What People Actually Mean When They Say "Blind Playthrough"

A blind playthrough means you record yourself playing a game for the first time without any prior knowledge of the story, choices, or mechanics. You see what the character sees. You react in real time. Nothing is scripted ahead of time. For Cyberpunk 2077, that means entering Night City completely cold, making genuine mistakes, missing optional content, and reacting to plot twists as they happen. That is the entire point. Most people confuse blind playthroughs with no HUD mods or speedrun categories. They are different things. A blind playthrough is about unspoiled experience, not about removing interface elements. You can have every UI element visible. You just cannot have played the game before, and you cannot use walk-throughs or lore videos during recording.

Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Test Blind Playthrough

This is the specific workflow I use when testing whether a blind playthrough is actually viable for content purposes. It starts with a clean installation, no community patches applied yet, and a fresh save file. I then record the entire session from character creation through the prologue and into the first major act. The goal is not to produce polished content. The goal is to test whether the recording chain holds up, whether the pacing works, and whether the game itself creates natural breakpoints that make editing feasible later.

The Setup

I use OBS Studio on a separate machine from the game. Capture card is unnecessary unless you are running console. The game runs on the primary machine at 1440p, 60fps target, with RTX set to Quality mode. Shadow quality is set to Low because that is the single biggest frame hit and it barely affects visual clarity on camera. This setup usually holds 55 to 60 fps during typical combat scenes. Open world driving pushes it down to around 48 fps, which is acceptable for recording purposes. Audio comes from the game mix at 100%, microphone at 60%, and desktop audio ducked to -20dB so menu sounds do not compete with voice commentary. If you plan to add narration later, which most people do not, you would leave the mic channel completely empty during recording. That gives you a clean stem to work with. The save file location on Windows is C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Cyberpunk 2077\savegames. I back up the entire folder before starting. If the game crashes or corrupts a save, which it does more often than it should, you can restore from that backup without losing any progress. I learned this the hard way during a test run where a corrupt save wiped twelve hours of footage. It took about twenty minutes to recover everything from the backup.

How to Actually Run the Test

Start a New Game. Choose V. Do not look up build guides. Do not check the wiki for dialog options. Make decisions based on what the UI shows you in that moment. Cyberpunk 2077 has a skill tree with Braindance, Nikkei, Interface, Bodyware, and Body channels. You will figure them out as you level. The game tells you what each skill does in the menu, so you are not completely guessing. The first thing most people mess up is the starting attribute allocation. At character creation you get nine points to distribute across Body, Reflexes, and Technical Ability. There is no penalty for putting points anywhere. If you dump everything into Technical Ability you will be a glass cannon who dies in the first firefight. I recommend three points into Body for the health buffer, three into Reflexes for the combat focus, and three into Technical Ability so you can actually craft items and hack drones. That distribution works for a standard first playthrough. When you reach Japantown and meet Jackie, the game introduces the first major mechanic: Braindance sequences. These are investigative segments where you scrub through recorded neural data. Many players miss the fact that you can layer multiple BD tracks simultaneously. Press and hold the appropriate button to add a second track, then press again for a third. Each track reveals different information. Without layering, you will miss evidence that is only visible on the audio or thermal track. This is something the game does not explicitly teach you.

Common Pitfalls During a Blind Recording

The biggest issue is combat navigation. Cyberpunk 2077 uses cover-based shooting with a tight aim-down-sights system. On a first playthrough, most people stand in the open because the game does not force you to take cover. Enemies will shoot you through walls and around corners. I spent an entire afternoon in Voodoo Boys quest territory dying repeatedly because I kept walking through kill zones without checking the mini-map for red dots. The workaround is simple: enable the enemy marker option in settings, keep the minimap in the corner, and treat every doorway as a potential ambush point. Another problem is vehicle physics. Driving in this game feels floaty on purpose. It is not a simulation title. If you are trying to record clean driving footage for a blind playthrough, expect to crash frequently. The game has a auto-brake assist option under driving settings. Turn it on. It makes the cars significantly more manageable without affecting the feel of the game enough to matter for recording purposes. Dialogue choices present a third issue. The game has a karma system that affects ending availability, but it is not clearly communicated. You will not know if you made a "bad" choice until forty hours later when an NPC refuses to talk to you. There is no achievement tracker for story decisions. I found this out when I completed a run and realized two side characters I had helped earlier were now hostile because of a single dialog option I chose in act two. The workaround is to save before every major conversation where you need to make a choice. The game auto-saves at certain points, but not consistently around dialog decisions.

Editing and Post-Production Reality

A full blind playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 runs between sixty and eighty hours depending on how much side content you engage with. That is roughly 3,600 to 4,800 minutes of raw footage. Editing that down to a watchable video usually means cutting it by 80 to 90 percent. I use DaVinci Resolve for this. The program handles large video files well, but you will need at least 64GB of RAM and a decent GPU for smooth playback during editing. A machine with 32GB will stutter constantly with footage this long. The editing workflow breaks into three phases. First, you scrub through the footage and mark timestamps for interesting moments. Second, you cut those segments into a rough timeline. Third, you add transitions, color correction, and audio mixing. Phase one takes the longest. I usually spend two to three days just reviewing footage and making notes. The actual editing phase takes another three to four days. Color correction is straightforward since the game has a consistent visual style. Audio mixing requires more attention because NPC dialogue is often buried under ambient noise and combat sounds.

What This Method Does Not Work For

Blind playthroughs are not suitable for players who want to see 100% completion content on their first viewing. You will miss side quests, optional enemies, and secret endings simply because you do not know they exist. The game has at least five distinct endings, and a blind player will only experience one. That is expected. If you want to show all endings in a single video series, you need multiple playthroughs with different choices, which defeats the purpose of a blind format. Performance recording also breaks down in certain districts. Pacifica, especially the Hero questline area, pushes the game hard even on high-end hardware. Frame rates drop to 30 or below in heavy combat sequences with explosions and magic effects. Recorded footage from these sections is often unwatchable. I avoid posting content from those areas unless I can stabilize it in post, which usually means adding a slow-motion effect or cutting to a different camera angle. Cloud saving creates another problem. If you have cloud saves enabled through Steam or GOG, the game syncs your progress every time you quit. This means you cannot easily rollback to an earlier save if you make a recording mistake. I disable cloud sync during blind playthrough recordings and rely entirely on local backups. It adds a step but prevents the frustration of losing hours of footage to a bad sync.

Final Notes on Execution

The whole process takes roughly two weeks from start to finished video if you are working a standard schedule. Raw recording takes about ten hours per session, and most people need four to six sessions to complete a full playthrough. The editing takes another fifteen to twenty hours total. You should plan for at least a month of work if you want to produce something coherent. If you are doing this purely for personal enjoyment and not for content creation, you can skip the recording setup entirely and just play. The blind experience works the same way either way. The recording chain only matters if you intend to share the result.