A nasty Johnny Silverhand bug nearly derailed my Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough, but this mod came to the rescue
I was stuck in "Johnny vision" for hours until I installed the FX Begone mod.
When V started coughing up blood during a conversation with Johnny Silverhand, I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was really trying to drive home the urgency of my ticking time bomb of a brain. Throughout the next quest, and the one after that, my entire field of vision kept pulsing with the glitchy blue effect that highlighted Johnny popping into a conversation. It felt like a bit much, but I was really getting into the roleplaying, so I figured heading home to V's apartment for a night's rest would set me right. When it didn't, I asked my colleagues how they got rid of "Johnny vision" because clearly I'd missed something.
That's when I got the bad news from Phantom Liberty reviewer Ted Litchfield: "I don't think I've ever seen that happen before."
Uh oh.
"That sounds like a mondo bug."
Uh-oh.
We investigated, and it turns out I'm not alone in catching this visual bug: during Cyberpunk's Automatic Love quest, other players have reported that talking to Johnny at a certain optional point causes his glitchy visual effect to stick. This problem actually dates back years and still hasn't been fixed in Cyberpunk 2077's many patches.
View post on imgur.com"
After trying everything I could to get rid of the effect—sleeping, visiting a ripperdoc, jumping in and out of photo mode, swimming underwater—I reached out to CD Projekt Red, which confirmed it's a known bug.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
"Our team is aware of this issue and working on a fix," the support team told me.
"In the meantime, we've found a workaround that can help:
1. Load an earlier save from before the conversation with Johnny after leaving the elevator.
2. During the conversation DO NOT select the "Fucked in the head worse than me" dialogue option.
3. Proceed with the quest as normal."
Unfortunately, that solution was a no-go for me: I'd stubbornly played about three hours of Cyberpunk 2077 with "Johnny vision" slowly driving me mad, and I wasn't about to throw away that progress and redo all of it. So I sought salvation from the only logical source: the mod community.
I found it almost immediately. The mod FX Begone, which supports the 2.0 update, targets and removes a ton of Cyberpunk's visual effects. It can disable the green hue of your scanner, the red glitchiness that clouds your screen when you take big damage, and, crucially, the "Johnny glitch," which removed the constant blue effect from my screen.
It's a cinch to install even without using the Nexusmods Vortex tool: all I had to do was drop a file in the "\Cyberpunk 2077\archive\pc\mod" folder.
I actually like Cyberpunk's glitchy visual effects when they're not permanently coating my screen, so I was thankful that FX Begone author CyanideX made the mod available piecemeal. On the files tab on Nexusmods, you can download small files to disable each visual effect individually. One 88 kilobyte download was all it took to get Johnny to chill out. My cyberbrain may still be a ticking time bomb, but at least I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in Night City with a headache.
Cyberpunk 2077 2.0: What the update changes
Cyberpunk 2077 lifepaths: Choose your origin
Cyberpunk 2077 endings: Aim for your ending
Cyberpunk 2077 romances: All the encounters
Cyberpunk 2077 console commands: How to cheat
Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.
When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).
CD Projekt rolls out a new Cyberpunk 2077 beta branch so people can keep playing while modders catch up to the 2.2 update
OG Fallout lead Tim Cain explains just how much thought went into the timeline, and why canned beans were key: 'Post-apocalypse, but not so far post- that everything's collapsed and everyone's dead'