CdProjekt have been incredibly busy over the last few months since they announced Cyberpunk 2077’s first paid DLC Phantom Liberty. Starring Idris Elba and Keanu Reeves, players will once again enter Night City as V, the poor sod who found himself (or herself, depending on your choice) carrying a mental passenger in the ‘soul’ and personality of Keanu Reeve’s Johnny Silverhands.
Fans of the main game will have long finished the original campaign with all of its twists, turns and commentary on racial and class systems in modern society. Whilst the state of the game was incredibly poor when it launched, and quite rightly the studio got absolutely ruined for their half-finished, over-promised and full of lies project at the time, since then CDProjekt have continually updated the game, with graphical, gameplay and AI improvements making the game not only playable now, but enjoyable.
Cyberpunk 2077 – A New Game?
News is continually being released now after the official announcement of Phantom Liberty’s release date a few days ago at Summer Game Fest, it seems that not only will players be getting a huge amount of content with the paid DLC, but the game will receive a free update for ALL players, including those who don’t pay for the DLC, that’ll revamp more or less the entire game, potentially bringing it closer to the original vision and what players were promised and mis-sold before launch.
Speaking to VGC, creative director Pawel Sasko had a lot to say on the upcoming changes.
“All the core, main systems of the game have been redone or updated in a major way… the biggest ones are the perks and skill trees, which have been rebuilt completely, and the next one is we’ve added vehicle combat which enables new car chases.”
The driving on the game was famously broken, with it being the subject of many, many memes, videos and gifs shared on the internet, so to hear it has had an overhaul is comforting to hear. It’s never fun to try and navigate an open-world the size of Cyberpunk 2077’s – due to get even bigger – when you can’t corner worth a damn. He also went on to add and describe more changes.
“We’ve also greatly expanded AI and completely redone the police system, which is rebuilt from the ground up and now has multiple levels with multiple archetypes of enemies who will chase you – it’s also different in Dog Town compared to Night City.”
We’ve been burned before, but from other interviews with other outlets, Pawel may actually be underselling this particular change to the policing of Night City and outer districts. Supposedly the policing will happen on a more individual and custom level, with crimes in different parts of the city drawing different responses. Murder someone in the desert with no witnesses? Well as in real life, you’ll garner far less, if any, attention from the police compared to if you murder someone in broad day light in the middle of Night City.
It’ll also supposedly appear that police will prioritise and react stronger with different units being dispatched if you commit crimes in the richer, more affluent areas of Night City, compared to taking advantage of the poorer areas.
“We’ve also redone the loop and whole progression of the game; the difficulty curve is different, the tiers and drops of loot is different, the archetypes of enemies has been redone for more variety. Those are the core things that we’ve changed, and if you look into it there are very few systems that we didn’t change or update. Even the UI and UX have been greatly updated.”
If Pawel is being truthful with this last quote, then fans of the game should be excited. We here at FandomWire loved the game once it had been heavily patched to a more playable release, so like yourselves, we’ll be looking forward to essentially playing an entire new game. The inclusion of new quests called Airdrops will also mean the base game has some new content, as they’re supposedly infinitely replayable, so it’s certainly looking like everyone, regardless of purchasing Phantom Liberty or not, will have a new experience with the game come early September.
Unfortunately for those of the fanbase that bought the game on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, you won’t be joining in and playing Phantom Liberty, as CDProjekt have announced the add-on will only be available for current generation consoles. Understandably some fans will be annoyed at missing out on such a huge piece of content, but if the promises are to be believed, it’s no surprise.
Related: Summer Game Fest: ‘Mortal Kombat 1’ Finally Has A Gameplay Trailer – And It Is A Brutal Watch
Cyberpunk 2077 is shaping up to be every bit of the game we wanted when it first released, and while it may be in a far better place than it was then, it is becoming far too commonplace for games to be released half-broken, not working at all or missing entire gameplay mechanics that were promised.
This year alone we’ve had Redfall, the developers of which apparently wanted it cancelled, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which had framerate issues, pop-in problems and many fans had all round performance problems, and of course the now infamously bad The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, a game that would have looked bad ten years ago. Here’s hoping that this trend comes to an end, and we’re not getting excited about finally getting what we were long ago promised…
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