However, videos aside, there is still a lot of room for speculation and deductive work, with many details about the game unknown. For most fans, waiting until the 19th of November 10 December is an acceptable compromise, but some of us just itch to dig deeper. We’ve collected some recently posted official screenshots and concept art from Twitter to help us learn more about the game. Night City, and its outskirts in the Badlands, are a vast and varied world for us to explore with its different districts all being visually distinct, with wholly different environments and dangers. We’ve seen quite a bit of the corporate center, with its sleek and clean aesthetic as well as the colorful and chaotic kitschy district, which at times feels like a high-tech sci-fi urban area cosplaying as a slum - or the other way around. There’s more to Cyberpunk 2077’s world, and these images give us a sneak peek into some other areas.
Concept Art
Westbrook is Night City’s high-class district where the wealthy magnates and corporate executives share turf with the influential Yakuza, though they don’t mix much. If Westbrook is for the 1%, then North Oak is for the 0.1%. The safest and most expensive area in the entire city, it paints a very different picture than what you’d expect. Decadent villas, parks, broad tree-lined avenues make it look like what you’d expect from a high-tech utopia as opposed to the cyberpunk dystopia every other district represents. Corporate security swarms throughout North Oak making it the only zone without any gang activity, but living or every travelling there means you need some serious wealth This concept art shows off one of those villas that belong to the super-rich. Who’s willing to bet we’ll be breaking into one of these?
Still in Westbrook is the more urban and Night City-ish Charter Hill, located near to the Corporate City Center. This is where you will find the hub of Yakuza activity, especially in the neighborhood known as Japantown.
While these miscellaneous buildings from Westbrook don’t reveal anything new, they are a perfect representation of the neo-kitsch aesthetic the designers defined Cyberpunk 2077 with.
This atmospheric picture of the Kabuki district could even be from a modern day setting. Not every neighborhood or district got the major development treatment over the years in Night City, and some look much like they did decades ago. If all the neon lights of the more futuristic areas feel suffocating, you can come here to take a little break - just don’t look around too much, because of few of them have crept up here too.
Night City’s corporate city center is a concrete jungle of blinding light and towering skyscrapers. Larger than life animated holograms vie for your attention in a battle of marketing, while the technicolor buildings can hide any number of dangers. Players will encounter an interesting dichotomy in Night City’s downtown. The Corporate District loses the bright colors in favor of a stark, serious and minimalist look that’s almost as soul crushing as the corporations themselves, while the rest of the district is covered in explosive vibrancy. Some areas will still have current-day buildings intact, hastily covered under layers of new construction. The artworks above and below show off this bustling city center, where we will probably spend a lot of time during our adventure.
Screenshots
A key theme in cyberpunk works is the sharp difference between the rich and the poor, with the greedy ultra-rich corporations going to any lengths to acquire as much wealth as possible, while the vast majority of the average population lives in squalor. Stepping out of Westbrook or the Corporate Center, you’ll see the poor areas of Night City, and it immediately becomes apparent that a million neon ads can’t make the future bright. These areas have very high gang activity, and chances are we’ll undertake missions to either clean them up or extend the influence of whatever faction we side with into them.
Standing on the rooftops of the slums will let you see the glamorous city center. It’s so close, yet so far.
Depending on what origin you choose for V - be it Corpo Rat, Street Kid or Nomad - the storyline will change and adapt to that background, altering the course of events and introducing you to certain characters you’d miss with another origin, or just interact with a lot less. Below are three of the characters who are key of one of the three origins.
