Cyberpunk 2077

There are 3 basic leveling components. Attributes, perk points and skill progression

Attributes are the most straight forward, there are 5 attributes you can level. Cool, Reflexes, Body, Intelligence and Technical Ability. Each level you get one attribute point and one skill point

There are distinct breakpoints with the attributes. At the start of the game you have 3 in everything and you have 7 points to allocate. So basically 67 attribute points to allocate with everything starting at 3. Without modding you cannot max everything out but you can max out several attributes.

The perks available to you depend on your attribute points because they have break points. So if you have 20 in reflexes you can take any reflex perk if you have taken the perk leading towards it.

The break points are at level 4, you can get the first line of perks, level 9 you can get the mid level of perks, level 15 the upper level of perks and level 20 the final line of perks

Hence there is very little to be gained from taking an attribute from 9 to 10 but taking it to 15 could change things dramatically in what perks you can take

There are typically 3 perk lines. So in Cool you have a weapons tree, a crouched mode tree and a throwing weapons tree. The other attributes will have similar trees, so technical ability has a tree for consumables, cyberware wear and tech weapons

There are 5 skills that you level by doing related activities like an elder scrolls game. These can be very messy. Headhunter levels by shooting people in the head but also stealth kills. Netrunner is leveled by using hacks etc, the most straightforward. Shinobi is leveled by using automatic weapons and in theory movement based abilities. Solo is increased by using shotguns, heavy machine guns and melee. Engineer is increased by crafting and using tech weapons which can overlap with other skills.

If you max out each skill you only get 2 perk points from it so you are limited to 70 perk points. You might get extra ones during the course of the game but there is hard limit to the amount of them you are likely to get.

Your default head mod is a hacking deck. This is functionally the same as casting spells.You can turn off cameras with it, make turrets your friend, make a guy put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. Previously most people stuck with that but there are other head mods. There is sandevistan which is slomo max payne mode at will and there is berserk mode which is a more general combat buff. If you don't find yourself casting spells, those modes are available to you. You don't have to stick with spells.

2.0 depends on a synergy of attributes a lot more than previous versions. Once upon a time you could only focus on int and spells and kill everything before they were aware of you. No matter what you main in you will want a back up option and probably your main thing is empowered by another attribute or perk

And then there is stamina. You can now sprint forever in the game. But doing anything from shooting a gun to swinging a hammer and etc etc requires using stamina. There are perks to affect the amount used but works like it does in dark souls. It is your action economy. No stamina, you aren't doing a dash. So you have to manage it

Most of your cyberware does not require much upgrading. The gold double jump legs are the same as the green ones with some stat differences you will not notice.

Better versions will be available the higher your level is so you don't need to manually upgrade them. You can just buy the better versions when you are high enough level.

The easiest way to make a lot of money is to just pick up the guns from the people you killed and sell them.

Clothes you find sell for a lot less so you can scrap them to get crafting materials.

Dogtown, the new area has cyberware merchants who sell unique cyberware that the other merchants don't have. These seem to be wildly overpowered such as an eye mod that gives a flat 30% to crit at base level and you can upgrade it

The default stealth kill is with throwing knives. If you perk yourself for headshots and apply a silencer to a high damage weapon you don't need to use throwing knives.

An enemy with a skull icon is an elite just like in an MMO. Your one hit kills might not work on them. So if you throw a knife into a skull enemy or magic themselves to shoot themselves in the head they might no immediately go down and could alert everyone else

In general you should turn up the difficulty the longer the game goes on. If you start on normal it will at some point turn into very easy. Just turn it up to hard then. And if hard turns too easy there is very hard.

The core path you have to do, the gigs are all worth doing, the low money quests are all interesting. People burn themselves out doing the ncpd scanner missions. Those are everywhere and you don't need them unless you want to powerlevel .

The map can be customised, I always want to see the vendors, the side quests, the gigs and the fast travel points. Your mileage may vary, maybe you want to grind out the ncpd scanners. Whatever you want you should customize the map indicators

Keeping this very vague, you can save your friend from Japan. Everything the narrative is telling you is he's a lost cause but you can just not follow that.

Double jump remains the premier leg mod. Its just so flexible compared to anything else.