The screen’s gone black. There’s a little loading bar in the top right hand corner, and occasionally the darkness gives way to momentary visions of a chrome body shell floating in limbo, accompanied by a low robotic whirr.
I’ve overcooked it, just a little bit.
Suddenly my view of the car comes back. It’s jiggling about, blurrily textured as though it’s travelling at the speed of light, between an empty void of sky and a featureless brown-ish disc. My futuristic phone rings.
“Hello V,” says Alex from Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC, “Surprised?” I can’t lie to her. I am a bit taken aback by this casual chat I’m now having while glitching out at between 600 and 200 miles per hour below the game’s map. I pick the response that reads “Didn’t expect this, I guess.”
In the seat next to me, Keanu Reeves says nothing. I think I’ve scrambled his brain.
The above is what can happen to you when you cock up a flying car speed record attempt/bungee jump in Cyberpunk 2077 – something that’s now possible thanks to mods. It’s easily done. You see, when you take off, set the thrusters of your Quadra Type-66 or Aerondight into drone mode, and attempt to fly vertically upwards as fast as possible, you need to make sure you stop before you hit the glitch ozone layer.
I couldn’t work out the exact point this flying car Bermuda Triangle kicks in, but it seemed to be around 19 kilometres away from the map objectives on my HUD. You’ll definitely know when you hit it, because it’s hard to miss that sudden screen eclipse, and the silence with which it drowns out the dull roar that’s accompanied your ascent. The key is not to push it too far.
I was managing to hit somewhere between 1000 and 1100 miles per hour on the way up, but the way down is where the real speed lies. Not to go all Mythbusters on you, but gravity, innit. Once you’ve stopped short of the danger zone, look down. You’ll see Night City far, far, below, sitting at the centre of the square of land where I reckon about 90% of Cyberpunk 2077 takes place. Surrounded on all sides by a vast expanse of featureless nothingness, it looks like a model on a table.
Then, the fun part starts. Descend as quickly as you can, and if you’re in one of the game’s faster cars, you’ll watch your speed balloon above 1000mph and continue to climb. 1200. 1300. 1400. You’ll have to work to keep it rising, though. The cars drop fastest when their thrusters are facing directly downwards, and the combination of wind resistance and drone mode’s uber sensitive pitch and yaw controls at these speeds make it easy to scrub precious momentum by dipping into a roll or flip.
To get the most out of it, you need to walk the tightrope of an airborne mechanical bull rider. Every shift in your movement has to be instantaneous and precise. Every correction as perfect as you can get it, rather than overtipping so you’re risking defeat in the opposite direction. I was utterly terrible at first, but just about started to get the hang of it by the time I was deep into the far too long period of time I spent messing around with this.
The result was the game rewarding me with a max speed of 1618 mph on my third attempt with the Aerondight, after trying out the pint-sized MaiMai hatchback and a motorbike in case their smaller size translated to a faster drop (it didn’t). I’ve got no doubt that someone who doesn’t spend the entire thing giggling and gently shouting ‘whhhhheeeeeeeeee’ could better that mark.
This is why I’m calling on the International Olympic Committee. Make this a sport at 2028’s LA games. Get some of the world’s foremost athletes to download Cyberpunk’s Let There Be Flight and Vehicle Speed Unlimiter mods. Stick Johnny Silverhand in their passenger seats thanks to the patch before the one that’s just been delayed, so he can occasionally cry out ‘woah this is too fast’ or ‘hang on a minute, where are we going?’ when he wakes up from his naps.
Let them make an utter mockery of the laws of physics. Then, see who’s managed the fastest speed, and who’s accidentally banished themselves to the glitch shadow dimension in their pursuit of cyberglory.
