Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the HUD, at least potentially, is the comm system to the upper left, here indicating a connection to TBug. The compass indicates Jackie as J, the upper right shows mission objectives. Like I said, nothing to surprising.

(The blue arrow to the right indicates Kareznikov (?) duration. It seems that after taking the boost via inhaler, there’s a set amount of time during which bullet time can be triggered.)

I do hope that CDPR makes their HUD as customizable as it was in the Witcher though. I want to find the Scavenger Hiteout without the help of the Omniscient Floaty Thing ™.

The direction from which V is attacked is also indicated, as per industry standard.

Non-lethal is a thing. Which is very, very good. I always wanted to do stealth/non-lethal in an rpg in an interesting way (even going so far as to do an Illusion playthrough in Skyrim).

Picking up bodies is not particularly new, but if you can hide them to avoid detection, well, that has promise.

I’m somewhat torn on this. On the one hand, a case could be made that showing all those tidbits of info increase immersion by simulating what the player would know if they were V. On the other hand, at some point all these infos add up to a lot of red numbers crowding the screen.

Ok, where to begin?

I’m going to assume that you have seen the trailer so I won’t be going for the prettiest pics. Just a few things I’ve spotted. Be prepared for really blurry cuouts for illustrative purposes.

First off, the level of detail is mindboggling. That’s obvious. Perhaps less obvious due to its seamless nature is the number of animations. We have:

Jackie gesturing at the female (scavenged) body while holding a gun.

Jackie telling you to be quite while alerting you V to the presence of a scavenger in the next room.

A scavenger pushing a wheelchair.

Jackie trying to pry a door open.

Jackie dual-wielding guns from cover behind a corner.

Jackie bursting through the wall a beating up on the last scavenger standing. (It’s mostly out of sight, but it does look as if he goes on to manually pick up the gun.)

This pattern holds true for the entire trailer - new animations are seen throughout. The work that has gone into this must be enormous.

Just imagine how you would go about scripting any of the above scenes with the animation suite from Fallout 4 …

Not much to see here until the actual functions of the stats are known in more detail. Cool is a cross between reputation and charisma.

Just in case you’re tardy to the party (even tardier than me, that is): in a departure from the source material, there will be no classes. The source material is a pen and paper rpg though, where a diverse class system makes much more sense than in a singleplayer game. A “fluid class system” as CDPR calls it make much more sense here, imo. Assuming of course that interesting specializations are possible and meaningful. None of that master smith+alchimist+enchanter+swordsman+thief+archer nonsense that’s made all my characters play alike in Skyrim.

At this point though, I’m wonderin in what way - if at all - the fluid class system adds an additional layer on top of simply leveling, picking perks, or implants. In Witcher 3, we had to specialize as well, but I wouldn’t call that a class system.

Unsurprisingly, V’s name is “missing data”, to be entered by the player.

His/her date of birth is listed as 2054 though, which would make V a mere 23 years old in 2077. I smell a good story about how he/she teamed up with grizzled old street veteran Jackie - particularly since Jackie is clearly a Night City resident whereas V is new to the sprawl.

The backstory menu features submenus for Childhood Hero, Key Life Event, and Why Night City? It’s not clear what impact these choices will have, but I’m hoping for something more than alternative dialogue lines. The voiceover does seem promising though … (”What you choose here will unlock different possibilities later on.”)

While the choices are sufficiently vague to allow for roleplaying, it’s clear that our character is a street kid. Key Life Events do not include “not getting second cyberpony for birthday”.

I also wonder whether Education and Prior Convictions, left blank for now, will actually serve a function or just exist for aesthetic purposes. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but given that V just moved to Night City, this may be a new and incomplete data set. (On the lower right, it says Night City Recognition Program - perhaps suggesting an automated data gathering protocol.)

(Played backwards. Works better than expected.)