The second episode of Night City Wire gave us a fresh wave of details about Cyberpunk 2077, including details on the backstory for each lifepath, and a look at weapon types.
The three lifepaths are Street Kid, Nomad, and Corpo (corporate), and a new trailer gives us the backstory for each of these: the Haywood background of the Street Kid who’s spent most of their life in the city; the sleek, neon backstory of the Corpo, lit by skyscrapers; and the wide-open world of the Nomad, with an isolated community living the Badlands. For instance, if you pick Nomad, the start of your story will revolve around how you left your Nomad family and are trying to start a new life in the city. Philipp Weber, a quest design coordinator, says lifepaths effect your whole experience. “You have your lifepath opportunities throughout the whole game until the game is over,” for instance, with additional dialogue options.
Weber’s specific example is “a mission when you have to steal a Flathead robot from the Maelstrom gang.” The gang itself stole the robot from a corporate transport belonging to Meredith Stout, who also wants you to complete an optional objective. “Even within that objective, we’re going to give you some options,” Weber says. “So as an example, if you have a corporate lifepath, you basically know what Meredith Stout is really about. You can read between the lines and you can get some additional options that maybe actually later enable you to do a completely different thing with the Maelstrom gang. And if you’re a nomad, you know some more details about how these Maelstromers would have even been able to steal a robot like that from Meredith Stout, who is part of the very powerful Militech corporation.” As a street kid, you wouldn’t have a specific new dialogue option because you wouldn’t “have a lot of experience dealing with higher-up people like Meredith Stout”: instead, you have "additional options that fit your life path very well, so later when you actually talk to the Maelstrom gang, one member of the gang offers you some illegal substance, but as a street kid, you actually know what this is about, you can talk some shop with him, and that might actually make that character like you a little bit more.
Another new trailer gave us an in-depth look at weapons, which will be split into one of eight categories: cyberware, melee weapons, smart weapons, power weapons, tech weapons, throwables, weapon mods, and attachments. The tech weapons segment focused on the Tsunami Nekomata, a semi automatic sniper rifle which “pierces like cardboard”, but we also caught a glimpse of the M-179 Achilles. The power weapons showed off the pump action shotgun Carnage, but again we had a quick look at the Tsunami Nue and the SDR-22. The smart weapons showed off the submachine gun, TK1-20 Shingen, and the melee displayed the Thermal Katana, as well as the Electric Alpha Baton, Spiked Bat and Sledgehammer.
One major part of Cyberpunk 2077 is the cyberware; the option to modify parts of your character’s body. For instance, this new trailer showed us Gorilla Arms, which had been “outfitted with kinetic energy recovery system,” and which were a “classic and reliable replacements for natural limbs, improving both strength and endurance.” We also saw Mantis Blades; “arm blades designed with lethality and concealment in mind, as effective as they are flashy,” with a “modular design with swappable blade edges.”
CD Projekt Red says the third Night City Wire episode will be along “soon”