Pre-alpha footage of Cyberpunk 2077 has been released into the wild, and it looks almost unrecognisable.
When Cyberpunk 2077 initially launched in 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, it was a bit of a mess. Sure, the PC version wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly functional at best. However, the last-gen version was a whole other matter.
I can’t speak for the Xbox One version, because I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 4, but I would assume that there wasn’t much of a difference between the two. The highly anticipated sci-fi RPG from CD Projekt RED was buggy, had major performance issues, and it was known to crash a little too often.
Thankfully, many of those issues were fixed and then some by the developers over the years with a wealth of content updates, as well as the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game.
I remember seeing gameplay clips shared online from the last-gen version of Cyberpunk 2077 looking horrible with textures not loading, which almost made the NPCs of Night City look like low-poly characters from the N64’s GoldenEye 007. Which brings me to the visuals of this recently released pre-alpha footage.
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Was Cyberpunk 2077 Nearly a Third-Person RPG?
The pre-alpha footage in question was shared by the Twitter user Synth Potato, and the build is said to be from 2013, roughly seven years before Cyberpunk 2077 was officially released.
This is what Cyberpunk 2077 looked like in pre-alpha.
This footage is believed to be dated 2013, Almost seven years before the game released.
This was a prototype for a third-person version of Cyberpunk that ultimately got dropped after The Witcher 3 wrapped up. pic.twitter.com/8hSQvCJU0Z
— Synth Potato🥔 (@SynthPotato) January 22, 2026
It kind of looks like a PlayStation 3 game with some missing textures, which kind of makes sense, because games were still being released on that console during that time. Of course, these missing textures, animations, and so forth are deliberate, being a pre-alpha and all.
However, the lighting is still impressive, it has to be said. At the point of this pre-alpha, it looks like it was under consideration to an extent by CDPR that Cyberpunk 2077 could have been a third-person and not a first-person game, or perhaps even given the players a choice of the two.
“First-person is fine, but I’ll never understand people who prefer it over third,” said GameRoll, replying to the tweet.“I’m surprised they didn’t keep this, make third-person an option – where you could switch between first and third-person perspectives,” suggested sjfostersound.
“The atmosphere in third-person just wouldn’t be the same if this prototype is even a tiny bit like what it would’ve handled like,” claimed Vusjibin. “Yes, I know there’s no polish, but taking this and polishing it to a perfect shine would have made for a less interesting game.”
Cyberpunk 2077 is out now on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch 2.
