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The demo is from the middle of the game. V has been implanted - against his will - with a biochip that holds the secret to immortality.
-He's BEING HAUNTED BY A DIGITAL GHOST NAMED JOHNNY SILVERHAND! (This confirms he's dead.)
-You can change V's hair color, skin color, eye color, and facial features. There are lots of facial customization options.
-Silverhand, when you leave the customization menu: "Come on, you really think they give a rat's dick how you look?"
-When meeting your Voodoo Boys contact, the "street kid" life path choice opened up an alternate dialogue option.
-The demo takes place in the Pacifica region of the city, which was initially supposed to be fancy but investors pulled out and left it a wreck.
-There's real-time translation of someone talking to you in Creol, thanks to an implant chip. They speak it and you just read subtitles.
-Pacifica looks like an extremely run-down boardwalk-ish district – a little like Santa Monica, CA. We see hotels, a Ferris wheel, and flamingo statues.
-There are lots of shops to find, and more stuff unlocks as your street cred goes up.
-Oh wow, Silverhand is like a hologram chilling behind Placide during this whole conversation. He looks exactly like he did in the trailer. He has a little blue tint and is glitching out. He makes occasional comments.
-There's a fully dynamic day and night cycle. Sunset looks nice.
-(In Vehicles)You can change the radio to listen to different stations and can swap between first and third-person perspectives.
-You can travel across the whole world freely and seamlessly with no loading screens.
-We driving around a huge parking lot to go in through the back entrance for a stealthier approach. That's optional.
-As we sneak by guards, they all have "18" next to their names – most likely a level indicator.
-V is holding what looks like an SMG with a red dot sight right now, but we haven't fought anybody yet.
-We grab a guard stealthily; we can either kill him or dispose of him in a non-lethal way. In this case, we toss him down a nearby garbage chute.
-"Players can play the entire game without killing an enemy if you wish." Non-lethal runs, here we come!
-There's a locked door. You could physically open it, but since this player character is a hacker we found a terminal to hack it. Hacking minigame confirmed!
-There's a grid of hex codes that you pick out the right ones for. Completing the basic level will give you access but you can get more optional benefits for doing even better.
-You can use perk points earned on level-ups to upgrade a number of categories: blades, rifles, handguns, assassination, cold-blood, sniper rifles, engineering, hacking, shotgun melee, two-handed, and maybe one more I didn't have time to write down. The level-up skill tree is a branching thing that looks like a motherboard almost, with cables going out from the center.
-Perks also affect dialogue options.
-The environments are fairly destructible, with walls and pieces of cover getting torn up with bullet holes during a fight.
-A loading screen was shown just for fast travel. Again, you can otherwise go through the entire game without loading screens.