Night City is a vast place, with much to explore, and yet it's still shockingly easy to miss unique loot and even story content.
Quests
- Do anything other than rain fire on Maelstrom in "The Pickup" after meeting with Militech, and you'll miss out on the chance at the one-night stand with Meredith Stout and the iconic melee weapon she leaves behind in her hotel room.
- It's very easy to cut off any chance at romancing your favorite Love Interest just by making one wrong dialogue choice at some point in their personal quest chain, with the consequences often only becoming apparent much later in the game.
- The player can go through the entire game without meeting Kerry and River, two out of four romance options with their own arcs and sidequests. River's sidequest is only available after doing the first Peralez quest where you first meet him, but you have no obligation to actually fulfill it. Kerry's questline is even more hidden, because it requires completing almost the entirety of Johnny's questchain, with no indication that it will unlock Kerry. Kerry's questline also comes very late in the game, at the tail end of Act II, right before the ending. After discovering them, romancing them is fairly simple (doing their questline and choosing a few dialogue options), but many players miss them entirely. For example, according to Steam achievements, far more players have completed Panam and Judy's storylines (who are both met through the main story), than River's and Kerry's, with Kerry's less than half of the first two.
- The side job "The Highwayman" is the epitome of this. For starters, it's initially unmarked on the map and is triggered it by one of several possible means. It sends you on a scavenger hunt between multiple unmarked locations spread across the entirety of Night City, with only the barest of hints as to where to look (as in, within a search radius of several hundred meters around some landmark), and that only if you actually read the evolving mission description in the quest log after every step. One of these locations can only be accessed with a keycode found on a previous location, with no hint whatsoever that these random numbers might be important later. Completing the quest rewards you with a spiffy motorbike, but accomplishing this without a guide is a challenge, to say the least.
- Telling Claire anything other than to focus on the race during the aftermath of the penultimate race in the "Beast in Me" questline and not chasing the crashing car in the final race will lock you out of getting one car the Type 66 "Cthulhu". for free... though if Claire kills Sampson, Regina will somehow get it and put it up for sale.
- During the main quest "Search and Destroy", Takemura kidnaps Hanako to talk to her about her brother's betrayal and murder of her father. He takes her to a hotel that gets raided by Arasaka soldiers and the floor collapses under you. V says that they need to save Takemura, but Johnny says that it's too late and tells V to get out of there. There's a secret objective where you can go back to save Takemura, but the game pre-2.0 update doesn't give you any hint about this. After the 2.0 update, it does appear as an optional objective. Fail in either case, and Takemura will die. Worse is that the achievement for the Devil ending requires Takemura to be alive at this point. If you failed to account for this, the only way to unlock the achievement and watch the "official" version of this particular ending is to either load a save from very long ago, or start a whole new game from scratch.
- The "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" ending hinges on making a string of very specific and counterintuitive dialogue choices in a certain conversation with Johnny, which occurs during a quest which is itself optional. Namely, V has to telling Johnny they no longer trust him, then give him another chance. Miss even one and you're locked out of this ending for good. Thankfully, there is a subtle indicator which can be used to determine if you're on the right path, though it's not until a later quest: during "Holdin' On", Kerry will ask Johnny (temporarily in control of V's body) whether the two of them get along, to which Johnny will reply in the affirmative or the negative; Johnny responding in the affirmative indicates that you're on the right track to unlock the ending. But even if the conditions are met, accessing the secret ending also requires to wait for several real time minutes instead of picking an option for the final raid, which isn't hinted at at all.
- Unlocking "The Star" ending requires completing Panam's entire questline, as it requires her and Saul to make amends and Saul to promote her to lead the Aldecaldos alongside him. This is the only ending that has to be unlocked that drastically changes the game's epilogue (since "(Don't) Fear The Reaper's" epilogue is a slightly modified copy of "The Sun's", to the point where the two are often lumped together and simply called "Path of Glory"). While Panam is an important character to the plot and one of the romance options, the player will likely do many sidequests for tons of different characters, with no indication that this specific questline will unlock something so significant. It's also worth noting that none of the three other love interests unlock any other endings. The best ending for the Judy romance also requires following this path, as in all of the others where V survives, Judy leaves her one way or another.
- Besides its own ending, the Phantom Liberty DLC adds a new ending path to the base game, but it can only be activated by siding with Reed and betraying Songbird, whilst doing the opposite doesn't unlock anything new in the finale. Since neither character in question turns out to be fully honest about the whole situation, there's no particular reason to trust either of them when they promise a cure for V's condition. So, without a guide many players who decide to side with Songbird probably don't even realise Reed is telling the truth when he says FIA scientists can cure V, thus providing a new optional ending for the game.
Items
- There is a very powerful Epic Iconic Smart Pistol with an AI attached, Skippy, that is picked up in an alley on one of the locally triggered sidequests. When picked up, Skippy informs you that he has two modes: Stone Cold Killer or Puppy Loving Pacifist. In Stone Cold Killer mode, his Smart tracking aims at the head, making him one of the most powerful pistols in the entire game, and in Puppy Loving Pacifist mode, his smart tracking aims at the legs, making him one of the worst Iconic weapons in the game. Any normal player would obviously pick the far superior headshot mode at the start. The catch? With absolutely no prior notification, after 50 kills Skippy switches to the opposite mode PERMANENTLY with no way to stop it or change it back. Players that picked "Stone Cold Killer" to start are thus locked out of one of the game's best weapons.
- In the release version of the game (pre-2.0 update, which the eighth gen consoles cannot get), almost all cyberware, including the legendary variants, can be found and looted in the world for free, saving you a lot of cash and Street Cred grinding. The chances of tracking down specific pieces without a guide are slim, while the 1.3 update Nerfed those odds even further. The 2.0 update instead makes standard cyberware available at any ripperdoc based on V's level, while "legendary" and unique pieces are found via specific missions.
- The trademark perk of Power weapons is their ability to ricochet their projectiles off of any solid surface. One of the two starter implants you get from Viktor is a Ballistic Coprocessor in V's palm that enables the ricochet effect. Nowhere is it mentioned that you also need a specific eye upgrade to actually see the trajectory, or that the trajectory has an auto-aim effect that snaps the trajectory to targets. The relative obscurity of the cyberware upgrade menu while trading with ripperdocs means that many players don't realize these upgrades even exist, extending the problem to almost all cyberware in some way. (Major update 2.0 makes all cyberware available at any ripperdoc based on V's level, but it's still easy to miss.)
- The game contains several legendary outfit sets, each following a specific professional theme like cop, media, fixer, etc.. Not only is this mentioned absolutely nowhere, most of the outfit pieces are also fiendishly well-hidden in places few players would ever look.
- Many legendary/iconic items are hidden behind stat-gated doors at side quest locations. If you complete the sidequest before your stats are high enough to open the door, you have no reason to ever go back there again and will never know there was a legendary item on the other side. Worse, some of these items are found during main missions in locations that are impossible to revisit after the mission concludes.
- The 2.0 update introduced a bunch of new iconic weapons that can be displayed on V's Wall of Weapons, but unlike those from the base game, these aren't tied to specific characters, sometimes not even to quests, making them a whole lot harder to find. For instance, the two iconic knives are sold by nondescript melee weapon vendors that you have no specific reason to visit, considering that all weapon vendors typically have the same inventory except for generic weapon blueprints.
- Patch 1.5 added a pet iguana for V. However, the only way to obtain it is to find its egg (which takes three in-game months to hatch) hidden in Yorinobu Arasaka's suite during the heist, making it Permanently Missable Content.
