I’m so sorry but this might actually be the worst game of all time for you.

It’s dripping with sexuality in ways that are omnipresent and unavoidable, and the in-game toggle just blurs out genitals. Doesn’t help with the endless everything else.

Combat and looting is like 80% of the game, and it’s impossible to complete at least half of the missions in the game (including the main story) without doing significant amounts of both.

The other 20% of the game is largely pointless conversation where your choices literally don’t matter til it railroads you into selecting the only correct dialog option (or one of a few identical ones) or one that instantly puts you into a forced fight.

Most of the mods are either cosmetic or are tweaks (triple jump is life)

It’s kind of a mid game and I’ll probably never actually even finish it.

1.) You can cover up boobs and genitals but there’s a ton of sexual advertising, sex workers, sexual violence.

2.) The game is mostly combat and looting.

3.) The plot is mostly on-rails, most dialogue options have the same results.

4.) I think I installed the “welcome to night city” modpack.

you should probably skip this one. killing and maiming is basically the only way you interact with the world and there’s one scene in particular where you essentially go into a cyber-brothel

I can really only comment on how integral combat and looting is to the game and the answer is very. There are clever ways you can navigate a lot of side quests especially to avoid combat, whether by stealth, hacking or finding “hidden” paths through maps, but the main storyline is a whole lot of shooting or shredding people in your way.

Looting is also vital. It’s basically an RPG in that regard. In addition to looting money, junk to sell, upgrades to your gear, etc, you can break down stuff you find and use it for crafting too (which may or may not be appealing, but crafting is quasi-optional). Gear management is less important on lower difficulties anyway.

Overall, I think the game has fantastic design elements and the gameplay loop is satisfying. The story is also, in some ways, very nice, tight, contained narrative that doesn’t explode into a Final Fantasy-type “main character is the only thing between all of existence and extinction”. But, as a cyberpunk tale, it really, really lacks the punk part of the equation. You can literally do quests for cops (most of them are side things, not even quests, more just combat opportunities, you can just ignore).

Combat is pretty integral, but you can avoid some of it by being a hacker. Looting I guess you can mostly or entirely avoid it but it’ll make the game a little harder. There are some scenes that take place at parties or whatever and you have to talk to people, but you are given some limited dialog options and the game will progress regardless of the choice you made. You may just get a different outcome.

Looting is how you get new stuff outside of buying with credits and quest rewards. It’s the cheapest way to get new gear. Some dialogue choices can get you into trouble.

I got bored tbh. It’s GTA minus the environmental detail. Eventually you can only do so many “go here, shoot guy, return” kind of missions.

CP was extremely forgettable for me, like I finished the main quest and did most of the additional content and then immediately stopped thinking about it. The expansion or DLC might be worthwhile but I believe they never released a robust set of mod tools for people to make their own content and the mods that do exist are all fairly superficial.

Storywise, Keanu Reeves fucked it up. Playing it again after getting bored, for the Phantom Liberty expansion, I liked his character a lot more - while it barely ever tries to do more than a surface-level “I hate corpos because they’re mean and not cool, which is why I’m mean and cool”, it’s not like he’s actually wrong.

But having him there surely took away vast amounts of care from everything else - the really easy example being how Jackie, the starting Best Bud, is totally sidelined by wanting him out of the way for More Keanu.

But what they do with More Keanu is mostly just More Bitter Quips with V slowly going from “you’re literally the biggest loser in history, you fucking nuked Arasaka and it did nothing” to “hmm, interesting” - while Jackie’s dream was a nihilistic heroic fantasy, it’s one that actually could change into something pretty cool over the game, and unlike V he has an actual personality and sense of the world, which is vital to cyberpunk. Even JC Denton had something of a soul, and his flatness and distance were deliberate things done to him by his childhood and training - he could carry a conversation and be the one saying the most interesting part of it.

Phantom Liberty is a big step up in writing and delivery, and it even manages to give V some vague ideology… alas not particularly good ones.

The ending was kinda neat, albeit totally stupid. Killer end credits song. Would have been a great movie (since it’s basically Escape from Night City), and they used Idris Elba with much more restraint. Needed a Snake Plisken cameo.

In response to the questions:

• Didn’t use the setting, but I imagine a lot of characters will still be wearing very few clothes, just covering up/censoring any boobs or genitals. Game feels pretty male-gazey in general.
• Combat and looting is like 90% of the game
• Can’t answer
• Used a mod to let me cheat and add in infinite money to buy all the iconic weapons I’d missed at the shop that was added in the DLC. Oh, also the really expensive cars. It worked, no complaints.
• Not really. The story and writing are incredibly weak, which means it relies on its moment to moment gameplay, which becomes quite formulaic and stale after you’ve progressed a decent way into the game and your build has solidified. The way the systems work mean that the gameplay gets easier as you progress, too, which results in the final boss fight being easier than some random scrap with scrubs 20 minutes into the game.

I’d say it’s not worth it. And I say this as someone who has beaten it three times (at launch, after the anime came out, after the DLC came out and “fixed” (it didn’t) things).

I’ve heard it’s improved substantially but playing it in the state it was at launch was disappointing and I have no desire to revisit it.

Nudity and sex can be turned off, and its effective. The only exception would be some very revealing clothing in some clubs, if that is stressful to you. Combat and looting are like… a VERY significant part of the game but as mentioned by another reply its not all FPS combat. Much of the fighting in my most recent playthrough was quickhacking and swords. There’s quite a bit of conversation in the game, with many quest objectives in the short-term being “meet with this person and talk at this club.” The dialogue options for the most part don’t change the end result, and any skill-checks that check your stats will provide you with a small amount of extra info or banter rather than changing the course of the whole story. I never played with many mods, except for one time when a gun I was really fond of decided to vanish. I hacked it back into the game with a mod and that was helpful, so you may want to keep a mod like that in your back pocket in case of glitches like that. I had an incredible time overall, with this being the first truly open-world game with RPG elements that I actually enjoyed. Cried at the ending I got on both of my playthroughs, was a really fun experience through and through.