You can now scan and steal paint jobs from any car in Cyberpunk 2077, plus more customisation with the 2.2 update

While it’s always worth starting a new game of Cyberpunk 2077 just to hear Judy say "his own choomba shot him!" for the thirtieth time, there’s now a slightly more tangible reason to start a new journey into Night City’s open world. Update 2.2 went live yesterday, bringing with it a host of fixes, as well as some deeper customisation options for both your character and vehicles. The base game is also 55% off on Steam until the 18th of December, with the Phantom Liberty expansion at 20% off, or both in a 48% off bundle. Cyberpunk is on sale often enough, although these current discounts line up with the cheapest it's ever been on Steam. Again: worth it for the line.

You can find the full patch notes here. Alongside the fixes, and a tantalisingly vague "more secrets to discover in Night City”, the headline items here are all centered around customisation i.e. making you and your car look cooler in photos i.e. the true endgame. There are lots of fancy trademarked brand names I’ll save for the patch quotes, but the upshot is that you can now customise the colours of several new car brands, including by scanning other cars you like the look of and paying a small fee to copy the colours to yours.

There are also ten more cars available to buy, and Johnny will sometimes appear in the passenger seat after the first act to "comment on and react to what's happening" (driving):

Rayfield's CrystalCoat™ technology, initially designed for Rayfield vehicles only, has now been adopted by other car manufacturers. You can now change the paint jobs on Herrera, Mizutani, Quadra and Villefort vehicles. Pro tip: Use CrystalCoat™ to fool the cops and lower your NCPD wanted level!

Kiroshi presents TWINTONE™! As CrystalCoat™ continues to gain in popularity, TWINTONE™ takes your paint jobs to the next level. Simply scan a car with your Kiroshi optics, switch to the TWINTONE™ tab, then save the vehicle's color scheme for a small fee. You'll then be able to select the scheme in the TWINTONE™ database under the CrystalCoat™ menu. There, you'll also find generic color schemes for all CrystalCoat™-compatible vehicles as well as unique color schemes exclusive to the vehicle model from which they were copied. Please note that color scheme cloning is not authorized on vehicles that are linked to quests, belong to the NCPD or that are incompatible with CrystalCoat™ tech.

I’d make a comment about how the ‘obnoxious Cyberpunk advertising’ bit doesn’t really work when you’re actually selling something but I think we’re probably way past that point. As for character customisation, they’ve added a lot, including 32 eye colours, 4 scars, 8 cosmetic bits of face cyberware, and 2 body tattoos. Amusingly, there’s also a new "Plain-to-Punk slider" that'll let you easily tinker with your corpo-to-rockergirl ratio.

Here's a few PC-specific additions too.

• You will now be able to properly rebind W and S to different actions other than their default settings in the Vehicle category.
• Optimized threading system to improve performance by up to 33% on Intel Arrow Lake based CPUs.
• Added more Razer Chroma effects for some sections in Phantom Liberty and romance scenes.

So, all in all a good time to pick up Cyberpunk if you’re still holding out, but that’s been progressively truer with each patch, culminating in a great expansion. Here’s Graham’s Phantom Liberty review if you’re still on the fence. "If you've never played Cyberpunk 2077 before and buy the expansion, Phantom Liberty is an absurdly lush, thrilling, 20-hour-long side quest," wrote he. "If you have played it before, it's an unmissable opportunity to check in on old friends, and to make a few new ones, in Night City."