Cyberpunk 2077: Which Difficulty Should You Choose?

The highly-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 is finally here, and the game has a fairly standard assortment of difficulty levels that let you tune the enemies’ threat levels to your liking. Based on your choice, the denizens of Night City can either be incredibly lethal or ridiculously easy to take down. There isn’t one best choice, but there are a few recommendations we can make based on your history with RPGs like this and your desired experience. Here’s everything you need to know about the difficulty levels in Cyberpunk 2077.

Which Cyberpunk 2077 Difficulty is the Best?

There are four difficulty levels in Cyberpunk 2077, and each of them is listed below.

• Easy – The right choice for players who just want to sit back and enjoy the story. Combat will not pose a challenge.
• Normal – Enemies will have all the tools at their disposal to take V on, but primarily only enemies at a higher level will prove a challenge.
• Hard – Combat will be a substantial challenge. The effective use of Perks, cyberware, combat gadgets and consumables will be essential to survival.
• Very Hard – Buckle up for a serious challenge. Careful character development and clever use of items, game mechanics, and the environment will be necessary to help V make it on the streets on Night City.

If you only care for the story and characters and do not want to spend a lot of time worrying about shooting and fighting, choose Easy. This mode is intended for players who come to Cyberpunk 2077 solely for the narrative and don’t care too much about combat. Normal is the standard difficulty, where most enemies will be fairly weak but higher level foes can still be deadly. This is a fine difficulty setting, but the combat really starts to shine once you bump it up a bit.

If you’ve played RPGs like Fallout and The Outer Worlds, we recommend you choose Hard. Cyberpunk 2077 is a deep RPG, and have an extra layer of difficulty during combat encounters will encourage you to be more creative with your equipment and utilize the full range of your toolset. Finally, if you’re an RPG expert and are looking for a real challenge, choose Very Hard. In this mode, your character build is just as important as your gear, so you’ll have to make careful decisions about V’s abilities and weapons. We don’t recommend this mode for a first playthrough unless you really know what you’re doing.

Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia. A next-gen version of the game is currently in development for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.