Cyberpunk 2077 fans still absorbing everything Night City has to offer (and there’s a lot) will at the very least know by now that their own version of V can romance several NPCs in-game.
Major characters that the mercenary-for-hire encounters throughout the main story as well as side missions can be wooed in the quest for companionship, though some of these, such as Judy Alvarez, are intentionally restricted to only being a potential partner for Vs with the female body type. Despite this, however, modders have discovered that players who opted for a male body/voice type can actually brute force the exact same pairing by tinkering with the game’s files. Remarkably, male voice recordings for the supposedly female-only option already exist, too, leading many to the belief that CD Projekt RED had originally intended for Judy to have a romantic interest in more than just one gender.
This, however, is not the case and the existence of audio assets for both is simply a result of how the developer handled voice work for the sci-fi RPG.
Speaking to Eurogamer, a representative of the studio explained how the unused male voice lines are present as a result of CDPR’s decision to have all of V’s dialogue recorded in male and female, regardless of whether it was intended to be used or not. This was done in order to “avoid missing something by mistake that would require future recordings,” according to the rep, who subsequently reaffirms that, in the case of Judy, she was “always only a female V romance partner and that was the artistic vision from the start.”
Presumably, the same applies for all four of Cyberpunk 2077‘s romance quest lines. Panam, Kerry, River and Judy all require that the player have different variations on male/female body and voice types, with some being less restrictive than others. Will you be using mods to broaden V’s options, though, or sticking with what CDPR intended? Let us know in the usual place below!
