The latest 50-minute hands-off demo of Cyberpunk 2077 is the first time it's looked like a real videogame. At E3 2019, we're past the spectacle of seeing a new CD Projekt game for the first time and are finally figuring out what it actually is. We’ve seen the menus, the upgrade systems, shop inventories, dialogue systems, varying approaches to solving problems—the usual ‘go in stealthy versus guns-blazing’ approaches were mentioned. We’ve seen the box art and ridiculous collector's edition. 

Cyberpunk 2077 feels like Deus Ex with an obscene budget and Keanu Reeves. Like a thing that we will conceivably play and finish in April of 2020. It exists. The demo wasn't a revelation in game design, even if the technology and art direction is staggering in scope and detail. This is CD Projekt pulling back the curtain and tamping down the cumulative years of excitement to remind everyone that it's made a very large role-playing game and that it looks very nice and that it's coming out soon. Here's what I saw and what I thought about it.

Above: CD Projekt hasn't released video of the E3 2019 gameplay yet, just the cinematic trailer.

Sorry state

The demo opens on a character creator, with the generic box art V staring at himself in a mirror. Keanu Reeves' character Johnny Silverhand leans on a nearby wall. The character creator isn't final, but it has the expected hair, skin, and facial feature options, if not the monstrous depth the Dark Souls or Mass Effect systems have. 

There's also an option to choose your background: street kid, nomad, or corporate. It's not just for your head canon either. Your background opens up certain dialogue choices throughout the entire game. As a street kid, if someone's trying to scam you, you might be able to see through their bullshit having swindled plenty yourself. A character with a corporate background will have a better time navigating big business hierarchies. Once finished making our man, Silverhand comments, not so kindly, "C'mon, you really think they give a rat's dick about how you look?"

Reeves has a surprisingly important role in Cyberpunks greater story. He's a hallucination, sort of, the byproduct of a faulty chip in V's head central to a mystery we're still fairly hazy on. What matters is that he can appear at any point, and often does with some crude, funny commentary in tow. He's a great foil to V's so far monotone delivery. Last year we wrote about how Cyberpunk's dialogue was lacking color and that it was a bit too cliche, but Silverhand is a promising sign our first impressions might not hold true. I wonder if he watches you on the toilet. 

We're in the Pacifica district of Night City, a district designed and built as a luxurious resort town replete with lavish hotels, malls, and amusements. But a shaky economy scared investors, so they pulled funding and left the district unfinished and unsupported. The impoverished moved in, with gangs in tow. The secretive hacking gang the Voodoo Boys control most of the district, largely comprised of Creole-speaking Haitians. V, the player character, needs their help, so they head to a church to meet a contact who will put them in touch with the right people.

The church is more like a nightclub, a darkened room only lit by the neon glow on the wall behind the altar. The room is so crowded people are touching shoulders. Whoever's driving the demo slowly pushes V through the crowd for a minute before the contact grabs him and tells him to check out a butcher shop nearby. 

A short walk through the district puts the poverty on full display. These aren't the rain-slicked neon streets of cyberpunk I'm used to. These streets are littered with dirt and trash. Neon is rare. Buildings are a drab grey-brown. The occasional car chassis is aflame. It's clear that systemic racism is still in play in 2077 and that Pacifica has become a ghetto for Haitians, and I'm really hoping Cyberpunk doesn't just use present-day strife as a backdrop. Cyberpunk is an angry genre, a stylish sci-fi exaggeration (less so, lately) of the byproducts of capitalism and technology working in tandem. Let's see Cyberpunk dig in, yeah?

It's an impressive scene. NPCs shuffle around, some sit around a fire. Everyone looks like they have their own agenda. V enters the butcher shop and speaks to the man behind the counter while an old woman rocks in a chair, singing in her native language as V's retinal input translates the song in real time just above her head, a nice touch. A scanner moves its digital light across V, just in case, and he heads to the back room to meet Placide, a high-ranking member of the Voodoo boys.

The details of the plot are a bit lost on me without proper context. This mission takes place around the middle of the game we're told, but the basic idea is that V needs Placide's help, so Placide asks a favor of him: figure out what the Animals, a rival gang of juiced up muscle freaks, are doing in the Grand Imperial Mall, one of the last projects to be abandoned in the massive investor pullout that led to Pacifica's collapse. After a quick walk and talk to Voodoo Boy HQ with Placide, he tests V's trustworthiness by trying to 'jack in' to him. As Placide reaches across the desk to plug a device into V's arm, a dialogue option pops up that lets you pull away and WTF the guy. Our V does just that, though it's possible to let him in without a fuss. A man emerges from the door behind Placide, and tells him something that sounds important. Just by looking at the door after the man leaves, V can shift the conversation and ask about what's going on back there, or just leave. It's a nice context-sensitive touch, and I hope to see it used in less overt ways.

So V heads outside, hops on a motorcycle, and tunes to a radio station playing some industrial hip-hop. We're GTA now. The mall is a decent distance away, and our short cycle tour of Pacifica leads us through yet more poverty, trashfires, and wandering locals.

Let's go shopping

V meets two of Placide's men in the destitute parking lot outside. Here's where we get to see more of Cyberpunk's combat options. The mall is a massive open area. It's possible to just waltz in the front door—that's right—guns blazing. But our V takes the back route and sneaks in, crouching behind objects to avoid enemy patrols. It's very typical immersive sim stuff, Dishonored or Deus Ex without the vents or whale barges, except in a setting more well realized than I've ever seen before (and it's not like Dishonored or Deus Ex are lacking in the world-building department). In this way, it's unsurprising and astonishing all at once. 

During V's stealth run, he remotely hacks cameras to turn them off, hacks a soda machine to spit out cans and distract guards. Two particular hacks stand out: an Animal gang member is boxing with a training robot. A quick remote hack lets V increase the training difficulty, so the bot clocks the poor bastard and knocks him out, sending a stream of blood into the air. Another Animal is training on a bench press, and because nearly everything is connected to a network, we hack the damn bench press and remotely press the bar into his chest, hundreds of pounds of pressure pushing the bar against his sternum. Dead.

They're clever contextual devices, but there's not a major difference between hacking a soda machine and throwing a bottle to distract patrolling enemies. It's great flavor, but functionally identical to plenty of stealth systems. Not disappointing, but not surprising or particularly challenging. Then again, I'm not the guy with his hands on the controller.

The demo takes a turn as the developers switch to a female V heavily specced into strength and decked out with super strong cyborg arms. We're going to infiltrate the mall again, but not so quietly this time. 

It's also about when we get a look at the perk tree, separate from the skill point system. As you play and level up, you'll be able to put that experience towards perks in that open up new abilities or buff exisiting stats/skills in 12 branches: handguns, rifles, blades, hacking, shotguns, two-handed combat, assassination, cold blood, sniper rifles, engineering, melee, and athletics. Some are self explanatory, but I'm curious what others like cold blood entail. 

Jacked V gets spotted early on by an unarmed Animal. The big guns (arms) come out and a fist fight ensues. Punches are loud and crunchy, and V makes quick work of the guy, but it wakes two nearby Animals, one of which is armed with a knife. V picks up a bottle, seemingly broken during the first fight, and stabs the poor jerks to death. Again, it's nothing particularly novel in how it plays, but the realistic audio, detailed character models, fluid animations, and blood spatter make the violence sting more than other games with functionally identical melee combat. For the squeamish, know you can finish the entire game without killing anyone. 

With the room cleared, because of her strength, V can pry open a few doors that weak hacker guy V couldn't. It creates a shortcut to the atrium hacker V had to spend 10 minutes sneaking around and hacking to reach. Strong V's method for clearing the atrium is some Terminator shit. Over a dozen Animals are strewn about the room, accompanied by an automated turret. She's strong and hearty enough to sprint towards the turret and rip the LMG out of the computer-controlled carapace. She turns it on the room and lets loose a constant stream of nonstop gunfire for, I kid you not, about 30 seconds.

It rips through everything, including a dolphin statue at the center of the atrium which sends it toppling over in an impressive demonstration of the destruction systems. Glass shatters, Animals fall by the handful. Cyber muscles can't stop bullets. An eerie silence settles in. Hell yeah, I think I'm going to spec into a strong character too. It's another example of Cyberpunk doing something familiar, but with striking flair. 

From there, we whip between hacker V and strong V a few more times, culminating in a disappointingly conventional boss fight. The local Animal gang leader is decked out with strength-enhancing tech too, enough to let her wield a massive hammer. But her metal muscles are easily disabled by shooting the massive purple spot on her back. 

One twist I dig: after weakening her she drops her axe, unable to wield it anymore, but immediately rushes and jams something into V's head, uploading some malware. A progress bar appears at the top of the screen, and if V doesn't finish off the boss (her name is Sasquatch) in time, V dies. It's a reminder that we're not a god among people, not the usual chosen one, just another person in a cyberpunk setting with access to the same abilities and tech as anyone else.

After the fight, V finds his/her target. He's a NetWatch agent, basically an internet cop, and he's in cahoots with the Animals in their attempt to take down the Voodoo Boys. Since this guy has access to the internet cop network, Placide wants access to his brain, but not before V hears what the internet cop has to say. It's an example of the kind of big choices we'll supposedly run into on the reg in Cyberpunk. See, the cop thinks Placide will kill both him and V once he gets the intel he needs. The guy says it's a normal move for the Voodoo Boys. Our dialogue options can lead us to betray Placide and collab with the cop or incapacitate and hack him immediately. 

Our V chooses to stick with Placide, which isn't necessarily the wrong choice, but the NetWatch agent was right. Once we jack into the cop's network via his brain and share access with Placide, he uses the opportunity to overload the network and scramble the brain of anyone connected to it at that moment, including V. Oops. 

V survives for a story reason, and we're told that reason is connected to the same reason Keanu Reeves lives in our brain as a wisecracking computer ghost. He's a pissed computer ghost now, because once V awakes, he demands V confront Placide immediately. When V leaves the mall, the Voodoo Boys in the parking lot are very surprised to see her still walking, and offer a ride to see the Placide right away. I'm curious to know if you can opt out, and it seems so since you don't have to get in the car as part of the dialogue tree. I mean, how small choices radiate outward into the rest of the narrative are all I'm curious about at this point. The character-building stuff is, from what we've seen, very much in the tradition of the tabletop RPG with modern game skill progression systems layered over the top. I just want to know how far Choice and Consequence™ go in Cyberpunk.

Without getting bogged down in story details we don't have proper context for, we meet Placide's boss, Brigette, someone who can hopefully help V out. And as part of that help, Brigette puts V in a bathtub full of ice. Keanu's character comes out and says hello again before V's sent to cyberspace. It's a truly trippy moment, like the final level in Rez overlaid on the psychedelic transcendence scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. V walks around in an abstract digital space, accompanied by Brigette, wireframes and digital artifacts zooming by and swirling all around. It's not a place you'll be able to freely explore, but clearly Cyberpunk's story won't strictly take place in meat space. And with that, the demo's over. 

Stripped of the mythic quality of its seemingly eternal development, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t present like a revolution in game design, and I don’t think that’s CD Projekt’s goal. It presents like an RPG with ambitious scope, playstyle variability, and a strict dedication to realizing a cyberpunk setting. 

I left the demo feeling like I had played many games like this before, just never with such a striking attention to detail. The combat looks great, Night City is a grim and gorgeous open world, the RPG systems are deep and varied, and Keanu Reeves isn't just some goofy sidequest NPC—he'll harass you for a good part of the journey.The only thing we need to know now is whether all the time and money and effort to develop such a detailed, fully-featured RPG will actually prop up an interesting story with meaningful character choices. And we'll need to play the whole damn thing to find out.

During the E3 trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 we saw Keanu Reeves appear as Johnny Silverhand, an iconic character from the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG CD Projekt Red is basing the game on. But something unusual happens at 3.45 in the trailer: there's a visual glitch, and for a second Keanu's not there. You can see powerlines right through him just fine, so it's not a problem with the protagonist's cybernetic eyes, but something stranger.

He's a ghost, not just some NPC who shows up briefly, and it seems he'll be a big part of the game. 

We know he's a ghost because one of the RPG books killed off Silverhand years ago, and though the body was never found, he'd be a lot older if he were still alive. (Clones exist in the setting, but we'll ignore that.) He should basically be Keith Richards by now.

According to Cyberpunk 2077's lead quest designer Pawel Sasko, Johnny Silverhand manifests as a "digital ghost" who is installed on a chip that V (the game's protagonist) has in their head. They're not explaining exactly what that means as "it's getting resolved fairly near the end of the game", Sasko says. However, it's canon in the RPG that Silverhand's girlfriend Alt Cunningham was a netrunner who was uploaded and became an AI ghost in the machine. Maybe Silverhand pulled a similar trick? We'll have to wait until 2020 to know for sure.

As for what it means for us as players, the obvious implication is that we may get to spend a lot of time with Keanu. He can appear anywhere to chat with us, and even taunts the player after character creation, saying, "C'mon, you really think they give a rat's dick about how you look?"

As for what Silverhand wants, Sasko wouldn't tell us everything, but did set up his backstory.

"He use to be a fighter for freedom, but in the eyes of corporations he would be probably called a terrorist," Sasko said. "This is the guy he is. He has a very strong vision for how the world should work, and he's like a true cyberpunk. He's the guy who goes against the system, and against the corporations, and against the city that's just an embodiment of this. He knows the city holds people in shackles—this is his way of seeing things. And suddenly he's back."

During the lastest hands-off demo of Cyberpunk 2077 at this year's E3, it was confirmed that you'll be able to finish the entire game without killing anyone. CD Projekt Red tells us that this is a change the team made based on fan feedback and survey cards handed out at E3 last year. 

"Right now, every weapon and every cyberware has a nonlethal option," lead quest designer Paweł Sasko told PC Gamer. Then he revised it a bit.

"I think I can say everything. There's one thing: only weapons that are lethal by definition, so let's say you shoot someone with a bazooka in his face. You shoot his head off. That's typically lethal."

It definitely is. What Sasko meant is there are weapons that so destructive that there's no way to make them safe enough to use on someone without killing them.

"But everything else actually has a nonlethal option," he said. "Pretty much every gun, pretty much every cyberware, you're able to use in a nonlethal way. You're able to knock them down, choke them, make them sleep and so on. There are ways not to kill them and spare them, like the way you could do with Sasquatch, the boss."

In today's E3 2019 demo, during a mission demonstrating different approaches to moving through an abandoned mall crawling with Animals—juiced-up gang members—some stealthy and relatively passive options to taking out or avoiding deadly confrontation were shown off. 

In true videogame fashion, players will have the option to sneak up behind some enemies and kill them or knock them out. An environmental takedown method also allows players to put enemies in a chokehold and use nearby props to finish the job. In this instance, our V knocked the Animal out and threw him down a garbage chute, which was described as a passive takedown option, though I worry about the state of the guy's neck after tumbling down a dark metallic shaft from the second story. You can't curb V's aggressive nature entirely, it seems. 

You'll also have numerous hacking abilities at your fingertips, assuming you spec into them, which will make even more stealthy, passive approaches possible. Turn off cameras, upload daemons (malware) into enemy implants to knock them out from a distance, or hack into environmental objects—nearly everything is connected to a network—to set up some distractions. Hack a soda machine to make it spit out can after can to draw the attention of nearby enemies, for instance.

We're seeing the game and talking to CD Projekt Red today, so stay tuned for more Cyberpunk 2077 news from E3 2019.

In a blog post today, Nvidia announced that CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 will support ray tracing when it launches next year, to make those neon-bathed streets extra atmospheric. 

Here's a quote from CD Projekt about the partnership: 

 "Ray tracing allows us to realistically portray how light behaves in a crowded urban environment," said Adam Badowski, Head of Studio, CD PROJEKT RED. "Thanks to this technology, we can add another layer of depth and verticality to the already impressive megacity the game takes place in."

Cyberpunk 2077 was already shaping up to be one of the most demanding PC games in years, but ray tracing is sure to push today's best graphics cards beyond their limits. We're gonna need some next-gen tech to hit ray traced 4K at 60+ fps.

We were able to check out a behind closed doors demo of the new RTX enabled build of Cyberpunk 2077, and while CDPR didn't explicitly state what sorts of ray tracing effects are being used, it did mention the use of global illumination and dynamic lighting effects in the game. There are also plenty of reflective surfaces, but those might be using screen space reflections. Either way, if there's a game that can potentially convince people that it's time to pick up an RTX card, this is the best candidate to date.

Above and below are our first look: Two 4K screenshots of Cyberpunk 2077 with ray tracing in effect. The top one's especially shiny.

Amidst the flood of Cyberpunk 2077 information revealed at E3 this year, CD Projekt served up our first look at the collector's edition of the game. If you've seen The Witcher CE boxes, you won't be at all surprised to hear that it's a pretty spectacular unit, with a huge box, a swanky figurine, an art book, the Visitors Guide to Night City, and all sorts of other stuff.

Check out the unboxing video above for a look at each part of the collector's edition.

While at first CD Projekt said the United States would only be getting a digital version, that plan quickly changed. American fans will be able to buy the physical Cyberpunk 2077 Collector's Edition for PC, too.

The situation isn't quite perfect, as the change is currently only confirmed for the US—CD Projekt is still "checking" the situation in Canada. But generally speaking, any game available in the US is easily had up north, too.

Here's everything CDPR is packing in with the Cyberpunk 2077 PC physical editions, both standard and collector's:

Cyberpunk 2077 Standard Edition PC

Cyberpunk 2077's standard physical edition pre-orders will come with these physical and digital goodies:

• Case with game discs
• Reversible cover
• World compendium detailing the game's setting and lore
• Postcards from Night City
• Map of Night City
• Stickers
• [Digital] Game soundtrack
• [Digital] Art booklet
• [Digital] Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook
• [Digital] Wallpapers for desktop and mobile

Cyberpunk 2077 Collector's Edition PC

The Collector's Edition will land you all of the same digital rewards plus a lot of extra physical swag:

• Collector's Edition box
• Reversible Cover
• Collectible steelbook
• 25cm (10in) statue of V (the game's protagonist) in action
• Hardcover art book
• Metal pin set
• Quadra VTech Metal keychain
• Annotated copy of A Visitor's Guide to Night City sealed in an NCPD evidence bag
• Embroidered patches
• World Compendium detailing the game's setting and lore
• Postcards from Night City
• Map of Night City
• Sticker bomb set

Cyberpunk 2077 (or, The Game Starring Keanu Reeves), now has a Steam page and a GOG preorder page. As we learned during Microsoft's E3 2019 press conference, the listing specifies an April 16 release date.

"Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure story set in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour and body modification," the official description reads. "You play as V, a mercenary outlaw going after a one-of-a-kind implant that is the key to immortality."

The listings confirm that V's "cyberware" can be customized, as well as their "skillset and playstyle". One of V's objectives, according to the listing, will be to steal a cybernetic implant which grants eternal life.

The trailer is below, in case you missed it. The game's available to pre-order, though keep in mind it doesn't release for another ten months.

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