You Can Turn Down Alcohol In Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 gives players a lot of choices, from how you approach missions to how you deal with interpersonal situations. This freedom extends to character-creator options you’ll never even think about again, like choosing your character’s teeth or genitals. But one bit of choice I wasn’t expecting, and which I can’t remember seeing in a game before, is that you can turn down alcohol when a character offers it to you.

Spoiler warning: There are vague spoilers for characters throughout Cyberpunk you might not have met yet if you’re early in the game. I’ve mostly left them unnamed, and it’s nothing major, but if you want to discover absolutely everything for yourself, you’ve been warned.

Cyberpunk portrays a gritty, underground world of the future, and as such there are a lot of scenes in bars. While I used to go out of my way to drink and visit bars in video games, I feel differently about all that now that I’m sober. On top of all the ways I’ve had to change my life and myself to stay sober, I’ve also had to ingrain the simple but wildly difficult habit of not picking up booze and putting it in my mouth. It’s taken a lot of conscious thought and practice; I get nervous when I have to carry someone’s drink for them in real life, even if I feel confident I won’t drink it. I still really like bars, both in games and in real life, but now they’re sites of anxiety as much as they’re fun. I worry I’ll be tempted to drink, or that people will comment uncomfortably on my choices. I don’t get upset when my video game characters drink or go to bars—breaking my sobriety in a game is not the same to me as breaking it in real life—but having the choice wrested from me can remind me of the compulsive habit my drinking once was.

My sobriety made me hyper-aware of an early Cyberpunk scene where a drink was poured for my character V. A woman I needed to meet with ordered drinks for both me and her. I braced myself for my character to drink, only to find during the course of our interaction that I was never forced to pick the drink up. When we moved to a new location, she chugged her drink, but I was able to leave mine untouched.

I had similar freedom in other scenes in which drinks were poured for me. In one instance, the game gave me a timed choice on whether to drink it or to say, “Thanks, I’ll pass.” In a later scene in which shots were handed out, I had the option to pour my drink out when everyone drank theirs, a moment that had its own animation.

At other times, I was given the option not to order a drink at all. When visiting the Afterlife bar with a companion, I could say, “Nothing for me” to the bartender. Sometimes characters commented on my choices: When I told one character “Don’t really feel like drinking,” my V followed up with “Don’t let that deter you,” to which the character replied in a friendly voice, “I don’t aim to.” Characters aren’t always so nice about it; in a side mission, I asked a companion, “Got some lemonade or something in that vein?” He replied, baffled,…