Some Bad News About Panam And Judy Romances For New ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Players

Yesterday, I read that as that a new flood of players make their way through Cyberpunk 2077, one of IGN’s busiest pages right now is their “Panam romance guide,” indicating a lot of players all have the same designs on Cyberpunk’s most enigmatic NPC.

But many new players are about to run into an old problem, and one thing that Cyberpunk did not do well, I would argue, even as all these other improvements have been made over time. There was no fixing this decision, and I don’t think it was a good one.

Cyberpunk 2077 has a very, very clear idea of who they want romancing who in the game, and options are essentially limited to…one NPC, depending on your V’s gender and the preference you want them to have.

You do not really need a “guide” to romance any NPCs here. This isn’t Mass Effect or Dragon Age where only a carefully tiptoed series of conversation will lead you into their hearts and bed. Just…be nice to them, and you’ll get there. But you need to be the “correct” V. This is the breakdown:

• Only male Vs can romance Panam.
• Only female Vs can romance Judy.
• Only male Vs can romance Kerry.
• Only female Vs can romance River.

No NPC here is down with both male and female Vs, and these are the only “main” romance options in the game, outside of a brief fling you can have with Meredith Stout, which seems like part of a cut corpo storyline. But no, you cannot romance other characters like Claire, Rogue, Johnny or Takemura. And of the ones you can romance, you are pretty locked into very specific choices.

I learned this the hard way with my female V who had gotten very flirty with Panam, only to have her ultimately pull away and reject me. I too went to look up guides back then to figure out if I’d done something wrong, but the answer is simply…Panam likes guys. The end.

There are PC mods that let you romance all characters with any gender, so that path is open for some. Reportedly there’s even cut dialogue in the data of the game for a male romance of Judy, for instance, as maybe these set roles were not always the plan. But that’s what made it into the final game.

I know that BioWare games have received some pushback for “too many” bisexual characters, but the reverse, very rigidly defined NPC preferences, is a lot less interesting and a lot more constricting, as many Cyberpunk players are about to learn if you’ve fallen in love with Judy or Panam or River and discover you cannot pursue them. Such is life, I suppose. But this is a video game, and we get rejected enough in real life where we don’t need to deal with this, if you ask me.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.