New Cyberpunk 2077 Mod Lets You Add an Iconic Feature from Watch Dogs

Ever since CDPR added modding support tools to Cyberpunk 2077,  the modding community have gone on to build a pretty robust mod library for the game.

While most of them add to the game in interesting ways, there are not many that enhance the ‘immersion’ factor to the degree that was promised by CDPR. Now, however, there is a new mod on the block that does that by bringing an iconic Watch Dogs feature to Night City.

Quite a few of Cyberpunk’s mechanics involve hacking into enemy databases and a variety of different objects in the game’s environment like cameras, vending machines etc. But in the case of the Watch Dogs series, things are quite different as the games focus solely on hacking. The game’s narrative follows a group of hackers as they contend with a corrupt government and all the institutions that thrive in one. Thus, one of the more interesting mechanics in the game is the ability to scan any NPC walking around and glean all the salient points of their life story.

Cyberpunk players can now add this very feature to the game by simply installing a mod.

The Kiroshi Opticals Crowd Scanner mod, created by modders Alien and BadAssGodFather, gives players a feature that lets them use V’s scanner to scan all the NPCs walking around the city and learn about their childhood, personality, significant life events and more. All the information generated for the NPCs is procedural but not at all random; the mod makes ingenious use of Cyberpunk’s base code to give each NPC an interesting backstory basis their appearance. So, an NPC in a snazzy corpo suit will have come from a life of privilege while an NPC in shabbier clothing will have a lot more negative life events and so on.

For those wondering, the mod doesn’t bring much to the game in terms of gameplay changes. But it definitely brings more depth and realism to a city that is still work-in-progress.

One of the more pleasing aspects of the mod is how it’s open for translation to several languages in addition to English – players just have to edit the text.reds file in the mod to replace the English strings with a language of their choice. The mod page also contains several helpful instructions as well as information on how to translate using gender-neutral and gendered languages.

You can check out the mod on its Nexus Mods page here where it joins the (currently) small group of mods that bring significant changes to Night City. The group includes the Borderlands mod, the audio mix mod and more.

About Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by CD Projekt, based on video game designer Mike Pondsmith’s game series.

Set in a dystopian cyberpunk universe, the player assumes the role of “V,” a mercenary in the fictional Californian city known as “Night City,” where they deal with the fallout from a heist gone wrong that results in an experimental cybernetic “bio-chip” containing an engram of the legendary rock star and terrorist Johnny Silverhand (played by Keanu Reeves) threatening to slowly overwrite V’s mind; as the story progresses V and Johnny must work together to find a way to be separated and save V’s life.