Silent But Deadly: Mastering Stealth Kills in Cyberpunk 2077

Silent But Deadly: Mastering Stealth Kills in Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by CD Projekt, based on video game designer Mike Pondsmith's game series. Set in a dystopian Cyberpunk universe, the player assumes the role of "V" (played by Gavin Drea/Cherami Leigh), a mercenary in the fictional Californian city known as "Night City", where they deal with the fallout from a heist gone wrong that results in an experimental cybernetic "bio-chip" containing an engram of the legendary rock star and terrorist Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves) threatening to slowly overwrite V's mind; as the story progresses V and Johnny must work together to find a way to be separated and save V's life.

The game's development began following the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Blood and Wine (2016). The game was developed by a team of around 500 people using the REDengine 4 game engine. CD Projekt launched a new division in Wrocław, Poland, and partnered with Digital Scapes, Nvidia, QLOC, and Jali Research to aid the production. Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith was a consultant, and actor Keanu Reeves had a starring role. The original score was led by Marcin Przybyłowicz, and featured the contributions of several licensed artists. After years of anticipation, CD Projekt released Cyberpunk 2077 for PlayStation 4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One on 10 December 2020, followed by PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 15 February 2022.
Cyberpunk 2077 received praise from critics for its narrative, setting, and graphics. However, some of its gameplay elements received mixed responses while its themes and representation of transgender characters received some criticism. It was also widely criticized for bugs, particularly in the console versions which suffered from performance problems. Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 to June 2021 while CD Projekt rectified some of the problems. CD Projekt became subject to investigations and class-action lawsuits for their perceived attempts at downplaying the severity of the technical problems before release; these were ultimately cleared with a settlement of US$1.85 million. By October 2023, the game had sold over 25 million units. An expansion, Phantom Liberty, released on 26 September 2023 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, which sold 3 million units in a week after release. Its total cost to develop and market (including updates and DLC) is reportedly over $436 million,[2] making it one of the most expensive video games to develop. A sequel, codenamed Project Orion, was announced.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing game[3] played from a first-person perspective as V,[4] a mercenary whose voice,[5] face, hairstyle, body type and modifications, background, and clothing are customisable. Stat categories—Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical, and Cool—are influenced by the character classes that players assume, which are NetRunner (hacking), Techie (machinery), and Solo (combat). V must consult a "ripperdoc" to upgrade and purchase cyberware implants; black markets offer military-grade abilities.[6] The rarity of any given equipment is shown by a coloured tier system.[7] V can take cover, aim, run, jump, double jump, and slide.[8][9] Melee strikes can be dealt with close-combat weapons.[10][11] There are three types of ranged weapons, all of which can be customised and modified—Power (standard), Tech (which penetrates walls and enemies), and Smart (with homing bullets).[12][13] Ranged weapons are equipped to ricochet bullets in a target's direction and slow them down in bullet time. Four types of damage can be inflicted and resisted—Physical, Thermal, EMP, and Chemical.[14][15][16] Weapon use increases accuracy and reloading speed, which are manifested in character animations.[17] Gunsmiths repair and upgrade weapons.[10] The game can be completed without killing anyone,[18] with non-lethal options for weapons and cyberware.[19]

The open world metropolis of Night City consists of six regions; the corporate City Centre, immigrant-inhabited Watson, luxurious Westbrook, suburban Heywood, gang-infested Pacifica, and industrial Santo Domingo. Its surrounding area, the Badlands, can also be explored. V navigates these locations on foot and in vehicles, which are subject to either a third- or first-person view.[6] Pedestrians are vulnerable to vehicular collisions.[13] Depending on the location, law enforcement may be alerted if V commits a crime.[20][21] Radio stations are available to listen to.[22] The full day-night cycle and dynamic weather affect the way non-player characters (NPCs) behave.[12][23] V owns an apartment and a garage.[10][24] Night City features non-English-speaking characters, whose languages can be translated with special implants.[25] "Braindance" is a device that allows V to undergo other people's experiences.[26][27] Branching dialogues enable interaction with NPCs and actions in quests.[28] Experience points are obtained from main quests and fuel the stats; side quests yield "street cred", unlocking skills, vendors, places, and additional quests.[7][12][13][29] Quests are acquired from characters known as Fixers.[13] Throughout the game, V is aided by various companions.[10] Consumables, like soft drinks, are used for healing, and objects can be inspected in V's inventory.[9] Minigames include hacking, boxing, auto racing,[30] martial arts, and shooting ranges.[31] The player's in-game choices can lead to different endings.[27]
After concluding the Voodoo Boys business in Pacifica, V is contacted by Songbird, the aide of New United States President Rosalind Myers. She explains that their transport, Space Force One, has been hacked over Night City and is about to crash in the lawless district of Dogtown. Songbird asks V to help rescue Myers in return for her assistance in preventing the Relic from destroying V's brain. Songbird also warns V that the warlord who rules Dogtown, Kurt Hansen, will likely attempt to use the opportunity to kidnap Myers. V is able to extract Myers from the crash site and escort her to a safehouse, but they lose contact with Songbird on the way. At the safehouse, Johnny warns V that Songbird and Myers may be hiding secrets from them.

The next morning, Songbird is still missing in action. A concerned Myers asks V to make contact with Solomon Reed (Idris Elba), a NUS sleeper agent stationed in Dogtown. Reed agrees to help, and V learns that Reed was abandoned by the NUSA in Night City after Reed narrowly survived an assassination attempt by Arasaka. They enlist the aid of Alex, a fellow FIA agent, and Slider, an underworld netrunner, who traces Songbird's trail. He is shocked to discover that she penetrated the Blackwall, the firewall that protects the world from rogue AIs inhabiting the old Net, to make contact with V. Slider is able to reestablish contact with Songbird, who tells V she is in Hansen's custody, but Slider is killed when his connection short-circuits.

V regroups with Reed in his safehouse, where he reveals that the NUSA ordered Songbird to sell him out to Arasaka. He also discloses that Songbird has been probing the Blackwall under Myers' orders, which is prohibited by international law. Regardless, Reed wants to rescue Songbird, so he and V infiltrate Hansen's headquarters. They meet Songbird, who explains that her mind has been corrupted by the Blackwall, but Hansen possesses a device called the Neural Matrix that can cure both her and V's conditions. Songbird sets up a plan to steal the matrix from Hansen, while Reed and V realize that Myers' plane crash was set up by Songbird so that she could reach Hansen and acquire the matrix to save herself. V then has a choice, let Songbird complete her objective or betray her using an icebreaker given to them by Reed.

If V betrays Songbird, she will secure the matrix but succumb to cyberpsychosis. Hansen kills Alex and V kills Hansen in pursuit of Songbird. V cannot stop Songbird from fleeing to Cynosure, an old Militech facility meant to counter Soulkiller, after another attempt by Reed to capture her. By the time V catches up, Songbird is already succumbing to the Blackwall's effects. Depending on V's choices, they either euthanize Songbird to prevent her from falling into NUSA custody, or hand her over to Reed so he can help her.

If V goes along with Songbird, Alex kills Hansen while V and Songbird escape. Songbird then enlists V to help her escape from Night City's spaceport to the Moon. On the way there, Songbird admits to V that the matrix will disintegrate after being used once, so it can only save one of them. V is left with the decision to help Songbird escape by launching her to the Moon, killing Reed in the process, or surrendering Songbird into Reed's custody at the spaceport.

If Reed and Songbird both survive, a new ending to the game is unlocked. Myers congratulates V for completing their mission and Reed informs them that the matrix can be used to cure V. If V accepts, NUSA surgeons use the matrix to successfully remove the Relic from V's brain, but the surgery fully deletes Johnny, puts V in a two-year coma (during which most of their friends move on), and causes irreparable damage to V's brain that renders them unable to use combat implants. Being unable to return to their old life as a mercenary, V is forced to accept that they must live quietly as a regular civilian from now on.
The concept of Cyberpunk 2077 was adapted from Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series. Antithetical to the stereotypical cyberpunk genre, the concepts explored in Cyberpunk evoke a sense of rebellion and whimsy while retaining the genre's grim tone. The protagonist of Cyberpunk—in comparison to the typical archetype of a hero attempting to save the world—attempts to save himself, from a downtrodden and lowly perspective.[39] Lead gameplay designer Marcin Janiszewski sought to remind players of its connection to the Cyberpunk universe, writing, "We want to assure fans of the pen-and-paper game that this is still the same Cyberpunk you know". In comparison to CD Projekt Red's development on The Witcher series, the time difference between the events of Cyberpunk and Cyberpunk 2077 allotted the studio more freedom towards adapting the series, although they attempted to stay true to Pondsmith's original works.[40]

Cyberpunk 2077, by extension, presents an alternate history, in which the United States became mired in wars in Central America in the 1980s deeply undermining its power and economy, the Soviet Union failed to dissolve and Japan became a superpower, diffusing its culture as far as California. The events of Cyberpunk 2077 take place in the fictitious Night City, a megalopolis immersed in Japanese culture that lies between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Stereotypical cyberpunk motifs, such as sadism, commercialization, and cruelty, and satisfaction, remain as mainstays in the political landscape of Night City.[41] A hedonistic wonderland, Night City is divided into two distinct classes: the downtrodden, who use psychedelic substances and physically augmented sex workers as a form of escapism, while the elite corporate class (known as "corpos") dominate society and are afforded great financial success.[42]

The script was first written in Polish and translated into English, a standard practice for CD Projekt games, according to quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz.[43]

V is voiced by Gavin Drea and Cherami Leigh for the male and female versions of V, respectively.[44] CD Projekt Red sought a suitable voice actor for the role of Johnny Silverhand. Keanu Reeves was approached in July 2018 for the role, and noted for his work as Neo in The Matrix franchise. Reeves' performance was recorded using motion capture technology, a process he had previously used for his performance as Neo in The Matrix (1999). Although a newcomer to the video game format, Reeves enjoyed the script.[45] Silverhand is featured prominently in the game, with CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński recalling in an interview with Bloomberg News that Silverhand's dialogue count is second only to V.[46]

Technical and gameplay
Cyberpunk 2077 was developed using REDengine 4, the fourth iteration of CD Projekt Red's internal game engine.[47] REDengine 3, REDengine 4's predecessor, implemented improvements to terrain and vegetation rendering. To achieve this, regions are streamed from a clipped mipmap (through a method known as clipmapping) in memory. Six clipmaps are created in total; the elevation, control map, and color clipmaps are streamed, while the vertical error, normal, and terrain shadow clipmaps are generated at runtime. In addition, a technique known as tessellation is used, where polygons are divided. In particular, polygon triangulation is used, where data is tessellated into triangles. The error maps are downsampled prior to hardware tessellation. This avoids costly computation, as large areas with high levels of tessellation aren't rendered. Furthermore, REDengine3 employs a radical approach to texturing; textures are painted using two textures: a background texture and an overlay texture. For slopes, the slope angle is computed and compared against a threshold value. Creating a thick cover on slopes was made possible through boosting the overlay texture when the vertex normal looked up; however, this presented complications in ground features, such as cobblestones, where improper distribution was applied. To address this, damping was added, along with blend sharpening. These measures created an ultimately low memory footprint.[48] Other advancements made by REDengine 3 include refined animations, volumetric effects allowing for advanced rendering of particle effects, such as clouds, dynamic physics, and an advanced dialogue mimic system. These improvements allowed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to have a more immersive open-world.[49]

Although Cyberpunk 2077 was initially developed using REDengine 3 as far back as 2013,[50] CD Projekt Red developed REDengine 4 after facing difficulty developing the game, which used a first-person perspective, a departure from the third-person perspective CD Projekt had developed in for earlier iterations of REDengine. REDengine 4 was developed using a US$7 million grant from the Polish government.[49] Nearly every aspect of REDengine was changed as a result, including the particle effects editor.[51] CD Projekt Red continued to work on REDengine throughout Cyberpunk 2077's development cycle, and as late as 2017.[52] Cyberpunk 2077 is the final game to use REDengine, as future games from CD Projekt Red will instead be developed using Unreal Engine 5.[47]

REDengine 4 implemented various lighting adjustments to create a more realistic world, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing through DirectX, global illumination, diffuse illumination, and ambient occlusion. These features are not present on the console versions of the game. Other features include physically based rendering—an improvement over REDengine 3, screen space reflections, and pin sharp reflections, although the player's character is omitted from the bounding volume hierarchy structure generated ray traced reflections. The player's character does appear, however, in render to texture objects, such as mirrors. Improvements to shadows include cascaded shadow maps, screen space shadows, and ray traced shadows with contact hardening, while improvements to character rendering include subsurface scattering and realistic skin shading. These features introduced computational complexity, testing older consoles, such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.[53] Cyberpunk 2077 uses vertical asset streaming, or culling, a rendering technique that omits objects below and above the player's field of view. This technique saves memory.[54]

During the development of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red partnered with several companies. These companies include Vancouver-based studio Digital Scapes to create additional tools,[55] multinational technology company Nvidia to implement real-time ray tracing,[56] developer QLOC for quality assurance.[57] In addition, artificial intelligence company Jali Research helped CD Projekt Red implement lip syncing for all ten localizations through procedural generation.[58]

CD Projekt Red used a first-person perspective to immerse the player further in the world and hone in on the megacorporation motif.[59] To seamlessly blend cutscenes with gameplay, CD Projekt Red decided to frame cutscenes in first-person, including the sex scenes, with limited exceptions. Players can, however, drive in third-person, and the player's character is visible in areas such as mirrors and security cameras.[60] The decision by game director Adam Badowski to include nudity was tactfully planned, with Badowski stating, "Nudity is important for us because of one reason. This is cyberpunk, so people augment their body. So the body is no longer sacrum [sacred]; it’s profanum [profane]", expanding upon transhumanist beliefs.[61]

The quest team took several changes in comparison to the quest system in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015). Game logic was implemented to allow for players to undertake quests in seemingly random orders while remaining coherent, while doubling down on The Witcher 3' philosophy of a "quest twist".[62] To reuse the stories written during the game's development, unused parts from the main story were turned into side quests.[63]