Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 sneakily adds a 'look at your cool gun' button
Every weapon in Cyberpunk 2077 has a special animation that plays the first time you pull it out. V will twirl a pistol on their finger, spin the cylinder on a revolver, break open a shotgun to check for shells, or something even more elaborate for Night City's iconic weapons. But after you've admired those animations once, they're gone—short of unequipping and re-equipping a weapon, you're stuck with a faster, simpler unholstering animation after that initial treat.
At least, that was the case in the original version of Cyberpunk 2077. As of the 2.0 update, you can now press a button to see those cool "first equip" weapon animations on command.
On PC there are multiple ways to draw your weapon in Cyberpunk, and this hidden command works with all of them. There's the "holster/unholster weapon" command, which by default is bound to the B key, the "cycle weapon" command bound to left Alt, and the 1-3 number keys for drawing your three equipped weapons directly. Tap any of those keys and you'll draw a weapon using its standard quick animation, assuming you've already used it once. But hold the B key or 1/2/3, and V will perform the full animated flourish while drawing.
Here's the difference in action.
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Holding the cycle weapon command (left Alt by default) doesn't work quite the same way, because a long press is already bound to an action: bringing up the weapon wheel overlay. But there's still a way to use Alt to see the "first equip" animation. Instead of holding it, do a double tap, and voila: guns be twirlin'.
I do wish Cyberpunk 2077 had a dedicated button for admiring your weapon from all angles like some other recent shooters. In Warhammer 40K: Darktide, for example, I like pressing a key and then moving my mouse to make my character hold up his boltgun like he's presenting it in class during show-and-tell—it's a nice way to pass the time in an elevator. But Cyberpunk giving us an easy way to rewatch these unique animations is great, too, and is actually something players were asking for as far back as December 2020 when the game first came out.
In May 2021, after it was clear CD Projekt had other priorities with its Cyberpunk patches, modder djkovrik released the Always First Equip mod that offered a number of custom options for triggering the special animations as often as you wanted, including via a dedicated keybind. That mod's mostly redundant now, but it put in some good work over its lifetime—more than 350,000 players downloaded it over the last two years.
With easily rewatching weapon animations now a built-in feature, and new guns dropping in Phantom Liberty, I hope we have a whole bunch of new first-person animation roundup videos in our future.