This new Cyberpunk 2077 texture mod makes Night City more eye-popping than ever
Cyberpunk 2077 has been criticised for a lot of things in its time, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone accusing it of not being pretty enough (if anything, the reverse might be true). But that hasn't stopped a modder from putting together the Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked Project, which aims to thoroughly de-blurify Night City's many surfaces, giving you the pin-sharp dystopia you deserve.
It comes from an author named Halk Hogan, the same person who made the excellent Witcher 3 HD Reworked Project, and it affects "many various environment textures occurring through whole Night City and Badlands," including "roads, walls, terrain, dirt, graffiti, vegetation, objects and more". You can see it in action in the video above, in which trees miraculously transform into higher-resolution trees while the soundtrack goes ham in the background.
The mod has two versions: Ultra Quality and Balanced. Ultra Quality, as you might have surmised, gives your GPU no quarter whatsoever, with textures so sharp they'll have your eyes out. It's "highly recommended" for anyone playing at 1440p or 4K, but "can use up to max 800MB more VRAM" than the base game. Then again, if you're the kind of person hunting around for mods to make Cyberpunk more visually demanding, your machine can probably handle it.
The Balanced version is a little more reasonable, losing some of the extra in order to achieve a mod payload that will only need an extra 400MB VRAM from your graphics card.
Both versions are downloadable over at the Nexus Mods page linked above, and installing them could hardly be easier. All you need to do is download your mod version of choice, unpack it, and move its contents over to the main game folder for Cyberpunk. Then, voila, the most beautiful dirt you've ever seen.
Whether or not Cyberpunk 2077 HD Reworked ends up on our list of the best Cyberpunk mods remains to be seen, but I'm always equal parts dazzled and mystified by the modders who create projects like these. No one's ever made a game that modders haven't tried to make more eye-searingly detailed, and to their credit, the results can sometimes be very impressive.