various members of the gang are
working out in—he’s able to turn
the apparatus against them.
One of the Animals is in a boxing
ring, sparring against a training bot.
V tweaks the bot’s difficulty setting
until it punches the gang member to
death. Around the corner, he hacks
into a weightlifting bench so that it
crushes the Animal working out on it.
Upstairs, V hacks a vending machine,
causing it to light up and distract a
couple of guards. This seems tame in
comparison to the previous
shenanigans... right up until V pulls
out his razor sharp nanowire and
slices them to bits.
MIND CONTROL
Clearly Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t shy
away from violence. In a later section,
ABOVE: Buying
upgrades on the
black market is the
best way to stay at
the top of the cyber
foodchain.ALTERNATE HISTORY
Key dates that shape Cyberpunk’s bleak future1989
A sinister organ made up
of high-ranking members
of the CIA, NSC, FBI, and
DEA secretly runs the
United States behind the
President’s back.1994
A nuclear meltdown
occurs in Pittsburgh, PA.
Almost 300 people die
and cancer rates
skyrocket. The exclusion
zone around the reactor
is named The Pitt.1996
A catastrophic societal
collapse begins. Martial
law is established in the
United States, the
President is killed, and
street gangs take control
of the country.2002
An event called the Food
Crash occurs. Crops
around the world are
ravaged by a virus, but
the United States defeats
it by developing a
counter-agent.2004
The first Corporate War
begins. Two megacorps,
Euro Business Machines
and Orbital Air, engage in
a campaign of
cyber-warfare after a
deal falls through.2017
The first self-aware
human clone is created,
NASA launches a manned
mission to Mars, and
London is flooded when
terrorists bomb the
Thames Barrier.only exception is weapons that are
lethal by definition,” says Sasko. “So
let’s say you shoot someone in the
face with a bazooka. You shoot his
head off. That’s typically lethal. There
are weapons that are so lethal that it
cannot go any other way. But
everything else actually has a
nonlethal option.”
CDPR skips back and shows how
the section would look with a
completely different build. This V is a
Solo. Unlike the Netrunner, she
doesn’t have access to a cyberdeck,
meaning she can’t hack the access
point to disable the camera at the
start of the level. Instead, she has
plenty of combat skills and a pair of
cyberarms. Thanks to her strength,
she’s can pry open a door that the
Netrunner V couldn’t get through.
After being spotted by one of the
Animals, she dispatches her foesV uses the nanowire to hack into one
of the Animals, gaining access to their
internal network. Thanks to this, and
a software daemon purchased and
installed earlier in the demo, V is able
to turn the guards against themselves,
forcing one to remove the pin of their
grenade, and another to shoot
themselves in the head. It was, I have
to say, a bit much.
Not every playthrough will be this
grisly, however. “We have a
completely nonlethal path
throughout the whole game,” says
Sasko. Of course this is a dangerous,
violent world, so you have to harm
people sometimes. But you don’t have
to kill anybody. Any of the quests,
street stories, open world content—
you can go through the whole thing
killing nobody.”
To support this, almost every
weapon and cyberware installation
will have a nonlethal mode. “The