Recording a Blind Playthrough Without Losing Your Mind (or Your Framerates)
Blind playthroughs are just what they sound like. You record yourself playing a game for the first time, no walkthroughs, no lore videos beforehand, nothing. The comedy comes from genuinely not knowing what is going on. With Cyberpunk 2077, this is actually a solid format because the game is dense enough that even veterans get lost in Dogtown. I recorded my own blind run through Night City a while back and learned more about recording performance than I expected. The biggest issue nobody warns you about is that Cyberpunk 2077 on PC eats recording software alive if you are not careful. The default OBS x264 preset will tank your already-struggling framerates in combat. I ran into this immediately on my first recording session. The game hit 30 frames in City Center and OBS dropped to 8. My capture was basically unwatchable with massive stutter spikes that looked like a glitch rather than my actual reactions. The workaround was switching to NVENC with the P2 preset and locking the bitrate to around 35 Mbps instead of my usual 20. NVENC on a 30-series card handles the encoding separately from the GPU, so there is less competition for resources. If you are on AMD, use AMF with the quality preset at 40 Mbps. Intel QuickSync works too but introduces a slight color shift that requires post-processing correction.
I also disabled the overlay in Discord and turned off GeForce Experience highlights before recording. Those background processes cause intermittent frame drops that ruin the timing on funny moments. The fix is straightforward: close everything unnecessary, set your recording profile to custom 1080p at 60 fps, and make sure your game is set to exclusive fullscreen mode, not borderless. Borderless causes mouse capture issues that make commentary audio sync poorly with your visuals. Audio matters more than most people realize for a blind playthrough. When you are genuinely confused, you talk more. I started using a USB condenser mic instead of headset audio because the game's ambient noise in certain districts bleeds into the microphone and drowns out my commentary. Setting the mic to a noise gate around -40 dB cuts out most of the environmental sound while keeping speech clear. The most counter-intuitive thing about recording Cyberpunk is the in-game performance settings. Most guides tell you to lower shadows and reflections first, but those are not what kills your recording stability. The real culprit is volumetric lighting and god rays. Turning those down to medium or off gave me the most consistent framerate during outdoor areas without noticeably degrading the image. This matters because consistent framerates mean consistent recordings. Stuttering is obvious when you review footage later.
Another thing beginners miss is the autosave behavior. Cyberpunk autosaves every time you enter a new district or trigger a major story beat, and these saves take time. If you are recording at high settings and an autosave fires during a moment you want to capture, the recording might skip a frame or two. I learned this the hard way when I missed a genuinely funny reaction during a cutscene transition because the game decided to autosave mid-scene. The fix is simple: disable autosave and set manual save intervals to every 20 minutes instead. Back up your save file manually before starting a recording session so you can reload if something goes wrong. For editing, I used DaVinci Resolve instead of Premiere. It handles the variable framerate footage from Cyberpunk better, especially when you have had to drop settings in certain areas. You will end up with uneven framerates across different districts, and Resolve's timeline renders them more smoothly than Premiere, which sometimes drops frames during export. Export at 1080p H.264 with high bitrate. Do not try to export in 4K unless you have a powerful machine, because the source footage already has compression artifacts from the recording process, and upscaling just makes them worse. One limitation worth mentioning: blind playthroughs of Cyberpunk are extremely long. The main story alone takes 40 to 60 hours depending on how much you explore. Recording all of that footage means you are working with maybe 50 to 80 hours of raw video. Editing that down to a watchable format is the real bottleneck. I spent about three weeks editing a single video that ended up being roughly 4 hours long. If you do not have the time for that kind of commitment, consider doing a shorter blind experience instead, like a specific side quest or district exploration, rather than attempting the full campaign.
Get the Full Details
If you want the software I used, OBS Studio is free and available from their official site. The key is just getting the settings right before you start recording, because once you are five hours into a session and realize your bitrate is too low, it is too late to fix anything. I also recommend enabling hardware acceleration in your browser and closing Chrome tabs while recording, since Chrome can consume a surprising amount of GPU resources even when you are not actively using it. This detail cost me two recording sessions before I figured it out.
