New Cyberpunk 2077 mod delivers polished third-person animations players have long wanted

For nearly seven years, Cyberpunk 2077 players who wanted to experience Night City from behind their character's shoulder instead of through their eyes faced a persistent problem: the game's animations looked broken. When CD Projekt Red released the game in 2020, it was built entirely around first-person perspective. The character models, the arm movements, the running cycles—everything was designed for a camera locked to the player's viewpoint. When modders eventually figured out how to unlock the third-person camera, what emerged was unsettling. Arms stretched at wrong angles. Running looked like a marionette having a seizure. The whole thing felt wrong.

For years, that was the best players could do. Third-person mods existed, but they were compromises—functional workarounds that let you see your character, but at the cost of watching them move like something was deeply broken inside them. The community wanted better. They wanted what other games offered: a character that moved naturally when viewed from behind, animations that felt grounded and intentional.

That changed when a modder named CybrDrake released the Immersive Third Person animations mod, available now on Nexus Mods. Unlike previous attempts, this mod doesn't try to repurpose first-person assets. It builds dedicated third-person animations from the ground up—a completely separate animation set that exists only when you switch the camera view.

YouTuber BleeeGMV posted a demonstration that showed what this actually looks like in practice. The character jogs down a pavement in Night City with arms swinging naturally, momentum building with each stride. There's no jank, no uncanny valley feeling. When the character runs up stairs, the animation shifts subtly to account for the incline—the same basic motion, but with weight and physics that acknowledge the terrain. Standing still, the character looks around, turning their head to take in the environment. There are idle animations where the character raises a hand to inspect it, small details that make the whole thing feel inhabited.

The mod demonstrates a slow walk with deliberate swagger, the kind of movement that reads as intentional and grounded. The sprint is faster and more aggressive than the jog, with animation and camera angle combining to sell the illusion of real speed. Traversal—vaulting over low obstacles, climbing up ledges—shows the character reaching out and pulling themselves up with hand placement that matters. There's even a climbing animation that echoes Lara Croft, with the character doing a handstand as they scale a surface.

What the video doesn't show is combat. CybrDrake notes that fighting animations remain unfinished and clunky in third-person, which means that part of the experience still needs work. There's also an asymmetry in the current build: female V's animations are mostly complete, while male V's are still being developed. The mod allows players to switch between first-person and third-person at any time, so if something feels off or unfinished, you can flip back to the vanilla perspective.

What matters here is that the mod proves something players have suspected for years: Cyberpunk 2077 could have felt like this from the start. The game's underlying systems and character models were always capable of supporting natural third-person movement. It just required someone to build the animations that the original release never included. Now that someone has, the gap between what the game shipped with and what it could have been is suddenly visible. The question for CD Projekt Red is whether they'll notice, and whether future updates might incorporate what a modder has already figured out.