Cyberpunk 2077

Note these tips were added before the recent 2.0 patch, which might make some of these tips wrong.

• Abilities have skills within them, you gain ability points (and some perks) from leveling. You max out at level 50 so you cannot have 20 points in every ability score. You absolutely do not need to but you will probably end up hard committing to some abilities over others.

• Skills are leveled by using them. Leveling skills generally makes you better at them and every so often gives you perk points to spend. In theory you could max out athletics (an ability) and invest all your perk points in shotguns (A skill) and never pick up a shotgun. This would be a weird thing to do. Mostly if you want to play with rifles you level reflexes and invest perk points in assault and then use the rifles making you better at them.

• You can only increase the level of a skill up to the ability score number. So if you only invest 10 in reflexes you can only level the skill assault (rifles, smgs) to level 10.

• When doing The Heist mission, there will come a point where you need to make a run for it. The games breadcrumbs will send you one way, but if you head in the other direction and climb up to the rooftop, there will be an Iconic Katana you can grab in a waiting AV - it’s one of the best melee weapons in the game with +500% crit damage and is missable if you don’t grab it right then and there.

• The point of no return mission at the end of the game will permanently change the world state and give you an epilogue, but it will also create a save as you enter the building so that you can return later to play through alternate endings + mop up side missions.

• Don't spend money on upgrading weapons. A mook is always going to drop a better weapon within the hour. By upgrading I mean go to the crafting menu and spending mats on upgrading the gear.

• Weapon mods are cheap so use those. And there's no harm in buying them. It's useful to have a few silencers in the inventory should you get a better pistol. Same with clothing mods.

• Check the later perks. The most important perks can be gotten before maxing the ability.

• Get the double jump legs as soon as possible. They vastly increase your mobility. You can get other legs mods but you don't need to jump that high and double jump allows you to course correct if you mess up.

• More or less everything will get super strong if you invest. Hacking will let you kill everyone in a building without setting foot in it. The tech rifles will let you shoot through the walls for massive damage. Stealth and revolvers will let you do insane headshot damage.

• Getting upgraded eyes will let you put mods on them. These mods have weakened post 1.5. But you can mod relatively few pieces of cyberware and there are still very useful mods you can put on the eyes

• Do some hacking stuff even if you don't invest in it. Turning off the cameras, pinging and some other low grade stuff can be very effective. With zero investment you can highlight every you are currently mad at, turn off the cameras and turn off the turrets

• The level design is very Deus Ex, so there's always a vent or a ledge you can avoid the front door with.

• Do the level appropriate stuff. When the game opens up the rest of the map to you if you go to the stuff it tells you is super hard the game will just kill you. The mobs will take 10% health damage, turn around and just end you.

• Since 1.5 there are not so many "you have to take this" perks. There used to be stuff like +50% head shot damage. Now it's headshots increase your damage after you hit one. For the sake of balance that makes sense. It is worth interrogating the perks though. Some of them you get most of the value out of just taking the first level of it. You also probably don't need to max an ability to get the most useful perks in its skill. There are too many abilities with underlying skill trees to give specific advice but if you spend 10 minutes looking at the skill trees and deciding roughly what you want to do that is time well spent

• The game is pretty generous with perk points. You can make your V good at melee just investing perk points. Not as good as a V committed to melee but enough to be effective. And melee is fun, punching is fun, slicing and dicing with a katana is fun. Maybe for any challenge you go to hacks or rifles but you can go apeshit on people with a katana for fun.

• It's probably worth upgrading the difficulty as you play more. Hard seems like it should be normal. You can die on hard.

• It's not a big deal really but some jobs don't want you killing anyone. These differ from the jobs where they want you to stealth. There's a gun mod that will turn the damage non lethal so if you get annoyed you can just slap one of those on and shoot everyone. The only difference is the fixer will be annoyed on the phone with you and give you less money if you kill people.

• If you're going to do the boxing quest you need gorilla arms. You'll have to put some points into the punching tree as well, not many. Maybe 6 or so. Heal on punch damage, stagger chance. Gorilla arms are fun so you should take them anyway. Mantis blades felt slow to me, not as fun as just using a katana. Monowire is ass. I've heard good things about the wrist mounted launcher for low to medium levels.

• The clothing seems to offer a lot more variety in what bonuses it gives you post 1.5 patch. I think movement speed increase is a good one. Getting behind cover to pop a heal is a good thing. It doesn't seem like you can just stack crit chance to 100% from clothing anymore.

• After the map opens up you won't have the default car for a while. I would suggest buying a motorbike. The driving is still ass but bikes have a better time negotiating traffic.

• One piece of cyberware you can install is the operating system. Most people probably use the ones that make you better at magic (hacks), Improving the one you start with gives you more hacks, your hacks come off cool down faster etc. There are other operating system types. One type will give you max payne mode (time moves at 50% for x amount of seconds), another will give you hulk mode making you tankier and better at melee. If you don't care about hacking these are worth a look.