Cyberpunk 2077 Beginner Guide 2026: Start Right in Night City

Cyberpunk 2077 is CD PROJEKT RED’s open-world action RPG set in Night City, a dense American metropolis run by corporations, gangs, and fixers. You play V, a mercenary chasing a one-of-a-kind implant, and the game mixes first-person shooting, driving, stealth, hacking, and dialogue-driven quests in a single open city plus the surrounding Badlands. The base game launched on December 9,

2020. Update 2.0 (September

2023) rebuilt the skill, cyberware, police, and vehicle-combat systems, and the Phantom Liberty expansion (September 26,

2023) added Dogtown, a new district with its own story. Update 2.5, released October 22, 2026, is the current version this guide is written for.

We do not quote individual reviews here, because store-page reviews are personal accounts, not facts, and cherry-picked quotes would mislead. What the store page itself shows is the aggregate, and it is strong: Cyberpunk 2077 holds a Very Positive rating on Steam, both overall and in recent reviews. A third-party snapshot from October 2026 put the overall positive share at about 87% across roughly 988,000 total reviews in all languages, with English-language reviews higher at about 89% of roughly 397,000. Treat those counts as a snapshot, not a live meter: they move every day. The PC Metacritic score sits at

86. The honest summary is that the game players review today is the post-2.0 game, not the 2020 launch version, and the rating reflects that: a huge, systems-rich RPG whose launch reputation no longer matches its current state.

Start with the base game unless you already know you want Dogtown. Phantom Liberty is a substantial story set in a new district, but it is designed to be played after you know the base game, and nothing in the first hours requires it. One price warning: a roughly 70% discount ran for about two weeks in October 2026 (base game about $17.99, Ultimate about $33.10) and ended around October

26. Those were limited-time prices, not the regular prices above. If you see them quoted as current prices, the source is out of date. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One stopped receiving updates in November 2022 and cannot run Phantom Liberty; buy on PC, Mac, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, or Switch 2.

Read the spec as two promises, not one. Minimum means the game runs; it does not mean it looks good or holds a steady frame rate in dense city traffic. Recommended is the comfortable tier, and its GPU class (RTX 2060 SUPER and up) is the realistic floor for a smooth 2026 experience. Two details matter more than the headline numbers. First, the SSD requirement is absolute: both tiers list an SSD, so a hard drive install is not a supported way to play. Second, 12 GB of RAM is the floor, not a target; 16 GB is what the recommended tier asks for, and it is cheap insurance against stuttering in the open city. If you are buying hardware for this game today, see the next section; if you already own a machine, match it against the recommended column, not the minimum one.

No purchase links appear here, because no hardware model in this section has been verified against a price-tracking source, and this guide will not attach a buy link to an unverified product. The recommendations below are tiers, not shopping links. For a comfortable Cyberpunk 2077 machine in 2026: a mid-range modern GPU with at least 8 GB of video memory (the RTX 4060 class is the sensible value tier; anything older than the recommended RTX 2060 SUPER class is a compromise, not a target); 16 GB of system RAM as the floor and 32 GB if you multitask; a 1 TB NVMe SSD, because the game alone needs 70 GB and you will not keep a 500 GB drive empty for long; and a six-core modern CPU or better, since Night City crowds punish weak processors in traffic. A Steam Deck runs the game (it is Verified), but expect to play at lower settings than a desktop at the recommended tier.

There are no starting-stat differences between lifepaths, and all three converge on the same V, the same apartment, and the same main story. Pick the fantasy you like: Nomad if you want the outsider arriving in the city, Street Kid if you want the local who already knows the streets, Corpo if you want the fall from the corporate tower. If you cannot decide, Street Kid is the easiest to follow, because its intro stays closest to the street-level story the game then tells. Do not restart over this choice; nothing downstream depends on it.

There are five attributes: Body, Reflexes, Technical Ability, Intelligence, and Cool. You start with 3 in each and 7 more points to distribute at character creation, with a cap of 6 per attribute at creation. Each level-up gives one Attribute Point and one Perk Point, and skills improve by doing related actions. Attribute points are permanent, so spend them on the playstyle you actually enjoy; perk points can be reset with the Tabula E-Rasa item, at a cost. For the full beginner builds, see our builds starter guide in the related list below.

No. The base game is a complete story and city. Phantom Liberty adds Dogtown and a second story; it is an addition, not a missing chapter.

Any of them. They change only the intro mission and some dialogue, with no starting-stat differences. Street Kid is the easiest to follow if you want a default.

No. Attribute points are permanent. Perk points can be reset with the Tabula E-Rasa item, at a cost, so mistakes in perks are recoverable and mistakes in attributes are not.

Yes, 2.5 is a free update, and no mods are needed for any of it. The update itself adds in-game cross-platform mod support via mod.io, which is optional.

Yes, the game is Steam Deck Verified. Expect lower settings than a desktop at the recommended spec.