Cyberpunk 2077 is now only three months away. The second episode of Night City Wire, a periodic web series by developer CD Projekt Red, debuted overnight. In this episode: Lifepaths, the music of Cyberpunk 2077 and getting to grips with weaponry. You can watch the full broadcast right here, or hit the embed below.
Lifepaths
Lifepaths are your character background. Will be a Nomad, a Street Kid or a Corpo?
Street Kids come up poor in the ghettos of Night City. They know the streets and what happens in them better than anyone. They are a tight-knit, multiethnic group who look out for each other. Community is important to Street Kids, and they’re always ready to fight for their comrades.
Nomads are outcasts who live in the desert Badlands of Southern California. They like their freedom, something in short supply within Corp-controlled Night City. They have few material needs. Their mods are as utilitarian as the people are hardy. But what happens when the Nomad life is over? What happens when you want to leave and head to the big city?
Finally, there are the Corpos, those who work within the system. You don’t belong in the streets, or the desert. You belong in the boardroom. Corpos are all about subterfuge, intrigue and insight. Information is power and the more of it you have on those around you, the more you can work any situation to your advantage.
Each lifepath grants certain bonuses throughout the game — for instance, you might have greater knowledge on a given topic as a Nomad than you would as a Street Kid or a Corpo, giving you the edge in a hostile negotiation. Street Kids might not know much about what goes on in the city’s higher echelons, but they can still talk shop with Corpo goons to curry favour.
SAMURAI
We’ve known for some time that Swedish punk outfit Refused had been recruited to create music for Cyberpunk 2077‘s in-universe band, SAMURAI. Led by legendary rocker Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves), the band eschews what might be considered “traditional” cyberpunk sounds in favour of hard, shoegazery punk. Several SAMURAI songs have been released already, but today has seen another drop: A Like Supreme. You can give it a listen in the embed below.
Actors pretend to be other people all the time. That’s their job. Musicians don’t really do that. A crucial part of creating music is that it is an authentic expression of self. How strange then to hire a band because they have the right sound, only to have them pretend they are another band. This is something lead singer Dennis Lyxzén seems to have found particularly challenging, not merely having to sing but also take notes from a voice director on his own accent for the first time.
Give ’em all the guns
There’s a lot of weapons in Cyberpunk 2077. You got your samurai swords, and your cyberware so you can stab boys up with surprise Wolverine spikes. You got your tech weapons, with their high impact rounds and basketball court sized exit wounds. There are power weapons if you prefer the explosive approach or something more technical — like richochet. There’s smart weapons if you feel that aiming is for chumps.
Like Borderlands, it appears that there are several weapons manufacturers, all with different design traits. Also in the mix are the now-standard weapon tiers of Common, Uncommon, Rare and Legendary. Legendary weapons will reportedly take a bit of work to secure — you may even need to kill a character you really like to secure the legendary weapon they carry.
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Cyberpunk 2020 launches November 19, 2020 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows PC. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X owners get a free upgrade from current-gen versions of the game.
