Cyberpunk 2077 from the makers of The Witcher

[jztemple2]

Also from PC Gamer, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review. They give it a score of 87 and say "Phantom Liberty doesn't reinvent Cyberpunk 2077, but it is CD Projekt firing on all cylinders to tell a great RPG story.". Note that the review contains story spoilers.

[Octavious]

15 hours seems pretty good to me. Anything with a gigantic amount of hours just is always padded with not fun stuff. I should reinstall today so I can be up and running with the patch tomorrow.

[El Guapo]

After spending 100+ hours or whatever it was on BG3, 15 hours feels like a palate cleanser.

[Octavious]

I have been playing short games the last week or so and it's really nice to actually finish stuff without diving through fluff. I'm replaying all the Uncharted games and they are about 10 or so hours each. I flew through the 1st one in a few days and there wasn't a moment of fluff in the entire game and it was glorious.

[jztemple2]

After 114 hours on Starfield I think I might be getting burned out. I wonder if I start a new game of C2077 tomorrow after the patch drops, will adding on Phantom Liberty the following Monday mess up my new playthrough at all?

[jztemple2]

Hmm, this might be answering my questions: Cyberpunk 2077’s skip to Phantom Liberty option is a blessing

Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is about to drop alongside the CD Projekt Red game’s 2.0 update and completely overhaul and expand the metropolis of Night City. So much so that you might want to restart your adventure from scratch to get to grips with everything on offer. If so, you don’t need to worry about rushing the early game ready for Phantom Liberty, as I got to grips with a great feature I can wholeheartedly recommend returning players use.

CDPR has already revealed that you can skip ahead to Phantom Liberty with a new save in Cyberpunk 2077, and after playing the game’s DLC for our Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty review, I’m here to tell you that it’s actually a really great option if you want to go into the open-world game fresh when the DLC drops.

After you’ve looked at the Cyberpunk 2077 build planner and decided if you want to be a netrunner, bruiser, or just an all-around troublemaker, starting a new game will see you met with the ‘skip ahead to Phantom Liberty’ option.

This is what I picked for my time with the DLC, and I actually found that it helped me enjoy all that Dogtown had to offer more than if I picked up my year-old save that’s been collecting dust. CDPR has already recommended you start a fresh save, but this way of doing so is a great option too. If you’ve never played Cyberpunk before I’d say start a normal save, of course, but this is a great option for those of you coming back.

[Daehawk]

Phantom Liberty story seems to me to be the same story start as Escape From New York.

[Skinypupy]

The base game is 50% off on PS5 right now ($30), just FYI.

I'll be starting it later tonight and hoping for the best.

[Max Peck]

The 2.0 update is live on GOG. It's a 54GB download.

CD Projekt Red is currently streaming a 2.0 update on Twitch. It was pre-recorded, so I expect it will be up on Youtube later today. If you're interested in what has been changed, and why, it's worth a watch.

[Blackhawk]

No.

No no no.

I've written a letter asking them to delay until after the new year. I'm still working my way through Starfield, and Baldur's Gate 3 is still waiting for me (I seriously struggled between Starfield and BG3 - I went with Starfield, as it's less story-based, so new game bugs are likely to be less severe.)

[coopasonic]

I installed the game last night in anticipation of this. I think I am go to replay the whole thing from scratch in 2.0. Lies of P can wait, or even be ignored altogether since I didn't (directly) pay for it.

[Max Peck]

No.

No no no.

I've written a letter asking them to delay until after the new year. I'm still working my way through Starfield, and Baldur's Gate 3 is still waiting for me (I seriously struggled between Starfield and BG3 - I went with Starfield, as it's less story-based, so new game bugs are likely to be less severe.)

It could be worse. The Lamplighters League and Star Trek: Infinity are coming in the next few weeks. Both of them somehow shifted from my Steam wish list to my library.

[Blackhawk]

Even if I were game-free right now, I'd be waiting for the DLC before I played. I'd rather play through the entire thing with all of the pieces in place. Besides, a 2.0-level update is going to have some bugs. By the time the DLC is released, many of them will be identified and (hopefully) patched up.

[Octavious]

The 2.0 update is live on GOG. It's a 54GB download.

CD Projekt Red is currently streaming a 2.0 update on Twitch. It was pre-recorded, so I expect it will be up on Youtube later today. If you're interested in what has been changed, and why, it's worth a watch.

I guess downloading it last night was pointless then. Oh well.

[Max Peck]

One of the nice things about Cyberpunk'77 is that it doesn't have to be a huge long-term time sink. If you focus on the main story, it's a 20-30 hour game. Having said that, playing through main story plus the core Phantom Liberty story sounds like it would be on the order of 30-45 hours and a completionist run would be somewhere well north of 100 hours. My two playthroughs (one completionist and one not so much) came to 290 hours total.

[Max Peck]

[Blackhawk]

2 hours of people on a couch - is there anything of note in there?

[Max Peck]

2 hours of people on a couch - is there anything of note in there?

It's not trying to be exciting or show off gameplay. To quote this-morning me:

If you're interested in what has been changed, and why, it's worth a watch.

If you're not interested that, then it's just a couple of community managers and a couple of game designers talking about some game they made and answering questions that were posted on their Discord.

[Blackhawk]

I'm interested in what's changed. I'm just not interested in a feature-length film to find out.

[Max Peck]

Well, then, maybe don't listen to it.

[malchior]

I fired up 2.0 and threw open every setting (set to Overdrive) and then turned on the path generation and DLSS 3.5. It's crazy. It's maxed out and the MIN on the benchmark was around 85 FPS and it usually was running around 120 FPS at 4K. Yes it's a 4090 but it is still beyond impressive.

[Blackhawk]

Good plan. I have a hard enough time getting blocks of time to watch actual movies. Watching two hours of people narrating patch notes? No thanks.

Maybe, if you got Morgan Freeman to narrate them. Or Samuel L Jackson. "Say Ray Tracing again. Say. Ray. Tracing. Again. I dare you, motherfucker!"

[jztemple2]

You should delete your Cyberpunk 2077 mods ahead of update 2.0, and you may need to do a clean reinstall of the game

I figured I was going to have to uninstall my Cyberpunk 2077 mods before checking out Phantom Liberty and update 2.0⁠. Most of the mods I went for on my last playthrough were difficulty and loot adjustments that'd clash with 2.0's big changes, and for the rest, mod authors would likely need to update their files to play nice with the patch. What I wasn't expecting was needing to do a clean reinstall⁠—complete with deleting some leftover files⁠—to clear up a persistent crash on startup.

I'm not sure exactly what borked my game, but big, foundational mod projects like Cyber Engine Tweaks need to be updated with each major patch in turn, and some users in the past have reported similar crash on startup issues to what I experienced. Mod author yamashi has noted on the mod's page that they will be working on a patch 2.0 version of Cyber Engine Tweaks in the coming days.

In the meantime, if you're a returning player, you may want to preemptively pull the nuclear option and do a clean install of Cyberpunk 2077 following CD Projekt's own instructions. The developer recommends:

[jztemple2]

Wake up, Samurai—Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Nvidia GPU driver just dropped

It's nearly time to play Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. And would you believe it's an absolute scorcher of a game expansion. Before that happens, however, there's still time to jump into the free 2.0 update to get your V ready for the new expansion and don't forget to download the latest Nvidia Game Ready drivers out today.

These new drivers don't promise much by way of specifics. Though Nvidia does say they provide "the best gaming experience for the latest new games supporting DLSS 3.5 technology and DLSS Ray Reconstruction including Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty."

That's probably reason enough to go out and download this driver package. Cyberpunk is chocked full of the latest graphics features, including Ray Reconstruction. Our Dave has been playing around with Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077 ahead of time, and he's quite smitten with it already.

[Max Peck]

Reviews are already coming out for Phantom Liberty. Rock Paper Shotgun seems to really like it.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review: perhaps the best expansion pack ever made

Cyberpunk 2077's triumph was that it offered a sprawling story, dozens of hours long, which cohered around just a small number of themes. Or maybe even a single thesis: that the cynical, defensive, self-centred voice in your head - personified by ancient, soul-trapped, anarcho-rockstar Johnny Silverhand - offered only a literal dead-end, and that real rebellion in the face of a messed-up world lay in helping friends. It was Frank Capra with robot arms and samurai swords, and I ate it up.

V doesn't go to Washington in Phantom Liberty, but Washington comes to her. CD Projekt Red's major expansion to the first-person RPG opens up a new district and a new cast of characters, including the President of the New United States and an aging sleeper spy played by Idris Elba. The themes remain the same, but the thesis is being tested: how can you help your friends if you don't know who they are, and if their goals are mutually exclusive?

With or without the expansion, and even as someone who enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 upon release, it's clearly now much improved. Does that mean that Update 2.0 and/or Phantom Liberty make Cyberpunk 2077 perfect, or even bug free? No and no. I experienced, for example, a handful of animation glitches and one instance in which Idris Elba got stuck during a scripted combat encounter and I needed to reload to the last save. What's changed, in my view, is that these issues now exist within acceptable bounds. I no longer feel like I have to caveat all my praise for the things the game gets right.

And it gets a lot right. When Phantom Liberty was first announced, I was a little disappointed that it wasn't continuing V's story onwards from the end of Cyberpunk 2077. Given all that ending entails, or can entail, I couldn't see how a mid-game expansion could add anything of narrative significance. I needn't have worried. One of Phantom Liberty's great strengths is that, despite Dogtown's secure borders, it isn't ringfenced in any way from the rest of the story. You can leave Dogtown midway to take on a few missed sidequests, or give your gal Judy a call to discuss what you got up to with the President the night before. The result is an expansion that reflects, refracts and enriches the game around it. If you've never played Cyberpunk 2077 before and buy the expansion, Phantom Liberty is an absurdly lush, thrilling, 20-hour-long side quest; if you have played it before, it's an unmissable opportunity to check in on old friends, and to make a few new ones, in Night City.

[Blackhawk]

Best expansion ever made? That guy obviously never played The Sims 2: Used Furniture.

[El Guapo]

How quickly we forget about the majesty of the horse armor DLC.

[Max Peck]

On the other end of the spectrum, we have PC Invader, with their 3.5/10 review:

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – dark and gritty, but perhaps not as intended

Few games have been released to as bad a reception as Cyberpunk 2077. But now, 3 years after its initial catastrophic launch, the team at CD Projekt Red has attempted to pull the game from the grave with all-new DLC and a huge 2.0 patch. This update is being released with definite trepidation on both the fans’ side and the studios, but is it enough to revive the original game, and does Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty deliver on what was promised all those years ago?

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is trying to build higher on a foundation that is unstable and crumbling. Even with the 2.0 update, the game was already a soulless, neon-drenched failure. The problems with Cyberpunk 2077 lie so much deeper than broken coding and poor optimization, and it really becomes glaringly obvious in the Phantom Liberty update.

The problem with the original release, for those who could run it, was that it didn’t feel like an RPG; it felt linear, scripted, and kettled. The Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty update feels no different. This is a straightforward action game with one or two small choices to make. Don’t go expecting the huge, sprawling web of options that could be found in something like Baldur’s Gate 3.

The 20 or so hours I buried into the expansion felt more like I was playing a text adventure as I trawled through hours of exposition. However, my replies made little to no difference to how the actual story played out, and I had very little choice as to how the narrative moved. It felt like I was sitting outside of the game until they had the need for me to shoot some bad guys, and even these moments were few and far between.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty isn’t the expansion that is going to earn this game any awards, and certainly isn’t the reason to start playing again. It’s a crying shame, as the studio can absolutely nail it sometimes.

[Carpet_pissr]

Dayam.

[Max Peck]

I'm sure it's driving a lot of traffic to their site, if nothing else. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to stand out from the crowd.

[jztemple2]

kettled

It's how I like my popcorn.

[El Guapo]

I'm sure it's driving a lot of traffic to their site, if nothing else. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to stand out from the crowd.

I basically take that review to be saying "I didn't like the original game, and the expansion doesn't do enough to make it better." Which is fair enough, but not overly concerning to someone like me who did like the base game.

[gbasden]

I'm sure it's driving a lot of traffic to their site, if nothing else. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to stand out from the crowd.

I basically take that review to be saying "I didn't like the original game, and the expansion doesn't do enough to make it better." Which is fair enough, but not overly concerning to someone like me who did like the base game.

Right. I loved the original, and I expect I will love this as well.

Another opinion from Gamespot...

Phantom Liberty is Cyberpunk 2077 at its best. CD Projekt Red has taken the lessons from the original release and focused on the parts that mattered most to deliver a thrilling and impactful experience that doesn't overstay its welcome. And although it fits into the original story, it leaves a lasting impact that rewrote my perception of Cyberpunk's world. From a gameplay perspective, Phantom Liberty takes full advantage of the fantastic overhaul of the RPG systems for combat, then elevates the intimate dialogue-driven elements that make it unforgettable--and does so in spectacular and inventive fashion in its conclusions. Beneath the violence and edginess, the actual cyberpunk world is always going to be about the toll on human life, and Phantom Liberty largely understands that. It's cruel, sobering, and bittersweet, and it'll stick with you well after V lays down their weapons.

[Daehawk]

[Carpet_pissr]

I'm sure it's driving a lot of traffic to their site, if nothing else. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to stand out from the crowd.

But is the criticism fair? Is the game that much on rails?

[Max Peck]

I'm sure it's driving a lot of traffic to their site, if nothing else. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to stand out from the crowd.

But is the criticism fair? Is the game that much on rails?

The game has a story arc, but I wouldn't say it's on rails and IIRC there are multiple possible endings, although I didn't see them all on my playthroughs.

[Blackhawk]

I basically take that review to be saying "I didn't like the original game, and the expansion doesn't do enough to make it better." Which is fair enough, but not overly concerning to someone like me who did like the base game.

If you disliked (or loved) the original, you probably shouldn't be reviewing the game if you can't set that aside for the duration.

[Blackhawk]

I'm not sure what they think 'on rails' means (or "linear, scripted, and kettled"), but they seem to mean that there isn't a lot of divergence in your options on the main quest. Even in the ~30 hours I played, I found it about as 'on rails' as a Far Cry or Bethesda RPG. Yeah, when you're on a story mission, it's scripted. Most games are like that - it doesn't mean that the game is linear. It sounds like he wanted a pure sandbox combined with a tabletop level of choice.

I read that review. It was just bad. It was, very clearly, someone with a bone to pick who went in expecting to hate it. Everything was written with bitterness and angst. I looked into the author - it was the first review he's written there, and, according to his site, it's the only gaming site he's written for, so it's likely his first review anywhere.

It shows.

/edit - from the review comments section:

Paul Younger

I founded this site many years ago before moving on. If you are an old-time reader here, well I can only apologise for this review and it's so sad to see what has become of PCI since its acquisition Still, it's Leo's opinion and he's entitled to it but 3.5 will be taking the piss. This site was originally founded on honest opinions and non-clickbait news and articles so it's sad to see this.

[malchior]

Yep - feels like pure clickbait.

[TheMix]

Both of them somehow shifted from my Steam wish list to my library.

Okay. I laughed. Well played.