To start the game the player chooses one of three different life pathways: The Nomad, The Streetkid, or The Corpo. These pathways will have lasting impacts on the game through unique dialogue choices with certain characters. More pertitently it will impact your starting mission and how you meet your new best friend Jackie.
If the player chooses the Nomad route then they will find that they are a nomad that takes home in the badlands, a desert area that resembles the deserts that can be found in America, they have been tasked with smuggling in an item across the border with the help of a resident of Night City, Jackie Welles. The mission goes realtively well until they are caught by the boarder patrol and reported to Arasaka. They barely manage to escape their persuers.
The next option is Streetkid. If the player chooses Streetkid then they start in a bar and are informed that they have a task to go and steal an expensive car that is owned by an Arasaka executive. On the case you meet Jackie who is also seperatly trying to to steal the car. You both fight over the car before you both are caught and thrown out to a nearby alley way with neither of you getting the car.
The Corpo route has you be an corportate worker for Arasaka counter intel. You get a mission from your boss to put together a team to strike back at one of the other corporate execs for messing with him. You call your best friend Jackie and meet him at a local nightclub to discuss buissness. When you discuss your boss's plan with Jackie he says it is a plan that is too risky and can only end badly for you, and as such refuses the mission. Before you can try and reconvince him though Arasaka members from headquarters come in and strip you of your job, bank account, and deactivate your cyberware leaving you with no more attachments to the corperation.
Act one takes place solely within the local area of one part of Night City, Watson. This act mainly follows your escapades to earn the repect of a fixer in area that has earned Jackie's respect, Dexter DeShawn. Additonally, this act serves as a way to connect V the main character to a few other characters and build possitive rapport with them. These characters include Viktor your favorite ripperdoc, Misty Jackie's partner and a person with a great inerest in spirituality, and you get to interact on a more signifigant level with Jackie. Your first mission for Dex is to get a small spider like military drone from a gang called Maelstrom which is called the Flathead.
The culmination of these efforts is to impress Dex and finally be allowed on his big mission he is planning out. His big mission that he is inviting you on is a hiest to steal a high tech piece of technology from the son of the chairman of Araska, the Relic. The mission does not go to plan at all and ends with you being the only survivor of the mission. Additonally, to preseve the state of the Relic you were forced to implant it in your head slot meaning you have an unknown technology also sitting in you. The end of the act is you being dragged out of a scrap heap by a trusted Arasaka underling named Takemura, and being taken to vik to be fixed up.
As your consciousness fades out from exhaustion and bodily damages, your sight changes perspective to that of a new view. The new perspective that you are viewing out of is the man named Johnny Silverhand in the year 2023. Johnny is a musician, revolutionary, known terrorist, and has a deep disdain for corporat,pions.
The scene opens with Jonny heading to the stage to do his send off before his big mission. Afterwards, he boards a helicopter to go infiltrate Arasaka Tower. He makes a forceful entry by gunning down everyone between him and his goals. He makes his way to an elevator to which he then puts a nuclear bomb in the elevator and sends the elevator itself hurtling down. Before he sets it off though, he breaks into into the Arasaka firewall to free someone he cares about. As he is leaving he is caught by Adam Smasher and killed, ending the flashback in your head and concluding the interlude.