Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is out next week, but you can play the 2.0 update now. It’s added a whole host of tune-ups like vehicular combat, new skill trees, balance tweaks to the RPG system, and a revamped police force—but who cares about that? You can do cool rocket jumps on your motorbike now, which is much more important.
I have Reddit user earthcastle to thank for this discovery, who posted some footage of them doing some nova vehicular stunts you can watch below.
this is the best part about the new update. i can ROCKET JUMP ON MY BIKE NOW from r/cyberpunkgame
As best I can tell, this is an unforeseen consequence of Cyberpunk 2077’s vehicle physics interacting with explosive weapons. In the 2.0 update, you can draw a sidearm while riding a vehicle with the press of a button (alt on a keyboard, by default).
This, from what I can tell, is limited to one-handed guns. I tried with a shotgun but to no avail. Thankfully, there’s an explosive Iconic weapon in the game that’s pretty easy to get called the Comrade’s Hammer. This self-descriptive gun is basically a handheld rocket launcher, with enough kick to hurl enemies into the air.
When in first person, this just plays the normal stagger animation V is slapped with whenever they get too close to a grenade. However, there’s no vehicle equivalent of this animation—and bikes are light enough to be flung into the air. Hunting down this weapon and building it took me about five minutes. You can find the crafting schematic from an NCPD crime activity in Arroyo, which I’ve placed in a screenshot below.
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)
Armed with my new explosive piece, I set about replicating earthcastle’s sick stunts. Turns out it’s really hard. There’s a lot of physics at play here. Riding up a hill will snuff out your explosive lift, barely taking you off the ground at all. Both the location you shoot and your current speed also impact how your bike flies, seemingly at random. What’s more, you still take damage—so it’s entirely possible to blow yourself up.
I did, however, manage to get a pretty sick jump during a car chase. This was immediately followed by my demise at the hand of a lamp post. You can watch my V’s ignoble flatline below.
On the one hand, this is not a viable strategy. It’s extremely dangerous, unwieldy to control, and will confer no game advantages whatsoever. On the other hand, why wouldn’t you do this, it’s sick as hell. Cyberpunk 2077 is a killer RPG at this point, but it’s also a game about doing rad stuff all the time—and there are dozens of montage videos of people proving that point. I cannot wait to see what they do with this new tech. It’s as dumb as it is totally awesome.
