Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most hyped-up releases of 2020, and it became even more famous after the catastrophically broken game that players got access to on release.
Since then, the devs at CD Projekt Red have been working non-stop to fix the game. By now, it’s perfectly playable.
But there’s always room for improvement when it comes to massive open-world adventures.
Vanilla Cyberpunk 2077 looks terrific, yet there’s a lot you can do to customize your visual experience with mods.
Join me as we take a look at the very best visual upgrades you can download for a truly custom style.
It’s impossible not to make the connection between Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077.
Blade Runner was an iconic movie that shaped the way we look at the future forever.
It brought with it a dark, dystopic vibe hinging on dramatic lighting and saturated colors – and now you can get the same vibe in Night City.
MangaClub’s Cyberrunner is a ReShade preset aiming to make the game more like Blade Runner by making colors a bit colder, increasing contrast, and more.
Even if you don’t like Blade Runner, this is miles ahead of the washed-out look found in vanilla.
Like many modern AAA games, Cyberpunk 2077 is full of little details that aim to reproduce the human experience to extreme lengths – including the pupil dilation and contraction that lets us see under a blinding sun or in the shade.
The thing is, this is a very complex system that’s poorly represented by simply blinding your character whenever they exit an indoor space during the day.
The Eye Adaptation Fix by Dravic makes it feel natural and less immersion-breaking by making the change much less dramatic.
You’ll still notice a difference when you move between different lighting, but it’ll be much smoother.
Light reflecting on surfaces realistically has been one of the great graphical advancements of the last few years, and for some people, the more reflective, the better.
Shiny AF Night City by MJ_Ehsan quite simply makes everything brighter and more reflective. It looks ethereal and mysterious, like being in a dream… or like having to walk home after getting your pupils dilated at the ophthalmologist’s.
Not only are reflections more intense, but there are many more reflective surfaces.
It gives the city a bit of a fever dream aesthetic that I love.
Do you get noticeable tunnel vision every time you crouch?
Does your eyesight get cloudy the closer to the floor your head is?
Yeah, me neither.
I get the developers were trying to recreate the feeling of skulking in the shadows by darkening the edges of your vision upon crouching, but it just doesn’t work.
Even worse, it breaks immersion.
This nifty mod by OREZXX will remove the vignette from your crouching perspective altogether.
Back in the days of CRT TVs and resolutions lower than 720p, you needed to make raindrops thick if you wanted them to be noticeable on-screen – and some developers never outgrew the habit.
Despite running in 4K and showing an uncanny amount of detail, Cyberpunk 2077 has somewhat crude rain. Creator AK47OG took note and worked on fixing it through this Better/Finer Rain mod, making each droplet much thinner for a more realistic look.
Coupled with the Climate Change mod, this has the potential to completely transform Night City into something sublime.
Stand up, and look down at your feet. What do you see?
Most people will see everything from their chest down – so why can’t I do that in Cyberpunk 2077?
What’s the deal with only barely seeing your feet?
I’m sure CD Projekt Red had their reasons to make the first-person camera that way – but luckily, modders don’t have to walk the line between function and immersion with quite so much care.
With this mod by creator Bonaniki, you can remind yourself of how buff or curvy you are at any time by looking down.
You can also move the camera around without turning your body, which is always helpful.
Those of you struggling to keep the game running without your six-year-old gaming laptop going up in flames will find a lot to love in the Ultra Enhanced ReShade.
This preset created by SrGamerio aims to improve visual fidelity and highlight details without your FPS tanking below the 20s.
If you’ve got one or two frames per second to spare, it’s definitely worth trying out.
It makes the image crisper but takes care not to oversharpen to avoid a “gamey” look.
It also brings out the color of Night City, essentially removing the washed-out “smoggy” look and helping you appreciate the detail that went into designing the game world.
On the other hand, if you’re running a state-of-the-art machine, there are ways to take things to the next level.
This fantastic tweak by creator SJBOX will increase draw distance so you can make out more details on objects far away, such as particles and high-resolution textures.
This is especially noticeable in long, straight city streets or out in the Badlands.
It can make the game much more immersive for those with a keen eye, and it’ll drastically improve your screenshots.
Just keep in mind it’ll put a noticeable extra strain on your rig.
This isn’t so much a mod as it is an update to one of the core systems driving Cyberpunk 2077 graphics on Nvidia cards – specifically the GeForce RTX 20XX and 30XX series.
DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, and it allows for much higher visual fluidity at a lower performance cost.
Vanilla Cyberpunk 2077 runs DLSS 2.1, but the more recent 2.2 version can help your game run smoothly and solve issues like “ghosting,” which creates a sort of afterimage on fast-moving objects like car antennae and tail lights.
If you’re playing Cyberpunk 2077 with a compatible Nvidia graphics card, installing this should be your top priority.
If your monitor or video card can’t achieve real HDR, but you still want a crisper image and better lighting effects, consider the Cyberpunk Autonomous ReShade by Vanguard1776.
This remarkable collection of visual tweaks and after-effects mimics the look of high-dynamic-range imaging with smart lighting and techniques originally developed for use in Unreal Engine 4.
Most of it is too complex for most users to grasp, but the results speak for themselves.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
