“Cyberpunk 2077” confirms it won’t “complete” its craziest side quest

Cyberpunk 2077 is gearing up to start promoting its upcoming Phantom Liberty DLC sometime soon, and many fans are hoping that in addition to new content, the DLC can feed into some side quests that left players stuck in the base game. Now we know that one of its greatest mysteries will never be solved.

Easily one of the most memorable and interesting side quests in Cyberpunk 2077 is the story of the Peralez’s, a Night City power couple whose husband is running for mayor. It starts relatively standard, they want you to investigate the death of the last mayor via Braindance data, and it’s hooked into the first mission where you meet River.

Then things get pretty weird.

Later, you are called back to their luxurious penthouse and are supposed to investigate something else. Jefferson Peralez claims someone invaded their house and he shot them, but then he passed out and when he woke up, there was no evidence that anything happened.

V’s investigation reveals that there is a secret monitoring station inside the apartment that Peralez never knew about, and further research suggests that the two are some sort of experiment in human mind trickery. Some people mess with their heads to change their personalities and mess with their memories.

You discover that this does not appear to be political. You are warned not to interfere any further by a mysterious presence that is heavily implied to be a rogue AI that has somehow emerged from beyond the blackwall to mess with things in Night City. This entity is personified in a man who oversees the final segment of the mission from afar, known simply as Mr. Blue Eyes, with glowing blue eyes. You can either tell the truth or hide it from Jefferson, but it doesn’t matter. The Peralez burn all contact with you anyway, and you need to find out what just happened.

It turns out you’ll never know.

Pawel Sasko, mission leader on Cyberpunk, was asked if the mission would be “done” later, and he says that it is already done. That the quest was designed to be unsettling and ambiguous on purpose as part of its narrative design. This wasn’t an “oh shit, we didn’t have time to finish this” situation, they really wanted it to be a mystery. And that’s part of what makes this story so damning, because you don’t have clear answers, and you feel like there’s a looming danger out there that you can shoot or hack to death. Many players, myself included, were hoping that perhaps the idea of ​​a rogue AI lurking in Night City would be explored in future content, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to be the case.

I don’t know, maybe so is better this way. I mean, it has stuck with me all this time after all, which is more than I can say for the hundreds of other missions I’ve run in games like these, so I guess it did its job.

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