Cyberpunk 2077 Lifepaths Explained: Nomad, Street Kid and Corpo

Cyberpunk 2077's lifepaths are the three backgrounds you choose for V at the start: Nomad, a drifter from the Badlands clans; Street Kid, raised on the streets of Night City; and Corpo, an Arasaka counter-intelligence agent. Each one gives V a different opening quest, a side job only that V gets, and extra dialogue options for the rest of the game. All three meet Jackie Welles by the end of the prologue, and from the Konpeki Plaza heist onwards the main story is the same. None of them is canon. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Nomad: leaving the clan#

V starts in a garage in Yucca, a small town near the border crossing into Night City, cutting the Bakkers clan patch off their jacket. V has turned their back on the clan and is heading to the city to find work. The local sheriff makes it plain that nomads, clan or no clan, aren't welcome. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Nomad")

V's first job is to smuggle a package into the city with a contact named Jackie. V bribes the border guards with papers declaring the cargo lost on arrival, but it was a set-up: Arasaka security is waiting beyond the crossing and demands its property back. Jackie drives them out through a Biotechnica protein farm, and in the garage where V's car finally dies, they open the package. Inside is a live iguana. Jackie likes V's style and offers a partnership. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Nomad")

How it colours the story. A Nomad V knows the road and the clans. That pays off most with Panam: in the run-up to The Star, V can quote the Aldecaldos' reputation back to them, recognise the old Aldecaldo tunnel they use to cross the border, and tell Panam Palmer a Bakkers saying about roads that fork and meet again. The Nomad's private side job, These Boots Are Made for Walkin', brings back V's old car, found in a landfill with a stranger who has been driving it. (Cyberpunk 2077, "All Along the Watchtower"; "Path of Glory"; "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'")

Street Kid: the car job#

V grew up in Night City and starts in the El Coyote Cojo bar in Heywood, fixing a broken nose. The barman, Pepe, owes money to a small-time fixer, Kirk Sawyer, who has threatened his legs. Kirk agrees to clear the debt if V steals a Rayfield Aerondight belonging to an Arasaka corporate. The local fixer Padre gives V a ride to Westbrook. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Streetkid")

V gets into the car, and then a stranger opens the door with a gun: Jackie, who wants the same car. The police arrive before they can sort it out. The car's owner tells Inspector Stints to break their legs and dump them in the river, but Stints hates corpos as much as anyone, and has them knocked out and left in an alley instead. Jackie tells V that Kirk's threats are mostly hot air and takes V for breakfast. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Streetkid")

How it colours the story. A Street Kid V knows the gangs, the fixers and the slang, and gets street-level options in conversations across the city. Kirk comes back in the private side job Small Man, Big Mouth, offering a cut of stolen Militech cyberware. It's a trap: the Valentinos were after Kirk, and the van holds only a fake Samurai jacket. In The Star, V can tell Panam they used to think they owned Night City and the city owned them back, but nothing holds them there now. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Small Man, Big Mouth"; "All Along the Watchtower")

Corpo: the afternoon V lost everything#

V is second-in-command of counter-intelligence for Arasaka in Night City, throwing up from stress in a bathroom in Arasaka Tower. V's boss, Arthur Jenkins, is fighting a data leak in Frankfurt that threatens Arasaka's lunar licences with the European Space Agency. He resents his superior, Susan Abernathy, for stealing a promotion from him, and orders V to have her killed, handing over her file and a stack of paper eddies. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Corpo-Rat")

V flies to Lizzie's Bar to ask Jackie, an old friend, for help. Jackie says no, and then Abernathy's agents walk in. She already knows. They take the datashard, strip V of every corporate privilege and shut down V's company cyberware, and they want to take V in too, until Jackie points out how badly a firefight on unfamiliar ground could go for them. V ends the day on the floor of the bar, with Jackie helping them up. (Cyberpunk 2077, "The Corpo-Rat")

How it colours the story. A Corpo V reads Arasaka better than anyone. Meeting Hanako Arasaka before the final choice, V can bow and say they hope to go back to the company one day. On the Arasaka route, trying to bluff past a guard by naming Abernathy, V learns she was found dead two days earlier, officially a suicide. In Saburo's private office, V admits that even counter-intelligence never knew the place existed. The private side job War Pigs brings back Frank Nostra, a former colleague purged by Abernathy who wants to hand V over to win his job back. (Cyberpunk 2077, "Nocturne Op55N1"; "Last Caress"; "Totalimmortal"; "War Pigs")

What the lifepaths change in the endings#

Every ending is open to every lifepath. What changes is the conversation on the way there and in the epilogues. The lines above for The Star and The Devil are the clearest examples, and they make the Nomad's Star ending and the Corpo's Devil ending feel like a homecoming, of a kind. For what each ending involves, see the Cyberpunk 2077 endings guide. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Phantom Liberty keeps the pattern. When Songbird asks V to go into Dogtown, each lifepath sizes the place up differently, and in The Tower ending, back on the streets of Night City in 2079, a pair of thugs gets a different answer from a Nomad, a Street Kid or a former Corpo. (Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, "Things Done Changed")

Where lifepaths come from: the tabletop game#

The name comes from the tabletop game. In Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk RED, the Lifepath is the part of character creation where you roll or choose your character's background: family, friends and enemies, love affairs and the events that shaped them. It gives each character a past to play off, much as the video game's three prologues give V one. (Cyberpunk 2020; Cyberpunk RED)