A nasty Johnny Silverhand bug nearly derailed my Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough, but this mod came to the rescue

When V started coughing up blood during a conversation with Johnny Silverhand, I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was really trying to drive home the urgency of my ticking time bomb of a brain. Throughout the next quest, and the one after that, my entire field of vision kept pulsing with the glitchy blue effect that highlighted Johnny popping into a conversation. It felt like a bit much, but I was really getting into the roleplaying, so I figured heading home to V's apartment for a night's rest would set me right. When it didn't, I asked my colleagues how they got rid of "Johnny vision" because clearly I'd missed something.

That's when I got the bad news from Phantom Liberty reviewer Ted Litchfield: "I don't think I've ever seen that happen before."

Uh oh.

"That sounds like a mondo bug." 

Uh-oh.

We investigated, and it turns out I'm not alone in catching this visual bug: during Cyberpunk's Automatic Love quest, other players have reported that talking to Johnny at a certain optional point causes his glitchy visual effect to stick. This problem actually dates back years and still hasn't been fixed in Cyberpunk 2077's many patches.

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After trying everything I could to get rid of the effect—sleeping, visiting a ripperdoc, jumping in and out of photo mode, swimming underwater—I reached out to CD Projekt Red, which confirmed it's a known bug.

"Our team is aware of this issue and working on a fix," the support team told me.

"In the meantime, we've found a workaround that can help:
1. Load an earlier save from before the conversation with Johnny after leaving the elevator.
2. During the conversation DO NOT select the "Fucked in the head worse than me" dialogue option.
3. Proceed with the quest as normal."

Unfortunately, that solution was a no-go for me: I'd stubbornly played about three hours of Cyberpunk 2077 with "Johnny vision" slowly driving me mad, and I wasn't about to throw away that progress and redo all of it. So I sought salvation from the only logical source: the mod community.

I found it almost immediately. The mod FX Begone, which supports the 2.0 update, targets and removes a ton of Cyberpunk's visual effects. It can disable the green hue of your scanner, the red glitchiness that clouds your screen when you take big damage, and, crucially, the "Johnny glitch," which removed the constant blue effect from my screen.

It's a cinch to install even without using the Nexusmods Vortex tool: all I had to do was drop a file in the "\Cyberpunk 2077\archive\pc\mod" folder.

I actually like Cyberpunk's glitchy visual effects when they're not permanently coating my screen, so I was thankful that FX Begone author CyanideX made the mod available piecemeal. On the files tab on Nexusmods, you can download small files to disable each visual effect individually. One 88 kilobyte download was all it took to get Johnny to chill out. My cyberbrain may still be a ticking time bomb, but at least I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in Night City with a headache.