Right at the beginning, we are greeted with a breath-taking view of Night City at night time. The city looks absolutely stunning in the dark with all the neon lights and skyscrapers. It almost feels like a Hollywood action flick based on Gibson’s Neuromancer, Cline’s Ready Player One or even adjacent to the dark ambience that Blade Runner sets in.
We also get a nice street view with V arriving at the ‘No-Tell Motel’ in an AI-enabled self-driving car. The buildings are lit with neon lights all around and covered with electronic advertisements.
Then we get the first close-up at our player, V, which is actually the newer model as seen on the latest official wallpaper. We can see the extremely detailed character model with realistic hairs and textures. This shows us what the new REDEngine 4 is capable of. Though I highly doubt the final game would look exactly like this unless the top-end hardware is the minimum requirement for the game, it should be kept in mind that this is a cinematic trailer anyway and the game still has about 10 months of development to go, so don’t expect this to be representative of the final game.
We also get a good look at Dexter DeShawn, a high profile fixer who also gave us the mission in the 48 min gameplay demo. He seems to have given V a mission to get some sort of chip, and V has returned to his hideout with the chip to get his reward money.
V has the chip inserted on his neck beside his ear (which is apparently what people in 2077 do to store and share data virtually, very similar to the microsofts in Neuromancer).
This is where things get dark. V is seen staring at himself in the mirror, with eyes filled with regret and anger. Now we see flashbacks of what just happened before him arriving here. V gets the chip, but his companion Jackie is heavily wounded and doesn’t survive the firefight. Here we see the car AI analysing Jackie and talking to V. So I think our car will also have a Tesla Summon-like feature in-game, like with the Batmobile in Batman: Arkham Knight, reminiscent of the AI-driven cars in Ready Player One.
We also see this (extremely detailed) woman hacking into and disrupting V’s system, disabling his Mantis Blades (which were shown in the teaser from 2013 and also in the gameplay demo). She seems to be a type of the various enemies entities with hacking abilities we’ll encounter in the Night City (which was also called Ninsei or the Night City, same as here in Gibson’s Neuromancer too).
Lastly, we see the person we had never even expected to be in the game. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s our actor Keanu Reeves. In Cyberpunk 2077. In-game. Playing an important role as Johnny Silverhand, the Rockerboy from the band Samurai. This is such a huge thing, the sheer magnitude of this makes me wonder how CDPR kept all this away from a prominent leak! I’m really excited to watch him perform his popular song Chippin’ In live at his concert in-game (if they exist).
Lastly, we get our glitching Cyberpunk 2077 logo, and the release date for the game – 16th April 2020 with pre-orders also live on Steam and GOG right now, and soon on Epic Games Store too.
That’s all the important stuff we got from the trailer, folks! See you in Night City soon.