Cyberpunk 2077 Beginner’s Guide: 13 Things To Know Before Playing

Navigating Night City’s sprawling metropolis presents significant challenges for new mercenaries, with countless systems and mechanics that can easily overwhelm unprepared players. The game’s immense freedom in mission approaches means critical gameplay elements often go unnoticed during initial hours, potentially hindering your progression and survival capabilities. This comprehensive guide delivers essential strategies to transform you from a struggling newcomer into an effective operative, accelerating your reputation growth while minimizing frustrating early-game setbacks.

Many newcomers underestimate Night City’s complexity, leading to common mistakes like ignoring communication systems, misusing cover mechanics, and overlooking enemy tagging features. Understanding these systems early dramatically improves your combat effectiveness and mission success rates. For broader strategic context, consult our Complete Guide to battlefield fundamentals that apply across multiple game genres.

Before diving into specific tactics, recognize that Cyberpunk 2077 operates on multiple interconnected systems – social, combat, stealth, and technical – all requiring coordinated mastery for optimal performance.

Social engagement forms the backbone of your Night City experience, with V’s communication device serving as your primary connection to the world’s dynamic ecosystem. While fixers regularly contact you with lucrative job opportunities and vehicle acquisition leads, the most valuable interactions often come from personal contacts you’ve cultivated throughout your journey. These relationships evolve through consistent communication, with text exchanges ranging from casual conversations to mission-critical narrative developments.

Many players mistakenly prioritize combat over communication, missing critical character development opportunities and potentially locking themselves out of romance options. Regular responsiveness to messages builds relationship meters that unlock additional content, side missions, and character-specific story arcs unavailable through main storyline progression alone.

Pro tip: Create a habit of checking your phone after every major mission completion, as timing-sensitive messages often arrive during these windows. Failed responses can permanently close certain narrative branches, so maintain active engagement with your growing contact list. This social foundation complements tactical preparation covered in our Weapons Unlock guide for comprehensive character development.

Beyond mission activation, strong relationships provide practical benefits including discounted services, exclusive gear access, and combat assistance during difficult encounters.

Survival in Night City’s hostile environments demands mastery of protective positioning, as exposed combatants face rapid elimination against well-armed opponents. The cover system, though occasionally inconsistent in activation, provides crucial damage mitigation through environmental protection. When approaching low barriers or corner positions with weapons drawn, V automatically utilizes available cover, with aiming triggering protective peeking maneuvers for return fire.

Advanced players integrate hacking capabilities with cover usage, holding the scan function while protected to gain tactical assessment opportunities. This scanning function slightly slows time, allowing comprehensive battlefield evaluation while maintaining defensive positioning.

Critical awareness: Not all cover provides equal protection. Assess cover durability by observing damage indicators – crumbling concrete, sparking metal, or visible penetration all signal inadequate protection requiring immediate repositioning.

Common mistake: Over-relying on single cover positions during extended firefights. Enemies frequently deploy flanking maneuvers and explosives against static targets. Develop the habit of scanning for secondary and tertiary cover positions before engaging to facilitate tactical mobility under fire.

For character builds that maximize these mechanics, our Class Guide offers complementary specialization strategies.

Enemy tagging represents one of Cyberpunk 2077’s most powerful yet frequently overlooked tactical tools. While scanning adversaries from protected positions or through compromised security systems, applying tags maintains target visibility through environmental obstructions and behind protective barriers. This persistent tracking dramatically enhances stealth operational effectiveness and target acquisition capabilities.

The tagging interface varies by platform: PC users click the mouse wheel during scans, while console players press R3. This simple action provides continuous intelligence on enemy movements, patrol patterns, and alert status changes.

Strategic application: Combine tagging with technical weaponry to engage enemies through solid surfaces, exploiting their highlighted silhouettes for unconventional attack angles. Security camera hacking before physical infiltration allows comprehensive enemy force assessment and strategic tagging without risking detection.

Advanced technique: Prioritize tagging enemy netrunners and snipers first, as these specialists pose the greatest threat to tactical operations and often position themselves in protected, hard-to-spot locations.

Warning: Over-tagging can create visual clutter during complex engagements. Develop selective tagging habits focusing on immediate threats and high-value targets rather than blanket application across all visible hostiles.

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Disassembling weapons provides essential crafting components that become crucial for upgrading your preferred firearms or creating rare weapon variants. This approach also serves as an effective weight management solution when you’re carrying excess gear, and you’ll eventually require these materials to enhance your premium equipment, including Rare and Legendary weapons and apparel, plus Iconic firearms.

Iconic weapons feature superior design and unique capabilities compared to standard weaponry, making them worth preserving throughout your playthrough.

During weapon dismantling and sales activities, exercise extreme caution to avoid accidentally discarding any firearms labeled as “Iconic.” These distinctive, one-of-a-kind weapons are exclusively obtainable from specific locations, typically through major narrative missions and significant side quests. Iconic weapons consistently include specialized perks that elevate their performance above conventional firearms, and they frequently maintain effectiveness even as you progress in levels and encounter more powerful gear. Consequently, refrain from breaking down or selling Iconic weapons regardless of your current level advantage. To maintain your Iconic weapons’ combat relevance, access the Crafting interface and utilize the Upgrade section to enhance their capabilities.

Vehicles provide excellent storage solutions for items you prefer not to transport personally, particularly since you can summon your automobiles virtually anywhere throughout Night City.

Your residential apartment includes a designated “Stash” zone where you can securely store weapons, gear, clothing, and miscellaneous items you wish to retain without physically carrying. Less commonly known, your automobiles offer identical storage functionality. All vehicles under your ownership—those acquired from Fixers, your initial vehicle, and cars earned through mission completion—generally contain trunks suitable for depositing your equipment. You can additionally summon your vehicles when positioned near roadways, with them appearing consistently reliably, making them ideal for transferring gear you want to preserve but cannot transport between assignments. Ensure you expand your vehicle collection during early gameplay stages to guarantee availability when required, since an initial story development temporarily removes V’s primary car from service. An efficient method for accomplishing this involves purchasing automobiles from Fixers when they contact you regarding availability; during early gameplay, completing the Heroes side mission will additionally provide you with a new transportation option.

If you anticipate engaging in any hacking activities whatsoever, invest in an improved Cyberdeck—your starting model performs inadequately for serious netrunning.

Should you choose to specialize as a Netrunner or hacker (or simply incorporate occasional combat hacking), you’ll find limited functionality with your initial Cyberdeck configuration. Cyberdecks govern your available RAM capacity and enable quickhack installation for deployment against adversaries. Superior Cyberdeck models provide expanded quickhack capacity and enhanced processing capabilities. Increasing RAM proves equally vital, since all quickhacks consume RAM resources during activation, with regeneration occurring gradually over time. Your baseline Cyberdeck offers minimal quickhack slots and restricted RAM allocation, significantly impairing your capacity to compromise enemy systems or perform practical functions like disabling surveillance cameras remotely. A Cyberdeck upgrade represents a valuable early-game investment, regardless of whether you pursue comprehensive hacker specialization.

Quickhacks deliver extensive tactical options during engagements for damaging opponents, interfering with their cybernetic enhancements, and rapidly eliminating them from combat scenarios. They merit acquisition from specialized Netrunner vendors.

Similarly, to function as an effective Netrunner, you’ll require potent quickhacks. An early side mission assigned by T-Bug will direct you to a Netrunner establishment, where you can obtain advanced and more powerful quickhacks for integration into your Cyberdeck. Quickhacks enable interference with enemy cybernetics or direct damage infliction, proving valuable for both direct combat situations and stealth operation enhancement. Once more, even without intensive hacking intentions, possessing capabilities for basic functions like distracting hostiles or disabling their visual systems can substantially improve stealth effectiveness and operational success rates.

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