(There are no spoilers for the plot of “Cyberpunk 2077” in this article. We’re just here to talk about controller settings.)
If you tried to play “Cyberpunk 2077” with a gamepad, there’s a good chance you found the game surprisingly difficult to control. Something is just off about the game’s camera controls when you’re using a controller — this issue wasn’t there when I tried it out with my mouse and keyboard instead. It was making it nauseating to play, particularly whenever I would attempt to aim at anything.
Trying to do any kind of precise aiming in “Cyberpunk 2077” felt just about impossible with the standard control settings, and the queasiness in my gut slowly grew the more I tried. So I went digging in the camera settings, and after about 15 minutes of experimenting I finally figured out how to make the game playable with a controller.
I should point out that the advice I’m about to provide is based on the PC version of “Cyberpunk 2077.” The console versions of the game also have these advanced options, but with dramatically different hardware I can’t speak with authority that what I’m going to suggest below will be as effective as these changes have been for me on PC. But it’s certainly worth trying.
So if you go into the “Cyberpunk 2077” settings menu, and then the controls submenu, you’ll find a section called “First-Person Camera (Controller).” After playing around with the sensitivity settings for a few minutes I noticed something very important, a button that read “Show Advanced Options.” Turn that on, and you’ll see a bunch of new options — and these are the ones you’re looking for.
These options are unusual. Stuff like “Horizontal Turning Bonus” and “Turning Ramp-up Time” and all that. These are all methods of fine-tuning your controller’s aim acceleration in “Cyberpunk 2077.” If you don’t know what aim acceleration is, there’s a pretty good explanation here you can read. But even if you aren’t interested in those details, that’s fine — just know that if you really don’t like how “Cyberpunk” plays with a controller, this is probably why.
So what I did here was just turn all of these “Advanced Options” down to zero. This completely removed all the aim acceleration from the camera control settings, and I was finally able to aim with any amount of effectiveness.
If you’re still feeling some weirdness with the controller in “Cyberpunk 2077” after this, that’s OK. You’ll still need to experiment with the horizontal and vertical sensitivity settings — these are just above the Advanced Options button — to find a speed that feels right to you, since sensitivity preferences vary wildly from person to person.
I also turned down the “Inner Dead Zone” to zero, and after that it felt just about right.
So if you’re playing “Cyberpunk 2077” with a controller and really don’t like how it feels with the default camera control settings, you should definitely give these options a try.