Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City is a maze of highways and neon towers. If players need to cross the map they can drive a car, hop between fast travel points, or use the game’s player character V’s cybernetic legs to zoom down the road at speeds not meant for human travel. The latter is not a special ability a player unlocks as part of the game’s vast skill trees, but rather what’s known in video games as a “bunnyhopping” bug, and it’s both a boon to speedrunners and a fun way to traverse the game.
Bunnyhopping is an old video game technique for gaining speed. Players used a similar technique in No Man’s Sky to speed up exploration and there was a time in the early days of Counter-Strike when public servers belonged to the players most skilled at bunnyhopping. Cyberpunk 2077 players have called V’s advanced jumping technique a glitch. But to my eyes, leaping is just another in-universe way to traverse the hostile city.
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There are several different ways to bunnyhop in Cyberpunk 2077. A player needs to be able to jump and then move in the air and several different in-game cybernetic modifications allow V to do that. Using a Maneuvering System cyberware mod will let V dodge in mid air. A player with good timing can jump in the air, dodge, land, and repeat. Every mid-air dodge adds momentum to V’s forward motion and it doesn’t take long until the player is a bullet shooting down the highways of Night City so fast that the game can’t render cars fast enough.
An alternative method uses the Kerenzikov implant which briefly slows down time when a character aims a weapon. For this method, players aim to initiate the slow-mo, then spam the forward dodge and jump. When the slow-mo breaks, V launches forward at a high speed.
Adding either the long jump or double jump cybernetic legs to either of these methods will increase the speed. V doesn’t seem to lose momentum when they’re in the air so players able to time their jumps properly can vault V forward at speeds faster than any car in the game. Speedrunners are already using the glitch to burn through Cyberpunk 2077. As of this writing the fastest time is just over three hours. A separate challenge involves zooming down Night City’s beltway loop in a complete circuit as quickly as possible. The current best time on that is just over a minute.
