this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Cyberpunk 2077
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That causes different issues.
It's cyberpunk. You're meant to have aim assist, hit confirmation, damage estimators etc. You're cybered, you're half machine, and losing your humanity to the machine to get those advantages is a core part of the setting aesthetic. Or alternatively, you don't get cyber, and you don't lose yourself to the machine, but then you struggle to survive when dealing with those who have. You see this play out in extremes in the cyberpsycho story arcs.
A cybered up merc is meant to be a small shark in an ocean of piranhas. An ocean where there are larger sharks, but also killer whales. A cybered up merc is meant to be a threat to most people on the street. But a gang of partly and non cybered folk should be a threat to the merc too. Maybe a merc could get lucky and tear up a gang by themself, but it would leave a power vacuum, and disturb a lot of people who had deals with that gang. It would be a story in and of itself. And any merc that kept killing wiping out entire gangs would eventually take a wrong step, and end up dead, or if they were good enough to not get killed by the gangs, they'd find themselves with a bullet in the back of the head, being put down by the corps who rely on the status quo in the streets to make their money.
The point being, the cyberpunk setting itself is not designed to be home to mass slice and dice combat. The slicers and dicers are the people who have lost themselves to the machine completely, the psychos that need to be put down.
tl;dr - Changing the difficulty wouldn't resolve my main issue with the game
It is a roleplaying game, with a very diverse set of possible builds and playstyles. Thats a major point of the OP article, that there are a wide array of possible Vs.
You absolutely can play through the game without getting any other cyberware beyond what the intro forces, you absolutely can play through the game as a maniac melee hack and slasher, and you can even do both those at the same time.
The last option there is more difficult, especially in the higher difficulties, but it can be done.
If your main problem is that... you can mow through factions and they don't really hunt you down, in response to you being an existential threat to them...
Well, if you want more depth there, there are mods that do rework and make more extensive both the police and gangs, how they interact with each other, and you.
I think the gang one is named 'They Will Remember', and pretty much does everything you're asking for.
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/19747
There are also mods that expand on the idea of the player being able to fully go into cyberpsychosis.
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/5646
There are other mods that rework how the Cops work... tons of different kinds of mods that rework many aspects of the game and gameplay, to make it into a much more dynamic and reactive experience, or that just fundamentally rework the entire way combat/cyberware/hacking/armor work, to be much more unforgiving.
Much like joytoys... the game can be whatever you want it to be.
Mods are great and all, but they're mods. The default setting, despite being called Cyberpunk, doesn't respond as a Cyberpunk setting should in response to many possible variations of V.
I stopped bothering with mods a long time ago, because I've found they're often too frustrating for me to be worth it. They break with updates, they don't play nice with each other, they often clash with the core storyline in unexpected ways, and they can annoying to install, and all of this has become more true since I moved to linux.
I think I'd love something like that first mod you mentioned if it were part of the base game, both because it sounds more fun and because it's truer to the genre the game is named after, but it's not enough to get me to install it and do another run through.