A fan-made mod will add multiplayer co-operative play to Cyberpunk 2077 this week. Polygon reports that NightCoop, which lets up to eight players share a single Night City, enters open beta on October 23 at 11 a.m. EDT after a run of closed tests.
A trailer released ahead of the beta sets out how the mod handles the single-player game's systems. According to Polygon, NightCoop synchronises the world so that combat and stealth function for every player in a session, including the case of a player activating their Sandevistan: the time-slowing cyberware leaves the other players seeing an afterimage, the effect the Netflix anime uses. Dialogue and quest choices are put to a vote, and the majority option plays out for everyone.
The trailer closes on a two-player heist, with one player working cameras and drones while the other mounts a frontal assault.
NightCoop's website states that the mod also supports player-versus-player combat, which the session host can toggle on or off. PvP shootouts take both players' stats and gear into account, but damage is evened out between players at different levels.
How the mod is set up
- Players install NightCoop and the RED4ext modding library.
- The host either loads an existing save or starts a new co-op game.
- Guests join the host's game as their own V.
The mod arrives in the same week as an official update. CD Projekt Red is releasing Cyberpunk 2077's free 2.5 update on October 22, timed to the release of the second season of the Netflix series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and has confirmed that it adds new quests, a perk that enables dual wielding and mod support on consoles.
That console mod support follows the studio's record on fan modification, which Polygon notes includes the unusual step of adding mod support to the console releases of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. RED4ext, the library NightCoop depends on, has been downloaded 12.6 million times on Nexus Mods.
