Cyberpunk 2077 – How to Watson (or Not) Przewodnik

This is a guide with a very limited scope: what to do with Watson and how long to do it? There is no “Prawidłowy” odpowiedź, but I’ll offer some considerations and then advise that you do you. This is based on the 1.52 skrawek, so earlier patch levels will behave a bit differently in detail, but will be broadly the same. There will be minor spoilers for the start of the game, but nothing you wouldn’t find out on your own after playing for an hour or so.

Starting the Game

No matter which lifepath or dialog options you choose, you end up in the same place by the same means:

• You meet up and team up with Jackie Welles
• You two raid a Scav haunt to rescue Sandra Dorsett, after which Jackie will borrow your car
• The next morning, you are contacted by Regina Jones (the fixer in Watson) to let you know she has work
• Jackie will return your car when you talk to him at the food stand
• You end up in Viktor Vektor’s ripperdoc clinic with new hands and new eyes (and a 21K debt to pay off)
• You will have a main mission to speak with Jackie (who you left out front with Misty)
• You will have a side mission from T-Bug to pick up a quickhack daemon over in Kabuki

On your way out to meet Jackie at the food stand, Regina will contact you just about as soon as you reach the fast-travel point outside your apartment (if you look at your map and set the filter to “Praca,” you should also have four fixer gigs available and a couple of other side mission markers). You’ll pick up the “Beat on the Brat” mission from Coach Fred (whether you interact with him or not). You can also pick up a free iconic pistol at the 2nd Amendment store in front of the elevator if you pay attention to your journal (CDPR didn’t make this one real obvious). If you search around your megabuilding, you can pick up a few hundred eddies, a couple of MaxDocs and BounceBacks, and various bits of junk that you can deconstruct for crafting components, or sell at either the dropbox outside your apartment, the gun store, or Coach Fred.

While you can sort of avoid meeting up with Jackie at the food stand, you really do want to make that visit to Victor with him in order to get those first cyberware implants since he will do those on credit, they will be useful with the weapons you have, this will remove those pesky “Cyberware Malfunction” messages and glitchy graphics, and Jackie will return your car.

Your initial inclination is probably going to be to follow up on the main mission, which will get you pointed to Dexter DeShawn’s missions. You’ll eventually end up completing The Heist mission, which ends the prologue, unlocks the rest of Night City, and gets you into the main game.

Remember that you are confined to Watson until The Heist is completed. That is the reason for this guide: how long should you stay/play in Watson before completing Dex’s missions?

Leaving Watson (or bee-lining the main story)

There are some very good reasons to head off to do Dex’s missions and The Heist, not the least of which is that the whole city opens up to you, you’ll have Johnny in your head to make his occasional appearances, you’ll eventually get introduced to all of V’s potential romance options. Dobrze, all except Judy, who you meet in Watson during one of Dex’s missions, but you can’t do anything with her until well after The Heist is complete. You’ll have tons of vehicles to buy, new apartments to buy, new gear to buy, new stores to shop at, more gangoons to kill, more side jobs, Wiesz, że … the whole game.

This is not to say that you can’t play around a bit in Watson while doing Dex’s stuff, so it’s not really a “beeline or not” kind of proposition, but mostly to point out that at one extreme, you beeline you way through and in exchange for doing that, the rest of the game opens up to you quickly.

You don’t really miss out on anything in Watson as much as you put it on the back burner to be picked up later.

Staying in Watson

At the other extreme is staying in Watson for as long as possible before tackling Dex’s missions. Regina Jones will have 22 gigs for you (I believe this is more than any of the other fixers) and there are ton of NCPD Scanner hustles in Watson. You’ll need to complete all of those and Regina’s 22 missions to get the “To elementarne” osiągnięcie, but there are a couple of Watson side gigs that won’t appear until after The Heist, so you cannot pick up that achievement right off the bat.

Post-1.5, Regina’s (and other fixers) gigs are not all immediately available. You’ll complete them a few at a time, then get a message that there are more gigs available, then do those, then get another message, i tak dalej.

The NCPD Scanner hustles which appear on your map will depend on your Street Cred level, so they, zbyt, are not all there at once, but they will appear when your Street Cred is high enough. Note that there are some scanner hustles which involve retrieving some loot at a location other than where the initial NCPD icon appeared. Those NCPD missions will not count as completed until you have retrieved that loot, but you can find them in your journal. If you forget or need a marker, just go to your journal and make that mission active.

Note that Regina’s Cyberpsycho missions will not kick in until you leave Misty’s after that first visit to Viktor, so the Watson cyberpsychos won’t spawn until you get that phonecall. For some of those missions you’ll be able to pick up some of the info that you’ll need to send to Regina. This can be handy if you goofed, your target is busy bleeding out (’tis but a flesh wound!), and you’re quick on getting back to her. Otherwise it’s just an interesting side effect of early exploration.

The “Dirty Biz” job (retrieve the raw braindance) is a bit bugged, at least as of patch 1.52. You can waltz in and grab the quest object with zero opposition at any time before that job becomes available. When the job becomes available, you cannot tell Regina, “Tak, I already have that” and just take it to the drop point. You must go work your way through the Maelstrom gangoons to the room where you found it and then get out to take it to the dropbox.

OK, the upsides of playing around in Watson are building Street Cred (there is lots to be had, especially if you farm the respawning gangoons), gaining levels, getting better gear, getting crafting specs, and earning eddies, of which you’ll need lots to get the better cyberware upgrades. Regina’s missions, the NCPD hustles, and the Cyberpsychos will take about 15 hours if you just focus on those (tack on a couple more hours to account for blasting the gangoons who look at you funny). You can get about 14 Lub 15 levels off Regina’s gigs, the NCPD hustles, and the five or so Cyberpsychos, perhaps more because I’m not counting the XP bonus for sleeping.

As far as the Watston cyberware goes,

• Viktor will not sell you the top-end Kiroshi (3 mod slots and he’s the only vendor) until you pay him back the 21K you owe him.
• You can pick up the Legendary Sub-Dermal Armor (+300 zbroja) once you’ve hit 30 Street Cred and have the eddies. It’s the best cyberware armor in the game, but you can still get the Common and Uncommon variants (+50 I +100) from most of the ripperdocs in Watson (including Viktor).
• You can get the Legendary Raven Microcyber Mk. IV cyberdeck (10 RAM, 8 Buffer, I 6 quickhack slots) z 40 Uliczny kredyt. The Raven isn’t the best cyberdeck in the game, but it’s an excellent early/mid-game deck and will do quite well for you until you can get the really preem decks in Pacifica.
  • Regina will have a semi-related gig (“Last Login”) that will get you a discount with that ripperdoc if you handle the post-mission dialog correctly (you can also pick up Sandra Dorsett’s databank while you’re doing that gig, but you won’t need it for quite a while). “Last Login” comes up at around the halfway point among her gigs.
• The Legendary Adrenaline Booster and the Epic Bioconductor can be picked up from the clinic in Kabuki. You can’t install the booster until you have 18 Body or the Bioconductor until you have 15 Ciało, but you can still buy them (the Bioconductor requires 43 Uliczny kredyt).
• Both the Legendary Ballistic Coprocessor and Legendary Smart Link can be had in Watson (Victor has one and the other is at the Kabuki clinic). Use the Ballistic for Power weapons (ricochet) or the Smart Link for Smart weapons (homing projectiles). You can only install one, but you can swap at any ripperdoc.

Note that except for Royce’s “Chaos” pistol, the couple of other Watson iconics for the weapon wall in your stash are specs and you’ll need to craft them first.

All told, there are some good reasons for staying put in Watson for a while. Regina will not have any vehicles for sale until after The Heist, so you’ll be stuck with your starting vehicle and anything you can steal/carjack. You’ll get a reasonable taste of what’s out there,or enough to have a decent idea of which you want to purchase later. If you’re going for the “Autojock” osiągnięcie, you’ll need to buy all of them anyway.

Wniosek

W sumie, I have found it works out a bit better to clear everything in Watson before tackling The Heist, mostly due to the extra levels and better gear that you can bring out into the rest of Night City. It’s not that you can’t grind Street Cred, poziomy, and eddies elsewhere, but only that it’s a bit more convenient if you stay in Watson. It makes the rest of Night City perhaps a bit easier if you are playing on Hard or Very Hard difficulties, but won’t make much difference on Easy or Normal.