It’s finally time for the first Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire stream where we’ll get a look at some more gameplay, a new trailer, and one of the game’s features called “braindances” which are kind of VR experiences. Don’t worry, it’ll make sense by the time this is over.

After a brief introduction we’re thrown into a new trailer that shows off a mix of cinematics and gameplay from the game’s prologue but notably features the Afterlife nightclub along with plenty of cyberpunk grime, cyborg Adam Smasher, fast cars, and basketball outfits that make the guys wearing them look like a sleep paralysis demon based on Vanilla Ice. So far so Cyberpunk. It also shows the biotech chip you’ll be stealing from Arasaka and which contains Johnny Silverhand’s digital ghost.

We also get a look at the Mox, one of the gangs of Night City which protects sex workers from abuse, usually by way of a baseball bat to the brain. It’s not really a lesson you survive to learn. We’re also introduced to the Badlands, the area outside of Night City that’s basically a lawless desert populated by two conflicting Nomad (people fired and blacklisted from working and basically had to LARP Mad Max to survive) factions. Expect plenty of car combat.

Adam Smasher, a character from the pen and paper also got an impressive makeover from his pen and paper book art. This full cyborg psychopath used to be a mercenary who got blown up by a rocket and now works for Arasaka security as their in-house nuisance blender. Not the kind of guy you’d want to cross but we all know how video games work so your V might want to hold on to some heavy artillery.

Detouring from the game slightly; Cyberpunk Edgerunners, an anime by Trigger (of Gurren Lagann, Kill la Kill, and Little Witch Academia fame) is in production and will be launching in 2022. The anime will not share the story or characters of the game but will instead be an all-new thing. Other than that, we know nothing about what the show will entail but it’s Trigger so you can count on it being super stylish and full of action that makes “over the top” an understatement. Back to the game:

Braindance is, put simply, a recording of someone’s experience, including their feelings. It’s a fairly standard trope of the cyberpunk genre and even crops up in some sci-fi from time to time. Another new trailer shows two thugs robbing a store specifically to record a braindance so they can sell it and get paid extra for the adrenaline high. After playing through the footage once, the trailer cuts to editing gameplay, where you can scrub through a braindance recording and scan objects in the environment, pick out conversations and other things the person recording wasn’t paying attention to, and seemingly fly around area the recording is set in. You’ll be using these as an investigative tool, with the trailer even showing how you can even scan a monitor within the recording and see what the camera it was attached to saw.

That was a good look at some of the lore of Cyberpunk 2077 beyond the guns and cars. We even got introduced to some pretty far-out cyberpunk concepts like sensory recordings and Adam Smasher’s cool new look. And we can’t forget about the announcement of an anime made by the legendary studio, Trigger. Cyberpunk 2077 will be releasing on 18 November 2020.