755 hours in Night City… and counting. And this gonk still hasn’t even started Phantom Liberty.

Yeah choom, let that simmer for a sec.

I’m a huge Blade Runner fan, so when Cyberpunk 2077 dropped I was already all-in on the neon-soaked dystopian vibes. Day one of release, middle of the COVID lockdowns, I jacked into Night City like a merc chasing their first stack of eddies.

Not gonna act like a saint though.

I first tried the game the gonk way.

Yeah… I pirated it on day one.

But here’s the preem part. CDPR never slapped Cyberpunk 2077 with DRM. Not at launch, not later, not even now. In an industry where most corpos lock their games down tighter than Arasaka vaults, CDPR did the opposite.

They trusted their players.

And honestly? That trust worked.

I only played that pirated copy briefly before I went and bought the game on Steam. Later I grabbed it again on GOG. Hell, I even gifted it to a choom.

Turns out when a dev treats you like a human instead of a walking credit chip, you don’t mind sending some eddies their way.

CDPR was the first corpo I ever encountered that had a real track record of shipping games without DRM. In a world full of corpo greed and shady biz, that made them feel like a rare beacon of hope.

Now about my rig back then.

Absolute scrap-tier chrome.

I was running an old Dell Optiplex with a GT 1030 and 8GB RAM. The game ran like a busted cyberdeck fried by a rookie netrunner. Lowest settings imaginable. Maybe 8–12 FPS if the machine spirits were feeling generous.

Straight-up braindance slideshow.

I even used Lossless Scaling just to squeeze a few more frames out of that dying rig. At one point I tried GeForce Now through a VPN, because the service wasn’t available in India back then.

That’s how badly this gonk wanted to walk the streets of Night City.

And somehow…

Even at 8 FPS…

I was hooked.

Night City had me locked in harder than a Corpo contract. The neon lights, the grime, the rain on the asphalt, the gangs, the fixers, the chrome junkies, the random gonks yelling in alleyways — the whole place felt alive.

Not like a game world.

Like a real city.

This was actually the first serious game I ever finished.

And after I finished it…

I didn’t delta out of the city.

Since that first run I’ve done multiple playthroughs with different builds. The progression system in this game is honestly nova.

Level up V.
Stack perk points.
Install chrome until you’re basically a walking cyberpsycho.
Mix cyberware, perks and weapons until everything syncs like a perfectly tuned cyberdeck.

You wanna be a stealth ghost slipping through gigs like a ninja?

Preem.

You wanna be a netrunner frying gonks through cameras and access points?

Also preem.

You wanna chrome up like a Maelstrom psycho and kick the door in guns blazing?

Night City’s got you covered, choom.

There are a million ways to clear a mission.

Sneak it.
Hack it.
Talk your way through it.
Or go full cyberpsycho and flatline everyone in the building.

The role-playing side is just as nova.

Different lifepaths unlock unique dialogue options, and some quests branch harder than a corpo conspiracy. The Maelstrom Flathead job is still one of the most preem quest designs I’ve seen in a game.

That gig alone can play out in so many ways it’s honestly wild.

Another funny part of this journey is how my hardware upgrades mirrored V upgrading chrome.

In the game you start with a Militech Paraline cyberdeck with 2GB RAM.

My real-life setup wasn’t much better.

I started Cyberpunk 2077 with a GT 1030 and 8GB RAM, eventually scraping together enough eddies to upgrade that to 12GB DDR3.

Baby steps in the chrome game.

Fast forward a few years.

Now I’ve built my own rig with my own hard-earned eddies.

32GB DDR5 and an RTX 4060, running Cyberpunk with Path Tracing and Frame Generation.

From an 8 FPS slideshow…

to Night City glowing like a preem braindance.

Feels like I upgraded from a bargain-bin Militech deck…

to a Tetratronic Rippler MK.5 Tier 5++.

Another thing Cyberpunk did was introduce me properly to CDPR as a studio.

Seeing the love and detail the devs poured into this game made me curious about their other gigs. So I finally played The Witcher 3.

And choom…

I realized what I had been missing all these years.

Turns out CDPR has been cooking preem games long before Night City ever existed.

Now about playthroughs.

Over the years I’ve run both genders and all lifepaths.

But my personal canon V?

Female V. Corpo lifepath. Netrunner build. The Star ending.

That one just hits different.

A huge part of that is Cherami Leigh’s performance. She adds so much depth to V’s lines. The emotion, the sarcasm, the anger — it all lands perfectly. Her chemistry with Johnny is just chef’s kiss.

No offense to Male V — he’s solid — but for me Female V just feels right.

I only did one full playthrough with Male V and didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.

That’s just my personal take.

I also tend to prefer female protagonists in games.

And in my Night City runs?

I stay loyal.

Judy is my calabacita.

Now fast forward to today.

I’ve logged 755 hours in Cyberpunk 2077… and counting.

No cheats.
No mods.
No console commands.

Just pure vanilla gameplay and a lot of time running gigs for fixers across Night City.

And somehow…

After 755 hours of chrome upgrades, bad decisions, street gigs and chasing eddies across the city…

This gonk still hasn’t even started Phantom Liberty.

That alone should tell you how much content there is in the base game.

If I had to nitpick one thing, it would be the lack of a proper third-person mode. I get that the game is designed around first-person immersion, and honestly it works.

But after spending hours customizing V and installing enough chrome to make a ripperdoc proud, it would’ve been nova to see your merc more often.

Still…

After 755 hours, Night City keeps pulling me back like a fixer pinging my holo with one more gig and a fat stack of eddies.

At this point I’m not sure if I’m still playing Cyberpunk 2077…

or if Night City already claimed this gonk as one of its own.