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How Cyberpunk 2077 decides which endings you get
Which endings are on the table is settled long before the rooftop — by two side questlines, one conversation with Johnny, and whether you own Phantom Liberty.
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Which endings are on the table is settled long before the rooftop — by two side questlines, one conversation with Johnny, and whether you own Phantom Liberty.
The choice is not made on the rooftop — it's made hours earlier. When V finally has to decide how the story ends, the options actually offered depend on which side questlines you finished, one conversation with Johnny, and whether you own Phantom Liberty. Arrive there having skipped them and the game quietly hands you the short menu.
⚠️ Spoiler warning. This page names the endings and what unlocks each. It does not describe what happens inside them.
Panam's questline opens one ending. Rogue's questline opens another, and either of the two also opens a third. Neither is part of the main story — they are side jobs you have to go and do, and they have to be finished before the point of no return, not started.
The Arasaka option is always there. It never needs a side quest, which is why a player who rushed the main story finds themselves choosing between it and giving up. That isn't the game being harsh: it's the game reflecting a V who never built anything.
Phantom Liberty adds a route of its own and a very different price, and it only exists if you own and complete the expansion. More on that below.
The one people search for is Don't Fear the Reaper, and it isn't unlocked by a quest at all — it's unlocked by a conversation.
You have to complete the side job Chippin' In before the point of no return, and during the long talk with Johnny in the oil fields you have to pick the answers that give him a second chance rather than shut him down. Nothing about the interface tells you those lines matter. If you got them right, at the rooftop Johnny proposes the run himself; if you didn't, the option is simply absent, and there is no way to reach back for it from that point.
It is a hidden path, not a hidden reward: the secret ending resolves into a modified version of one of the other endings, and it is brutally unforgiving to play. Both sources agree on the trigger; nobody sensible attempts it without a save from before the rooftop.
If you own the expansion, its own ending decides whether a further option appears at the rooftop. Two of the four Phantom Liberty conclusions — the ones where Songbird ends up in the NUSA's hands rather than yours — open the path where V can be cured, at the cost of never being able to install cyberware again.
The other two close it. This is the single most consequential fork in the game for what the base story can end as, and it is made inside the expansion, before you go back to Night City.
The endings are the end. You do not return to Night City afterwards to tie up loose ends — the credits are the credits, and continuing means loading an earlier save. So, in order:
If you're still earlier than this and dying more than you'd like, how armour and mitigation actually work is the system the game explains worst — and the full game page has the rest of what we track. The other choice people ask about, much earlier in the story, is what to do with Jackie.