, or gained by breaking down owned items in your backpack.

Like guns, ingredients come in different tiers of rarity. Players will be able to craft Legendary and Iconic weapons in Cyberpunk 2077, but they’ll need to find the right tier of crafting ingredients in order to do so. The quality of your ingredients, their rarity, directly feeds into the stats and characteristics of your crafted equipment.

What you’ll also need in order to craft are blueprints. From consumables and grenades to rare Weapons and Armor, you won’t be able to craft without the requisite blueprints. Like ingredients, these can be found in the open world as loot, or bought from vendors—though some will also be granted once you invest further down the Crafting skill perk tree.

Gangs & Corporations

General Information

• Every gang in Cyberpunk 2077 has its own identity, goals, MOs, and territory.
• Corporations control the city, with constant power struggles both internal and external.
• Corporations rule the city, while gangs wreak chaos and seek their own forms .of power within
• Much of the conflict in Night City comes from gangs vs. corporations; this can be physical gunfights, or information warfare raging on the Net.
• V’s story will involve working with—and in direct opposition to—multiple gangs and corporations in order to achieve certain goals. Both are an inescapable part of life in Night City

NPCs

NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077 are the various characters you'll meet throughout your journey up the mercenary ladder in Night City. As V, you'll come across characters from different backgrounds, factions, and cultures. Some will work with you and help you as you learn the ropes of the outlaw game, others will be passing acquaintances - or obstacles - and some will be tougher to figure out until you spend some time digging deeper into who they are.

The relationships you build, and how you choose to go about dealing with the characters you encounter, will help shape your story, often in surprising ways. Your appearance and your dress will change the behavior of NPCs, and will also affect the story. Style and appearance work together with the personality you create for your character.

Night City

General Information

• Night City is made up of 6 distinct districts each with its own visual styles, atmosphere, dangers, and opportunities. These districts are Watson, Westbrook, Santo Domingo, Pacifica. Heywood, and City Center.
• The Outskirts (The Badlands) is the 7th district, a vast desert waste beyond the city walls inhabited by off-the-grid smugglers and wandering Nomads.
• Get around the streets of these districts in style with a driving model that is tuned to the personality of each individual car.
• Which characters you choose to spend time with, work with, and learn about will shape your story and the atmosphere of the game.

Getting Around Night City

With so much ground to cover, you need a good way to get around. Sure, you can use the NCART (Night City Area Rapid Transit) fast-travel system, but nothing beats cruising the streets of Night City from behind the wheel of a ride of your own. Night City has many cars and motorcycles to choose from—as well as trucks and tanks if you like things heavy-duty, and your personal driving experience will differ depending on the type of vehicle you drive.

General Tips for Driving

• Engage a burn-out by holding both the gas and brake simultaneously. Combined with your steering input, you can use this to rotate your car around in tight spaces if you find yourself stuck in a tight street—or alley. You can also use this technique for a harder launch off the line in races.
• Similarly, you can hold down the Emergency Brake button and hit the throttle to free rev the motor when your car isn't moving. This can also be used to get a better launch.
• The emergency brake has two modes. If you press it when you're off the throttle, you will get a very typical emergency brake reaction, useful for pulling 180s and reversing course quickly. It can be useful for dramatic course corrections too, but if you apply it while still on the throttle, it functions more like a drift button and produces a softer reaction better suited for initiating drifts. Keep these in mind during high-octane chases where you need to gain the advantage over a pursuing vehicle.
• If you get stuck, use the left stick to try and right your vehicle or bump it back onto the ground.