open/close all folders
G
- Gaia's Lament: Much like in the original source material, the planet is in rough shape, especially around Night City. Desertification is common, the rain is more acidic than not, and pretty much every natural body of water in and around Night City is some form of biohazardous. On the fauna side, animals are almost unheard of, due to the environmental devastation and several wildlife-borne diseases that started several human pandemics as well, and resulted in deliberate exterminations that essentially wiped out the few animals that managed to survive the pollution and diseases. The worst part? No one cares. When an environmentalist tries to explain the horrific side effects that have been caused by killing off all birds, the talk show host brings out a woman who lost her children to Bird Flu and makes the environmentalist confront her.
- And some places are even worse. After the Suicide War of 1997, most of the Middle East has been reduced to fields of glass and radioactive sand, where even living life in a thick bunker and always wearing a hazmat suit when outside, most people are lucky to make it to thirty.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- After V is predicted to die within a few weeks as the Relic shreds their soul, there is no time limit for the player to worry about; even though no main quest ending allowed V to survive prior to the release of Phantom Liberty, the main questline can be pursued at the player's own pace.
- One side mission has a Fixer send V after someone after they went out of control and killed all the guards and the driver during what was supposed to be a hijacking, claiming it drew too much attention and ire. The player can behave identically in just about every gig and the worst they get is a slight reprimand from the Fixer for sub-par performance if there's a bonus objective to be stealthy and/or non-lethal, if they don't outright ignore it. The closest V comes to suffering actual repercussions for drawing too much attention is an optional gig where a netrunner tries to transfer ownership of a vehicle provided V can sneak in and grab it from a secure lockup; if V draws too much attention, the netrunner will alert the entire lockup's security and leave V to die.
- Since the game gives you quite a bit of freedom and side missions to complete even before you finish Act 1, V can practically be a walking chrome tank that can shrug off entire magazines of assault rifle fire and move so quickly that they can slice up a room full of gonks before the first one even draws their weapon, and yet Dex's bodyguard manhandles them without effort and they 'die' from a single bullet to the skull, even if said skull is packing more armor than an Arasaka personnel transport.
- Judy's side-mission starts with her trying to recruit an old flame Maiko to gather more bodies so they can help take over the Cloud dollhouse/brothel. This doesn't seem to account for the fact that V is a One-Man Army that might have already killed everyone there on their own, including the old owner, the last time they went. This is, however, subverted by the mission's aftermath, as wiping out the Tyger Claws leadership simply results in them crushing Clouds with brutal reprisals later on, establishing that just killing everyone didn't solve anything.
- Just like any open world RPG the player is free to make V run around killing innocent people and cops during free roam. Outside of getting the attention of cops, there's never any lasting consequences for this and none of V's friends, acquaintances or employers ever mention them going on a killing spree.
- Missions that require you to remove your weapons always ignore all models of V's potentially cyber-weaponized forearms or a cyberdeck full of hostile quickhacks and act as if they're disarmed once they toss their weapons. Particularly noticeable in Konpeki Plaza where, with enough grinding, the player can purchase said cyberware but when put through a weapons scan comes up clean. It's especially egregious when you remember that in the Cyberpunk lore, combat cybernetics are actually more dangerous than guns themselves, and even someone with just a single cyber-weapon can still mow down swaths of gun-toting citizens before being brought down.
- If you go for the Temperance ending with the Aldecaldos' help, the game gets confused and treats Rogue as both alive and dead at the same time — Johnny-in-V's-body goes to the cemetery to mourn Rogue's death, only to get a call from her during the credits in which she verbally rips into him for what he allowed to happen. It's possible that this ending was originally restricted to Johnny's version of the final mission before it was made available as an option for all choices except The Devil.
- In gameplay V can heal from bullet wounds, explosions and melee attacks by inhaling a Maxdoc or injecting a Bounceback, which are in plentiful supply all around the city. In the story wounds are portrayed far more realistically. Jackie bleeds out after the failed heist with V desperately yelling at Delamain to take him to a ripperdoc rather than just injecting Jackie with either of the two drugs. The same applies to both V and Takemura who take days/weeks to recover after the highway chase. Interestingly, in all the aforementioned scenes, the person takes a Bounceback.
- Attacking gangs never leads to any long lasting consequences. While every other gang member in the area will be hostile the faction as a whole never seems to hold a grudge against the lone merc who kills dozens if not hundreds of them in NCPD missions or free roam. You can, for example, attack the Voodoo Boys before and during V’s temporary alliance with them without comment. This also applies to corpo NPCs: a few NCPD missions consist in disturbing Arakasa operations and can be completed by killing Arasaka goons, but completing them won't lock you out of the Devil's ending, where you willingly join Arakasa.
- This has been changed as of patch 2.0. After completing certain jobs, if the job involved betraying or getting into a major conflict with a gang, from that point forward they may occasionally send hit squads to try and kill V. This includes Arasaka themselves, who's assassins are implied to be operating entirely under Yorinobu's orders, not Hanako's.
- During the scene where V gets his or her first implants (besides the Militech cyberdeck that he or she starts the game with), V may comment on the Kiroshi optics, gushing over how they are "top shelf tech". In gameplay terms, however, these are the most rudimentary optical implants the player can receive, and they can be traded in for a superior version at almost any ripperdoc in the city. Whether they're further upgraded or not, the supposed quality of V's optics is never brought up again by anyone. It gets even weirder when you realize that Kiroshi is the only optics manufacturer whose products V can purchase; there's literally no in-game competition. Becomes
Fridge Brilliance when you realize V wasn't talking about that model just Kiroshi in general. No other optics are available because they'd be a downgrade! - The game has a huge problem with keeping Johnny's and V's relationship consistent between the main story and sidequests. It's all too common to get into massive bitching contests with Johnny during a main quest, only to turn into instant best buddies in the next sidequest because quest dialogue doesn't change regardless of where in the overarching narrative you choose to do the side content. This gets weirder in the ending missions where no matter which path you take, Johnny and V end as friendly/having a friendly demeanor towards each other. Even if you choose for V to kill themself, Johnny just accepts it after a moment of anger. Even if you chose Arasaka and never said a bad thing about the company and only vocally disagreed with Johnny at every choice at that point, he acts like you're betraying yourself even if you really are the V you started as. Some of this was adjusted in Patch 2.0, where some of the early dialogue with Johnny will reflect whether or not he's dropped his initial antagonism towards V in the main story.
- Various characters and news casts point out how toxic the water in and around Night City is, but no matter how long V swims or even dives in lakes, river or the Pacific, they never suffer any ill effects.
- Claire Russell is introduced early in the game when she serves Jackie and V as the Afterlife bartender. In Act 2, she has a series of street racing side-missions, during which she has several heavy conversations about the death of her husband and her life as a transwoman, and which can end with V and Claire committing a revenge murder and Claire gifting V her beloved truck. Afterwards, Claire's phone calls and texts become increasingly distant until she stops answering. However, she will still greet V in the bar with cheery dialogue that does not update to reflect their relationship.
- In the mission "Kold Mirage", Nix will trigger a daemon from a legendary Netrunner and require V to save him. All that is required to breach the security of this most-feared hacker is solving a simple Breach Protocol, no more advanced than ones V does to hack a vending machine.
- Wilson, owner of the Second Amendment gun store in V's megablock, invites the player to a shooting contest at some point in Act 2, for the explicit purpose of drumming up customers because he's short on cash. Depending on how generous you've been with your spending at his shop before, he might well have hundreds of thousands of eddies to his name in the shop interface when he says that.
- The street cred stat is meant to represent how well-known V is among the mercs and fixers of Night City, with the maximum level of 50 basically giving them living legend status. The problem is that there are so many opportunities to amass street cred in Watson alone that you can hit SC level 45 before you even finish Act 1 to kick off the actual plot, just by doing all the side content like Assault events. The relatively slow passage of time means this can be done in no more than three in-game days, less if you hurry, meaning that instead of slowly building your rep over the course of weeks and months, you go from zero to hero almost instantly.
- Placide will always trash-talk about your implants even if you're decked out in nothing but legendary gear that's literally the best money can buy. However, Placide is a massive jackass, so this one might just as well fall under Gameplay and Story Integration, too.
- The toy pistol you're given for the augmented reality game you play with River and his nephews during "Following the River" consumes handgun ammo like any of your real guns, despite ostensibly only shooting virtual bullets that don't exist in the real world.
- According to a dialog with Johnny during a Dogtown gig, the Militech Mk. 31 HMG is so heavy it's impossible to carry one yourself unless you have arm implants. In the proper game, V doesn't need implants to use one (one can be found during the prologue rescue quest, before V has access to implant customization).
- Many alcoholic drinks can be found ingame, and serve as consumable items (they enhance moving speed and reduce accuracy). There's also many occasions where V can sit to a bar and have a drink (alcohol or soft drink) in various quests, but it never results in the actual inebriation ingame effect. Likewise, eating River's jambalaya during his quest doesn't give the health buff like the various food consumables found in normal gameplay.
- In the prologue, V catches a virus when coupling with Sandra Dorsett during her rescue, and according to a discussion with Viktor V suffers from symptoms including nausea, headache, and hypersensivity to light. In gameplay, it only results in error messages occasionally appearing on the HUD (at the very least, hypersensitivity to light would translate ingame as some form of Interface Screw), and while such symptoms would logically make you less efficient (especially in fighting), there's no stat debuff.
- At the start of Act II, V's computer has a new e-mail where the apartment landlord notes V missed the date to pay the rent (due to V recovering after being "killed" by Dex) and will be expelled if it happens again. In proper gameplay, you never need to pay the various apartments' rent beyond your initial purchase, and contrary to Viktor's early sidequest "Paid in Full", there's no means or need to repay this specific debt. Should you pursue the "Tower" ending however, V really is kicked out of their apartment over unpaid rent thanks to being in a two-year coma.
- The side job "Fortunate Son" has a part where V is ambushed by the NCPD and must kill them to procede. Contrary to cop killing in free roam mode, this shoot out doesn't count to the Wanted meter.
- In Act 2 main quest, the "Down on the Street" main job has Johnny explaining V that V can answer to Johnny without speaking aloud. "Down on the Street" is available immediately after "Playing for Time" (where V gets introduced to having Johnny in their head) and is supposed to be completed right then. However, at the time "Down on the Street" starts, the wide-open sandbox is available again, and "Down on the Street" is just the starting part to one of three main questlines which can be completed in any order, and side jobs are available too. V and Johnny have mental conversations in the other main questlines and some of those side jobs, too. In summary, depending on the order the player complete missions, by the time you play "Down on the Street" V probably already knows how to chat with Johnny without speaking aloud.
- Johnny can be scanned (it only shows his name) and he appears on the minimap: despite him being just inside V's mind in-story, he's technically a NPC who's really present (though he logically has no hitbox).
- In cutscenes where V is required to produce a weapon, they will always draw the bog-standard Unity pistol that you start out with at the beginning of the game. They'll still be using it when they interrogates Anders Hellman despite the fact that any player will almost certainly have replaced it at that point.
- Gangbangers: The "Gangs of Night City" featurette showcases several of the gangs, including the ones revealed earlier: the Maelstrom, Voodoo Boyz, the Animals and the Moxes.
- Gang of Hats: The gangs are visually, ideologically and criminally distinct:
- The Animals are roided-up bodybuilders used as muscle for hire.
- The Voodoo Boyz are Haitian hackers paying lip service to Hollywood Voodoo.
- The Sixth Street are gun-toting Eaglelanders clad in military gear who started as a Vigilante Militia before falling into crime themselves.
- The Tyger Claws are Yakuza (who behave more like Japanese Delinquents) favoring melee weapons dabbling in prostitution and rackets.
- The Maelstromers are augmented to the point of being grotesque and take their names out of the Norse Mythology, fittingly dealing in illegal cyberware and assorted activities.
- The Moxes dress in neon and/or pastel and behave like studs and bimbos from The '80s, being joytoys who took up arms to protect sex workers from abuse.
- The Valentinos are stereotypical Central and South American gangsters with added gold-plated cybernetics.
- The Scavengers' rank-and-file behave like gopniki (Russian hoodlums) while their higher-ups take more from The Mafiya.
- The Wraiths are a gang comprised of Raffen Shiv; Nomads exiled from their clans for heinous acts. They have a Desert Punk style to them.
- Gas Mask Mooks: Trauma Team personnel always have masks on to ensure they won't be afflicted with any potential airborne poisons, pathogens or illnesses while treating incapacitated patients.
- Gay Option: A V with a masculine body and voice can pursuit Kerry Eurodyne, while a V with a feminine body and voice can chase after Judy Alvarez. You can also hook up with joytoys regardless of yours and their genders. Meredith Stout is available as a one-night stand for any V, which is completely missable if you don't speak to her correctly and side with her during The Pickup.
- Gayngster: Same-sex romances and sexual encounters are available to the player for both male and female V, allowing you to play as a deadly hired gun operating in the Night City underworld who just happens to be gay or bi.
- Gender Bender: In the Temperance ending Johnny takes over V's body, which leads to this if you're playing as a female V. Man, I Feel Like a Woman can be averted or played straight, as Johnny can tell his new sidekick in the ending that he won't be a woman much longer, implying some corrective surgery is already lined up.
- Gender Is No Object: Women, men, and people of other genders seem to be about equal in the grand scheme of things: There are female ripperdocs, edgerunners, policewomen and soldiers. The most respected fixer in the city, Rogue, is a woman. Alt was a brilliant and well-known netrunner when she was alive, and Judy is considered one of the best braindance editors out there. Female V can be everything a male V can be. One of the MAX-TAC units is led by a woman (Melissa). Nobody has any objections when Saul appoints Panam as the second leader to the Aldecaldos, nor do they have any issues if she starts leading them by herself after his death in "The Star" ending. Even a company very heavily tied to traditions like Arasaka has no problems with Hanako taking over after her father's death in "The Devil" ending. Amusingly, even all the gangs have male and female members and seem to allow everyone to rise in the ranks on the same terms and allows women to become leaders (Suzy Q is the leader of the Moxes, Ofelia can become a leader of Maelstrom, The Voodoo Boyz are led by Maman Brigitte and Tyger Claws and Animals have high-ranking female members). That being said, women (especially sex workers) do tend to be victims of various forms of sexual assault by a wide margin; the Mox were explicitly formed by sex workers who felt it was safer to look out for one-another.
- Getaway Driver: At the end of The Heist mission, Delamain plays this role.
- Ghost Town: Rocky Ridge is a direct example: planned development of suburban area that was swiftly abandoned when construction was deemed no longer economically viable. Other, smaller examples can be found around the Night City Badlands. Dialogue with Panam while en route to Rocky Ridge mentions that there are thousands such abandoned settlements dotted across North America.
- Pacifica is a former luxury oceanside resort that was left abandoned in the wake of the Unification War. Now part of its luxury hotels are filled with gangs and homeless squatters while a significant portion is walled off and known as the "Combat Zone".
- Gladiator Subquest: Optional variant, the "Beat on the Brat" sidequest forming a chain of these.
- Gilligan Cut:
- In the E3 2018 gameplay, V denies Jackie's prediction that they will spend everything on a three-day bender. In the next cut, they are shown waking up...after a three-day bender.
- Another one happens in "The Gig" trailer: after T-Bug says "Preferably no bodies, not one", Jackie and V are shown going guns blazing through a bar.
- Glowing Mechanical Eyes: A shorthand for the characters using the Net is their eyes glowing blue. Other colors are possible, like the Afterlife's bouncer's eyes glowing orange when he contacts Dex DeShawn over the local subnet, or red when scanning, or a static pastel rainbow if under the effects of an optics-disrupting cyber attack.
- Golden Ending: Averted. Despite the game having multiple endings, none of them can be considered purely "good" without any drawbacks. In the base game endings, V will always either die, or will have six months to live, with unclear probability of finding the cure. There's also the "Temperance" ending, where Johnny takes over V's body with their consent, but even that ending is very melancholic and bittersweet. "The Tower" ending, included with Phantom Liberty is also an aversion to the trope, despite V actually getting a new lease on life...because they've lost their ability to wield chrome and remain an edgerunner. All their relationships have been upended thanks to everyone moving on during their 2-year coma, and they have to accept that their glory days are behind them and they'll just be another face in the crowd going forward.
- Gold Makes Everything Shiny:
- A great lot of Neo-Kitsch-style clothing has gold trim.
- The Valentinos' visual style revolves entirely around gold. Their guns, their cyberware, their jewelry, even their cars are gold-plated all over. Some high-ranking Valentinos have more gold on their body than any other color.
- Dexter DeShawn has a gold-plated cyberarm, among a good number of other golden accessories.
- Gone Horribly Right: Richard Night envisioned Night City as an environment of a new age of enlightened capitalism, completely planned, self-sufficient, safe from crime, and multicultural. Unfortunately, he didn't take into account the effects that the rise of rampant corporatism would have on "new age capitalism", which turned the movement out to be anything but enlightened, making Night City ugly, poorly planned, and torn apart by crime. At least it is multicultural...
- Good Prosthetic, Evil Prosthetic: The Maelstrom favor red, black and silver cybernetics with an inhuman look (including glowing Extra Eyes), V prefers flesh-colored cybernetic arms and discreet optic implants with subtle, scar-like wiring on the face.
- Gorn: This grim setting does not shy away from graphic violence, both in and out of combat. Shotguns can blow huge, gnarly holes into enemies, limbs often get torn off by gunfire, heads get blown apart or chopped right off by swords, and that's not even getting into the disemboweled, mangled bodies of organ harvesting victims you'll frequently find in gang hangouts.
- Gratuitous German:
- The Maelstrom gang's HQ is a club called Totentanz, which is German for "dance of the dead".
- One advertisement around the city shows some BDSM imagery with the slogan "Zeig dich" — "show yourself".
- Grenade Spam: Enemies that carry grenades have an infinite supply of them, so either take them out quickly or prepare for having assorted explosives chucked your way every couple of seconds. On the other hand, with grenades being cheap to craft and able to stunlock just about everything including bosses, this is an easy way to beat almost any Boss Battle with a minimum of fuss.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: The 2.0 update introduces the "Finisher: Savage Sling" skill available at 20 Body, which allows V to pick up a weakened enemy and fling them at others.
- Groin Attack:
- Skippy is a smart pistol that can be tuned to Puppy-Loving Pacifist mode, where he only shoots people in the groin. This Crosses the Line Twice when he sometimes shoots prematurely and apologizes for it.
- One early-game side mission is about an unfortunate dude who's suffering a constant and very painful version thanks to his defective Mr. Stud penis implant. Black Comedy at its finest.
- Skippy is a smart pistol that can be tuned to Puppy-Loving Pacifist mode, where he only shoots people in the groin. This
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Generally averted thanks to reasonably clever AI, but there are still some examples, most notably the Reset Optics quickhack. It's one of the few that doesn't provoke affected guards into action no matter how often they're hit with it, and not even if their entire squad ends up affected simultaneously. You'd think they'd find this kinda suspicious, but no, it's fine, back to business as usual. Same goes for the Request Reinforcements quickhack - you can send the same guard on a goose chase through his deployment area for hours if you're so inclined because they'll never suspect something being fishy.
- Guide Dang It!: It's shockingly easy to miss unique loot and even story content; this isn't helped by the fact the game's wikia/fandom wiki, where you'd normally go for that sort of thing, is lore-focused and the dominant moderators are rather hostile towards gameplay/loot related edits.
- During the quest where Takemura kidnaps Hanako to talk to her about her brother's betrayal and murder of her father, he takes her to a hotel that gets raided by Arasaka soldiers and the floor collapses under you. V says that they need to save Takemura, but Johnny says that it's too late and that V needs to get out of there. There's a secret objective where you CAN go back to save Takemura, but the game in a rare instance doesn't give you ANY hints about this. You just have to go looking for a way back through purely your own volition (or by accident). Otherwise, Takemura WILL die.
- There are certain strands of sidequests that, when completed, will unlock additional endings. Unlocking the secret ending requires not only completing a certain sidequest, but selecting a very specific set of dialogue options throughout it. There is absolutely nothing in the game to indicate any of this.
- There is a very powerful Epic Iconic Smart Pistol with an AI attached, Skippy, that is picked up in an alley on one of the locally triggered sidequests. When picked up, Skippy informs you that he has two modes: Stone Cold Killer or Puppy Loving Pacifist. In Stone Cold Killer mode, his Smart tracking aims at the head, making him one of the most powerful pistols in the entire game, and in Puppy Loving Pacifist mode, his smart tracking aims at the legs, making him one of the worst Iconic weapons in the game. Any normal player would obviously pick the far superior headshot mode at the start. The catch? With absolutely no prior notification, after 50 kills Skippy switches to the opposite mode PERMANENTLY with no way to stop it or change it back.
- Almost all cyberware including the legendary variants can be found in the world for free, saving you a lot of cash and SC grinding, but the chances of tracking them down without a guide are remote. And then Update 1.3 came along and changed these chances to zero.
- The trademark perk of Power weapons is their ability to ricochet their projectiles off of any solid surface. One of the two starter implants you get from Viktor is a Ballistic Coprocessor in V's palm that enables the ricochet effect. Nowhere is it mentioned that you also need a specific eye upgrade to actually see the trajectory, or that the trajectory has an auto-aim effect that snaps the trajectory to targets. The relative obscurity of the cyberware upgrade menu while trading with ripperdocs means that many players don't realize these upgrades even exist, extending the problem to almost all cyberware in some way.
- The player can go through the entire game without meeting Kerry and River, two out of four romance options with their own arcs and sidequests. River's sidequest is only available after doing the first Peralez quest where you first meet him, but you have no obligation to actually fulfill it. Kerry's questline is even more hidden, because it requires completing almost the entirety of Johnny's questchain, with no indication that it will unlock Kerry. Kerry's questline also comes very late in the game, at the tail end of act two, right before the ending. After discovering them, romancing them is fairly simple (doing their questline and choosing a few dialogue options), but many players missed them entirely. As of February 2021, only about 14% of steam players finished Kerry's storyline, and about 29% completed River's. Compare that to 32% who finished Judy's, and a whopping 42% who completed Panam's, both of who you meet through the course of the main story.
- Unlocking "The Star" ending requires completing Panam's entire questline, as it requires her and Saul to make amends and Saul to promote her to lead the Aldecaldos alongside him.. This is the only other ending that has to be unlocked that drastically changes the game's epilogue (since "(Don't) Fear The Reaper"'s one is a slightly modified "The Sun" epilogue, to the point where the two are often lumped together and simply called "Path of Glory"). While Panam is an important character to the plot and one of the romance options, the player will likely do many sidequests for tons of different characters, with no indication that this specific questline will unlock something so significant. It's also worth noting that the three other love interests don't unlock any other ending's, it's just Panam.
- The best ending for the Judy romance also requires following the above path.
- The game contains several legendary outfit sets, each following a specific theme like cop, media or fixer. Not only is this mentioned absolutely nowhere, most of the outfit pieces are also fiendishly well-hidden in places few players would ever look.
- Many legendary/iconic items are hidden behind stat-gated doors at side quest locations. If you complete the sidequest before your stats are high enough to open the door, you have no reason to ever go back there again and will never know there was a legendary item on the other side. Worse, some of these items are found during main missions in locations that are impossible to revisit after the mission concludes.
- The side job "The Highwayman" is the epitome of this. For starters, it's initially unmarked on the map. If you trigger it by one of several possible means, it sends you on a scavenger hunt between multiple unmarked locations spread across the entirety of Night City, with only the barest of hints as to where to look (as in, within a search radius of several hundred meters around some landmark), and that only if you actually read the evolving mission description in the quest log after every step. One of these locations can only be accessed with a keycode found on a previous location, with no hint whatsoever that these random numbers might be important later. Completing the quest rewards you with a spiffy motorbike, but accomplishing this without a guide is a challenge, to say the least.
- The 2.0 update introduced a bunch of new iconic weapons that can be displayed on V's Wall of Weapons, but unlike those from the base game, these aren't tied to specific characters, sometimes not even to quests, making them a whole lot harder to find. For instance, the two iconic knives are sold by nondescript melee weapon vendors that you have no specific reason to visit, considering that all weapon vendors normally have the same inventory except for generic weapon blueprints.
- Gun Fu: The actual name of an achievement you get for quickly killing three enemies with a handgun at close rangenote . The devs all but confirmed that the whole thing is yet another tribute to Keanu Reeves, particularly John Wick. Because of how gun combat works in this game, this is only possible with very preem gun skills or a Sandevistan.
- Guns Akimbo: La Chingona Dorada, the weapons of choice for Jackie Welles. V can eventually obtain Jackie's guns from El Coyote, both of them, but can only use one at a time, which makes them the only iconic gun you can wield and display on V's Wall of Weapons simultaneously.
- Guns Do Not Work That Way:
- The Ajax assault rifle, while otherwise designed conventionally, is supposed to be chambered in 5.56mm caliber and should sport a magazine size of 30 rounds. Said magazine is very long with a noticeable curve, similar to the Real Life 40-round 7.62mm magazine of the RPK machine gun. A 5.56mm mag of such dimensions would hold about 60 rounds.
- The Kyubi, a semi-auto assault rifle added in the DLC packaged with the v1.6 patch, has the same length banana magazine that the Ajax has, sharing the same animation set for reloads, and an even shorter 20-round capacity.
- On the same note, Johnny's Malorian pistol is stated to be chambered in an enormous 14mm caliber. Its magazine placement makes sense, but its size is way too small to hold 10 rounds of such dimensions.
- The Kang Tao Chao pistol has an electrically-fired disposable barrel that doubles as a magazine, as all the rounds are pre-loaded in the disposable barrel. While this is a comprehensibly futuristic design, the Chao defies physics by packing 30 gyrojet rounds into a five inch barrel.
- The Defender LMG is just plain weird. For starters, its grip is on the outer right side of the weapon instead of below it as usual. This would make both the integrated bipod and the FN SCAR-style shoulder stock extremely awkward to use, if not completely unusable. It also has a carry handle above the barrel, but with an estimated 80% of the gun's weight concentrated in the main body, it's so far off-center as to be useless as well. The second machine gun, the MA70 HB, reuses the same animations and thus follows the same asinine design principles. Considering that the other power weapons are all sensibly designed, it really makes you wonder why the LMGs of all things ended up as such a harebrained design clusterfuck.note
H
- Hacker Cave: The Voodoo Boyz' base of operations, full of computers, screens and, of course, hackers.
- Hacking Minigame: Breach Protocol is a gameplay feature that plays an important role in the quickhacking mechanic; so much so that one of the two Intelligence skill trees is entirely devoted to it. Benefits range from crippling enemies in a variety of ways as soon as combat breaks out, to drawing large sums of money from the countless access points around Night City. The minigame itself consists of a square matrix of double-digit code snippets on the left side of the screen and a randomly generated list of code sequences on the right side that correspond to whatever daemons you have available for upload into the target network. The input sequence always starts from the topmost line and must alternate between lines and columns after each code snippet. How many daemons you can upload is limited by time, but primarily by your cyberdeck's buffer size, which provides one of the main incentives for buying better cyberdecks. The random sequences are usually generated in a way that allows you to chain them together for maximum efficiency, and figuring out how best to accomplish this is key to mastering the minigame. Thankfully, Save Scumming is a viable option in all but a handful of situations.
- Hand Cannon: There are quite a few massive handguns in circulation in Night City, but the most impressive examples are the Burya and the Liberty, respectively a bulky tech revolver of Soviet origin and a power near-exact copy of the Automag V
that fires slowly but with tremendous power.- Honorable mention goes to Johnny's Malorian Arms pistol that, while not looking particularly huge, is chambered in a custom 14mm caliber, meaning it has a larger bore than a .50AE Desert Eagle and the firepower to match. It's closest real life equivalent would be Pfeifer Zeliska revolver, chambered in .600 Nitro Express.
- Shot for shot, the most powerful gun in the game is the "Comrade's Hammer", a custom Burya that can be built after looting the schematics from a gang hideout. It only holds one shot and takes longer than the normal Burya to reload, but that one shot does ten times the damage of a shot from the normal version. With the right perks (in particular the one that causes the last shot in the mag to do double damage) and level appropriate upgrades, it can consistently one-shot every normal enemy in the game, and take out cyberpsychos in two or three headshots, even on the harder difficulties.
- Hand Wave: The Night City Metro not being accessible until the 2.1 update is explained in-universe as the player's NCART City Pass having technical issues that weren't fixed until recently.
- Hard Truth Aesop:
- A single person (or a small group) can't reform a corrupt system that spans the entire globe, because they simply lack the means and power to do so, and even if they'll put a dent in it, it will be patched up sooner rather than later.
- Some people are their own worst enemy. While the system or an outside agent might make a tempting target for blame, the fact is that sometimes the only one who is to blame for your bad situation is you and your poor choices.
- Everything comes at a price, even if it's not readily apparent, and it's almost impossible to fully understand the consequences of your decisions until it's too late to turn back.
- Heist Clash: This is how V meets their future Best Friend Jackie Welles in the Street Kid life path: both of them are hired to jack the same luxury car. While they are arguing over it, a silent alarm goes off and the police catch both of them red-handed. They are later released by a sympathetic officer and decide not to hold a grudge against each other.
- Heroic BSoD: V gets a few over the course of the game.
- The first is at the very beginning of Act 2, when they learn that they will eventually die by having their personality overwritten by Silverhand's and that Vik, one of the best ripperdocs in town, can't do anything to save them. Misty has to drag them back to their apartment and offer some short-term options and words of comfort before they can even begin to come to terms with their situation.
- The second is at the very end of the base game, when V learns that after all their troubles, all they did to still find a way to save themselves, their brain has already suffered too much damage and that, even after being separated from Silverhand, they only have months at most to live. This is actually foreshadowed somewhat at the end of the tarot-collecting quest "Fool on the Hill," but with significantly less angst; V doesn't know this for sure yet.
- The third is if you pursue the "Tower" ending included in Phantom Liberty, where V realizes that despite being saved, they've lost the ability to wield implants and continue as an edgerunner. Worse, the surgery put them in a two-year coma during which time everyone they knew and connected with has moved on, leaving them facing a world where Nothing Is the Same Anymore. Like in Act 2, V is eventually comforted by Misty, who offers them some advice and perspective on what their new life is going to be like, allowing them to come to terms with their situation.
- Hired Guns: Night City has an entire class of deniable mercenaries, so-called "edgerunners", who do dirty jobs for whoever pays enough. V and their companions make their living this way, and while brute force isn't necessarily on the agenda, design or circumstance often conspire to turn any job into a shootout.
- Hitbox Dissonance: Physical objects in the game world often have larger hitboxes than their model suggests. Many a sneak attack was ruined because a shot that should've passed right by an obstacle hit that obstacle instead of the enemy behind it, alerting them to V's presence. Enemy hitboxes occasionally fall in the opposite extreme where shots just pass through their limbs or head, doing no damage but - again - announcing V's presence to every enemy in the area.
- Hollywood Hacking: Comes with the setting. With Netrunner skills, you can use hacking not only to break into computers, but also to hijack your enemies' cybernetics and force them to perform Psychic-Assisted Suicide, as demonstrated in the 2019 Gameplay Deep Dive. The same video has Sasquatch, the leader of the Animals gang, grab V, plug a cable into her and upload a virus, causing Interface Screw.
- Hollywood Silencer: The detachable suppressors V can mount on many Power weapons play the trope completely straight. The only one that at least skirts the edge of realism is the one that's part of Panam's iconic Overwatch sniper rifle. Unlike the normal ones, this suppressor merely reduces the report instead of making it inaudible, so unless you're several dozen meters away from any witnesses, the shot will be heard.
- Homing Projectile: The "Smart" weapons can lock onto opponents, allowing you to hit them with minimum aim. They are essentially gyrojet weapons, with projectiles guided wirelessly by the smart gun's targeting computer which interfaces with the shooter through a piece of hand-mounted cyberware built for smart gun interfaces.
- Honor Before Reason: In the gig, "Hippocratic Oath", a ripperdoc named Lucy Thackery is being held by the Maelstrom against her will and made to treat their injuries and install their cyberware. When V comes to rescue her, she refuses to leave until she's finished treating her latest patient even though he's violent thug who's probably killed more people than she'll ever save. None of this matters to Lucy, who cites the Hippocratic Oath as part of her reasons for doing so. The only way to get her to go is to either help her or kill the patient either through inaction or shooting him dead.
- Hover Tank: The Basilisk armoured transport you can help the Aldecaldo nomad clan steal is one of these — a floating hexagonal lump of metal with a 25mm autocannon turret on top. This makes it useful for passing over rough terrain and Militech minefields, which is one reason the Aldecaldos (who make a great deal of their money from border smuggling) want it so badly. The other reason is that it's a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond, where the tiny fish it's up against are Raffen Shiv marauders and their ramshackle Desert Punk vehicles.
- Hyperactive Metabolism: The easiest and cheapest way to heal V is to have them eat any of the food items one can find absolutely everywhere. This confers a long-lasting and pretty powerful Healing Factor outside of combat, but since this merely means "as long as the enemy hasn't detected V", stealthy characters can benefit from it practically nonstop... but then again, stealthy characters will rarely have need of it in the first place.
I
- Iconic Outfit: V's "Samurai" jacket — with Tron Lines in the collar and large metal studs on the shoulders — is featured in most trailers, promotional artwork and action figures. It can be unlocked in-game by completing the "Chippin' In" mission.
- Informed Attribute: The game goes to great lengths to emphasize that Samurai was a very underground band, but Samurai merch and albums can be found all over as junk, as posters, and in shops.
- Immortality Inducer: The plot revolves around a prototype chip that allows to store one's soul, or at least a copy of it, which Arasaka intends to use to allow the ultra rich to live on past their regular human lifespan.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: You can unlock an achievement by shooting an enemy's thrown grenade out of the air with any of the game's slow-firing revolvers, which requires either a fair bit of marksmanship or a lot of dumb luck.
- Instant Sedation: A potent quickhack called System Reset, which is a unique piece of soft built by legendary netrunner Rache Bartmoss, will instantly stun and knock out a target via their cyberware. It is essentially the nonlethal (and stealthier) variant of the gruesome Suicide quickhack.
- Interface Screw: Every now and then after Act 1, the Relic starts glitching and causes this to the Player. This is largely the only real impediment caused by the Relic's weeks-to-live effect.
- Corpo V starts the game with a bunch of proprietary Arasaka implants that include fun stuff such as a real-time stock market ticker on top. All of this goes offline the moment they're fired (as well as seeing their bank account vanish before their eyes).
- Invisibility Cloak:
- The Flathead combat drone uses "dynamic camo", which uses cameras and screens on its surface to blend in with its surroundings. It's still fairly visible, but would be easy to miss at a glance.
- Update 1.3 introduced Optical Camo cyberware that makes V invisible to enemies and cameras for 5, 10, or 15 seconds, depending on implant quality, followed by a lengthy 60 second cooldown. Its graphics effect is a pretty bad example of Visible Invisibility due to how plainly obvious it is to the player while enemies can barely spot V even while under direct attack, though this may be more for the player's benefit to avoid becoming disoriented by the sudden disappearance of their arms and weapons.
- It Always Rains at Funerals: Played With. The end credits (shown simultaneously with voicemail messages sent to V) roll over a glass pane on the other side of which drops of water fall down. Depending on the player’s choices, V may or may not be alive and in their own body at that point, though even if the former, V’s days are numbered anyway.
J
- Jack of All Stats: Johnny Silverhand's classic Porsche 911 was one of the best, if not the best car in the release version of the game. While slightly inferior in the top speed department to most of the muscle cars, it was still very fast, had great acceleration, good brakes and excellent handling. It's also quite sturdy and agile due to its small size, making it a top choice for Claire's racing missions. A later patch severely reduced its top speed and controllability, pushing it deep into mediocre territory instead. Its spot on the pedestal now belongs to the Javelina and the Coyote, two Nomad muscle cars that are among the fastest vehicles in the game and also handle almost as if on rails under most circumstances.
- V's default car is quite slow but sturdy and handles better than 90% of all the other cars. The Delamain 21 behaves exactly the same aside from higher top speed.
- Japan Takes Over the World: As is common with cyberpunk settings, there is a massive amount of Japanese text and advertisement across Night City, which is based in California. It's still unknown though if Japan has become the dominant superpower by 2077 or if the European Economic Community still remains the most powerful player on the globe, like it did in the original tabletop games. Though Japan itself may not be, the most powerful singular corporation is the Japanese zaibatsu Arasaka Corporation, run by a family whose patriarch is an old Japanese imperialist.
- Jaywalking Will Ruin Your Life: A scan of Mauler of the Animals reveals he's wanted by the Night City police for "Illegal use of pineapple or pineapple-adjacent products (Pizza Desecration Act, article 1, 5 5o)".
- This reaches a new level of comedy when you realize that "Tofu'd tuna and pineapple pizza" is a commonly available food item.
- This can apply literally if you jaywalk in sight of an NCPD patrol since it counts as an offence punishable by death.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- Wilson probably shouldn't be calling his potential customers "bush-league", but his rant about disrespecting firearms, and the responsibility of learning to handle a firearm if you own one are things pretty much anyone can get behind.
- Maiko is clearly out for herself and agrees with the plan to kill the Tyger Claws ruling over Clouds mostly to get back at Judy, but she's right about the Tyger Claws not sitting by idly after losing Clouds.
- Johnny is a massive asshole, but he's right about how corporations have ruined the world.
- Joke Item: The Budget Arms Slaught-O-Matic. Its only use is as a quick Ranged Emergency Weapon if you weren't prepared enough to bring your more powerful equipment in a hectic battle and you don't have enough eddies to either purchase better equipment or upgrade your currently existing equipment before battle. While in lore it plays true to its description as a cheap gun made readily available for anyone outside of corpos, military, and government workers, its disposability after expending its entire magazine in one use and its inability to be crafted or upgraded makes it effectively useless as an everyday weapon, unless you're truly desperate.
- Lethal Joke Item: Phantom Liberty adds plans to let you convert them into the HA-4 Grit pistol, a full automatic tech pistol with all-around good stats and the largest pistol magazine in the game.
K
- Katanas Are Just Better: When they're superheated and Sharpened to a Single Atom, like the Arasaka Thermal Katana featured in the "Tools of Destruction" featurette. With high enough of a Reflexes stat, they can even be used to reflect bullets back at enemies.
- Kick the Dog: Pretty much everyone in Night City, but a notable example is what happened to Militech war veterans.The company gave crippled vets the latest and greatest in cyber limbs when they were injured in war, with cameras showing before and after with the Vets talking about how Militech and really come through. Once the cameras were off though, Militech took back the limbs and replaced them with cheap outdated models, then charged them for the surgeries and cheap limbs.
- Kill Streak: The Cold Blood perk tree is focused on taking down enemies to gain stacks of Cold Blood which grant various buffs when leveled like increased armor, health regen, or attack speed to list a few. The perks available early on aren't much in terms of combat buffs, but as more and more perks are made available and are selected, it can turn a high-level V into a juggernaut as kills are racked up and the wear-off countdown is repeatedly reset. The stack can be made higher and the wear-off timer can be made longer, and a perk also exists that makes it so it just drops one stack level instead of losing the entire stack when the countdown expires.
- Kill the Poor:
- A background newscast talks about the city's plans to fumigate the sewer system in the Watson district to deal with the vagrant population in them. Residents are warned to stay away from sewer openings during the operation.
- Two NPCs in the wealthy City Center district casually discuss shooting homeless people for sport as a fun pastime.
- Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Three major types of ranged weapons are "Power" — more or less conventional firearms with the added potential for ballistically plotted ricochet trajectories; "Tech" - electromagnetic railguns that can potentially pierce cover; and "Smart" — gyrojet guns firing remote-guided micromissiles.
L
- Large Ham:
- Keanu Reeves CLEARLY enjoyed himself in this role. And boy does it show.
- Royce, the off-the-hinges leader of Maelstrom, is large and in charge and likes to let everyone know.
- Lethal Joke Item:
- Aside from constantly talking your ear off, the iconic smartgun Skippy initially appears to be an otherwise normal weapon of its class... until you unlock its Stone-Cold Killer mode that automatically aims for the target's head, making it one of the deadliest weapons in the game that can take down absolutely anything (including any and all bosses) in extremely short order. Note that Skippy can be acquired and fully "trained" as soon as you start Act II, assuming you know where to look and how to train it.
- Ozob's Nose, a simple basic grenade (no sticking, no homing) that requires the high-tier Edgerunner Artisan crafting perk, costs Legendary components to craft and does no more damage than a basic frag grenade, will pop with a party pizzaz... but also has a significantly increased explosion radius.
- Level Grinding: More like Everything Grinding, really. Gangoons in the streets respawn when V leaves the area, which sometimes means just walking around the next corner and back. A popular example is a certain tour around the ripper clinic in Pacifica that takes you past at least seven groups of Voodoo Boys and Scavengers in less than two minutes of running and gunning. Rinse and repeat to grind XP (very slowly), street cred (surprisingly quickly), money by selling all the loot (decently quickly), crafting components by disassembling all that loot (ditto) and even specific weapons due to each gang having unique gear preferences. It's also a handy way to grind achievements like "take down [number of] enemies with [type of] weapons".
- Level-Locked Loot: Pre-2.0, some weapons and equipment were locked off until your stats reached a certain level. This included heavy weapons that required a high enough Body level to carry, cyberware that required a high enough Intelligence level to use, and a host of others items which you couldn't buy from vendors until you had sufficient street cred.
- Level Scaling: Zig-zagged upon the game's initial release. Random weapon and armor drops would scale to V's level, but enemies did not; this had the tendency to turn the game into a shooting gallery due to most enemies going down in one hit from almost anything once you exceeded level 35 and wielded the gear to match, as the most high-level enemies including the Final Boss sat somewhere around levels 20-25. As of the 2.0 update, all enemies and loot are scaled to V's level.
- Liberty Over Prosperity: The nomad perspective of the world in a nutshell. They may live hard lives, but consider it worth it to maintain their freedom from the domination of the corps. Saul threatening this independence with what Panam considers short-sighted decisions is Panam's main source of friction with him.
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: In a setting as violent and corrupt as Night City, it's impossible for anyone to keep their hands cleans. Characters who are said to be loyal and incorruptible inevitably utilize shady and underhanded tactics in pursuit of their ideals. Even the most heroic playthrough as V involves cold-blooded killings, numerous betrayals, and morally ambiguous choices that have no clear outcomes.
- Like Brother and Sister: If the player tries to romance a character who isn't attracted to them — Judy and River for male V, Kerry and Panam for female V — that character will let them down gently, and confirm that it can't happen. Despite this, they will still remain on close, friendly terms with V, and in the case of Panam, even be willing to risk her life for them. Judy seemingly views V as her new best friend after losing her previous one to suicide, and she's by far the character devastated the most by their suicide in the Reaper ending, and one ending has Panam literally adopting V as a sister in the Aldecados.
- Local Reference:
- You'll notice that the street name signs have an unusual design and color scheme for an American city. That's because they're based on the visual identification scheme used in Warsaw.
- Likewise, the sewage drain covers are also European styled; German, specifically, though the covers themselves can be found across central and eastern Europe.note
- Misty's second name, Olszewski, is unambiguously Polish, hinting that she's likely an American of Polish descent. If you call Viktor in "The Devil" ending, he will say that Misty can't come to the phone right now, because she's visiting her family in Poland. Viktor will also say that Misty sent him a postcard with a polar bear on it, referencing the old joke that claims that Poland is so cold and culturally backwards that it has polar bears roaming the streets.
- Lost in Translation:
- An odd example: If the player romanced Kerry Eurodyne and chooses to call him before the Point of No Return, they can ask him about a new song he's working on. In the original Polish version, he says the title will be "Seamurai Goes Down", referencing the events of the last mission with him, where him and V have sex on a yach they stole from his manager and then promptly sank it, making the title a Double Entendre. In the English translation, the song's title is instead "Seamurai in Smoke", which loses the dirty pun. It's unclear as to why the title was changed, since it was already in English to begin with.
- Two last missions in Kerry's questline are called "Czarna Materia" ("Dark Matter") and "Teoria Wielkiego Wybuchu" ("The Big Bang Theory") in Polish. It also ties the first one with a song called "Dark Matter" on Kerry's computer, which foreshadows the events of said mission. In the English version, due to all missions being Titled After the Song, "Czarna Materia" was titled "Off the Leash" (an In-Universe song), and "Teoria (...)" was changed to "Boat Drinks". While an attentive English-language player might connect the dots with the song and "Off the Leash" (it's briefly mentioned that the club this mission takes place in is called Dark Matter), the theme is completely lost with "Boat Drinks".
- A minor one in the corpo lifepath prologue: When Jenkins talks about the dirt he has on Abernathy, in the Polish version he specifically uses the word "kochanka", meaning that Abernathy's lover is a woman. The English word "lover" is gender neutral, so this detail is omitted, though Jenkins also mentions Abernathy's "lover's husband", which (very) vaguely implies a woman.
- At the very start of "Gimme Danger", Takemura says that the parade is going to celebrate "Japanese heritage", which may suggest that it's being held to celebrate people of Night City who are of Japanese ancestry AND their culture. In the Polish version, the word used is "dziedzictwo", which strictly means culture.
- During the gig "Psychofan", Johnny can recount one of Samurai's afterparties, where he says that Kerry threw up in Nancy's guitar case. This seems odd, because Nancy was the band's keyboard player, not guitarist. In the Polish version, the word used is "futerał", which is a more generic name for a case used for transporting any musical instruments, not only guitars.
- In the English version of "Off the Leash", before V gets an option to kiss Kerry, he will say "Think you can drive the shadows away?" to which V can respond "I'll even protect you from yourself". This conversation sound more natural in the Polish version: Kerry instead asks "Obronisz mnie przed cieniami?" ("Will you protect me from the shadows?"), with V's response being more or less the same as above.
- In the French version of "Venus in Furs", the mission objective to meet Meredith Stout in the motel tells onscreen to meet her on the second floor ("premier étage") of the No-Tell Motel despite her being on the first floor due to a translation mistake caused by the way French language refers to building floors (French numbers floors as ground-level, first, second, etc. instead of first, second, third, etc.). The mistake is rather noticeable due to the quest having a map marker clearly leading V to the "wrong" level.
- In "Life During Wartime", if V accepts to be examined by Hellman, Johnny calls V out for accepting to be a "guinea pig". In the French localization, this has been translated as "cochon d'Inde", which exclusively refers to the animal; a "guinea pig" as a test subject would be a "cobaye".note .
- Love Cannot Overcome: Depending on your ending, your love interest might break up with you due to diverging goals in life. Each one has at least one ending where they stay in a relationship with V, however.
- Ludonarrative Dissonance: the main plot of the game is that you are desperately seeking cure for a condition that is killing you. You are given only a few weeks to live and are constantly given reminders of your condition like choking, visual effects, as well as NPCs commenting on your imminent demise. However, a massive chunk of the game is about doing odd jobs for criminals and Fixers that will yield you money you can only spend on luxury items.
