Broadly speaking, there are three basic types of bugs. Some are fun but harmless, like the GTA Trilogy bug where the player’s car inflates several times its size. Others can be downright game-breaking, while some are beneficial for players that learn to exploit them. It might be unsurprising to learn that Cyberpunk 2077’s been home to all three types.
Fortunately, the latest discovery falls into that third category. Some Cyberpunk 2077 players have found that they can completely nullify falling damage by opening the game’s photo mode.
According to Reddit user John-Killing, players can trigger the glitch by activating Photo Mode when loading a save. After that, activating photo mode in the air will nullify fall damage. This seems to work because it causes Cyberpunk 2077 to lose track of the player’s velocity. When the player exits Photo Mode, the game resets their velocity to zero. So, for example, if a player falls fifty feet, enters Photo Mode, then falls ten feet, the game only registers them as having fallen ten feet.
John-Killing posted about the bug Thursday night, though this isn’t the first time someone stumbled upon this particular exploit. John himself found it eight months ago, with a commenter noting they’d heard of it before but could never get it working. Still, the exploit's existence seemed to be news for many in the Cyberpunk 2077 subreddit.
In fairness to CD Projekt Red, glitches like this aren’t unique to Cyberpunk 2077. As one Reddit commenter pointed out, many games have similar glitches. For example, anything that interrupts a player’s movement could theoretically cause a game to lose track of their momentum. This includes everything from abusing the save/load system to simply opening the pause menu.
It’s also understandable that this kind of bug could slip through the cracks during play testing. After all, John-Killing still had to go through a specific process to make it work. Plus, not everyone’s been able to replicate it, even on the same version of the game. Still, unless the original poster is deliberately misleading people, it appears that the exploit still works in version 1.31 of Cyberpunk 2077’s PC release.
Cyberpunk 2077 released in a badly unfinished state in December 2020. The troubled launch once more drew attention to the AAA game industry’s addiction to crunch time and marketing-driven game development. 2021 saw CDPR gradually bringing the game up to a finished state. However, as this exploit shows, the studio hasn't quite managed to squash all the bugs.
Cyberpunk 2077 is out now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One with PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions in development.
