Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Beginner Guide Ps5

Getting Started in Night City

Installing Cyberpunk 2077 on PS5 is straightforward. The game is roughly 70 gigabytes, so make sure you have space cleared before you begin. Once it loads, you'll go through the character creation screen, which takes longer than most people expect because there are a lot of sliders. Don't spend too much time here. Pick something that looks acceptable and move on. Your face doesn't matter much after the first two hours, and you won't be looking at it much anyway since V mostly stays in third person with the camera locked behind the shoulder. The first thing you need to understand is that the game runs on a skill system called Attributes and Skills. There are five Attributes: Body, Reflexes, Technical Ability, Intelligence, and Cool. Each one unlocks different playstyles. If you dump points into Body, you get access to Strength mods and health bonuses. If you put them into Reflexes, your shooting and katanas get better. Technical Ability governs hacking and crafting. Intelligence controls netrunner abilities. Cool affects stealth and critical hit damage. The initial build matters more than players typically expect because respecing is tedious. You can respec at Shermans Clinic or by finding Voodoo Boys fixer contacts later, but you'll lose the feeling of commitment when you realize you wasted three points early on. I made the mistake of building a pure netrunner for my first playthrough and then encountered a group of Maelstrom enemies in Pacifica who have heavy armor plating. Netrunners rely on disrupting enemy cyberware and causing explosions, but those guys were essentially immune to most of my deck's programs because they equipped anti-hack mods that are common drops from Maelstrom vendors. I spent about forty-five minutes getting stuck on a mission I could have completed in ten if I'd just built a balanced character instead of min-maxing toward the endgame. That experience taught me to invest at least one point into every Attribute before specializing. It keeps your options open when the game throws curveballs.

The second major system to grasp is the weapon modification engine. Almost every firearm in the game can be modded, and the interface for this is buried under the inventory menu. You need to find blueprints from vendors, street dealers, or looting bodies. Without a blueprint, you cannot equip the mod even if you have the materials. I went about twenty hours without realizing this because the game never explicitly tells you. You just see a mod listed in your stash and you can't figure out why it won't attach. The solution is simple: check the vendor's inventory when you're browsing weapons. If the mod has a small icon next to it indicating it requires a schematic, buy the schematic from a ripperdoc or vendor first. This usually saves you from wasting time trying to force attachments that literally won't install. Your first few missions in City Center are forgiving. Do not stress about difficulty settings at this point. The game gives you enough information through tooltips and the skill tree preview. Pay attention to the perk descriptions, though. Some perks are genuinely powerful and others are cosmetic traps. The "Rifler" perk in Reflexes, for example, reduces weapon sway significantly. It sounds minor but it completely changes how accurate you are during firefights, especially on harder difficulties where accuracy penalties are amplified. Similarly, the "Silent but Deadly" passive in Cool gives you a one-shot kill chance from stealth, and it scales with your level. It is one of the most consistently useful perks in the entire tree. Regarding the PS5-specific experience, the game benefits from the DualSense controller's adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. The triggers resist when you are aiming down sights on a scoped rifle, and they give a noticeable bump when you switch between weapon types. It is a nice touch but not essential to understanding the gameplay. The real advantage of playing on PS5 over the previous generation is load times. Fast travel is nearly instantaneous, and combat transitions between interior and exterior spaces are smooth enough that you rarely notice the seam. This matters because the game constantly moves you between locations during main story missions, and slow loading would have been punishing on this schedule.

One common mistake beginners make is neglecting the cyberware installation system. You get implants for your internal organs, limbs, and cortical stack, and each one provides passive bonuses or active abilities. The most important one for new players is the Gorilla Arms implant. It costs 15,000 eurodollars at any ripperdoc, and it unlocks dialogue options that let you smash through locked doors and certain NPC interactions that would otherwise require high Street Cred. Not buying it early is one of the most expensive decisions you can make because it forces you to either grind Street Cred higher or backtrack later to install it. I learned this the hard way when I was about an hour into my second run and realized I could not progress through a key junction in Heywood without returning to a ripperdoc I had already visited twice. The detour cost me probably twenty minutes and left me questioning my life choices. Another thing the game does not make obvious is how important Street Cred is. It functions as your reputation meter and gates access to better gear, vendors, and side jobs. You gain Street Cred by completing gigs, side jobs, and NCPD scanner hustles. The main story also increases it, but slowly. If you focus exclusively on the main questline, you will find yourself outgunned by mid-game enemies because your equipment tier caps at whatever Street Cred you have passively accumulated. This is by design, but it is easy to miss if you are not paying attention to the Street Cred number in the bottom right of the HUD. For combat specifically, I recommend starting with a hybrid approach rather than committing to pure gun or pure melee. Pick up a rifle and a katana early. Use the rifle for range and the katana for close quarters when enemies close in. The game's cover system is functional but not deep. You will find yourself taking cover frequently and then getting pushed out of it by enemies flanking you. Learning to reposition during fights is more important than memorizing cover spots. Movement in this game feels weighty on purpose, so fighting while moving is harder than it should be. Accept that and plan around it rather than trying to play like you would in a faster-shooter.

Difficulty selection matters more than most games because the scaling is aggressive. On Easy, enemies are squishy and you can brute force most encounters. On Normal, which I consider the baseline, enemies deal reasonable damage and you need to use cover and mods. On Hard and above, one or two missed shots can kill you, and enemies will exploit your position aggressively. I would suggest Normal for your first playthrough. If you find it too easy after twenty hours, you can adjust the difficulty in the settings menu without restarting. The game does not punish you for changing it mid-playthrough, and it is less disruptive than starting over on a difficulty that was too punishing from the beginning. Vehicle combat is available but shallow. You can ram enemies, drive over them, or shoot while driving with the right build investment, but the physics are inconsistent and the gunning mechanics feel tacked on rather than polished. Do not invest heavily into driving skills unless you enjoy the concept more than the execution. The motorcycles are faster but harder to control, especially in rain conditions where traction drops noticeably. Cars are more stable but slower to maneuver. Neither feels particularly satisfying after the first hour, so use them for transportation and dismiss them as combat tools. Finally, a note about the inventory and crafting system. You will accumulate a lot of junk items, weapons, and crafting materials. The game encourages you to dismantle common gear for components rather than selling everything. Selling everything seems logical at first because you need eurodollars for upgrades, but you will quickly run out of cash when you encounter the few vendors that actually carry high-tier items. Dismantling gives you the materials you need to craft mods that improve your weapons, and those mods persist across your playthrough. The math works in your favor if you dismantle first and sell only what you do not need for crafting. This principle alone can save you thousands of eurodollars in the mid-to-late game.