as Cyberpunk 2077 It has been updated repeatedly, focusing mainly on performance improvements CD Project REDThe open-world adventure, especially on consoles – let’s be fair – it’s more than a pig. But back in Night City, I was struck by the depth of these updates. I’m surprised they haven’t been talked about more.
I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PC before it was released to the world, and chaos ensued. At the time, I thought the game, you know, was great. It’s not perfect. Its love of sledgehammer-level subtlety is eroded, and it’s not a GTA-quality open world (though arguably it never will be, coming from a studio that’s tiny compared to Rockstar). But it’s a fun, exciting open world with some extremely hackable RPG systems, decent shooters, and a branching story structure, and I honestly found it surprisingly engaging and engaging. I’ve spent about 60 hours with it and love it.
Then there is the console. Oh god, it came to the console. Those console versions are what they are, right? a mess. A thousand memes were launched. A high-end PC experience plagued by a few bugs, but no more than your average open-world game version, suddenly gave way to the brutally miscompiled video of a terminal fading game, as both the graphics and mechanical systems seemed to crash themselves and implode.
So CD Projekt has a job on hand. A lot of people are dumbfounded. One of those people is me, right? I can only play the game on a high-end PC and make a verdict based on that, and then a huge audience gets a very different experience. But they’ve also ruined their reputation as gamers’ darling studios. Much of what The Witcher 3 has built on the studio’s reputation seems to have unraveled in just a few weeks.
The closest comparison I can think of is what happened with Square Enix and Final Fantasy XIV. As the follow-up to the perfectly successful MMO, one of World of Warcraft’s few healthy competitors, it’s a disaster. In this case, Square had to reboot the entire game and build something new from the ground up, not just to save the game, but the company’s reputation and most valuable IP. The result, now famous, is arguably the biggest comeback in gaming history.
And, you know…I know a little bit about it, though Light Shadows, close up cyberpunk. It will never be FF14. First, it’s improving an existing game, rather than completely rebooting it — but those improvements go well beyond the bare minimum. Frankly, you can tell that CD Projekt sucks. As it should; everything from that studio is here.
When I returned to Cyberpunk 2077 this week for the first time since its release month, I knew what to expect: technical improvements, bug fixes, and maybe some general tweaks. What I wasn’t expecting was how much of a change there would be other than making the game work in all situations.
So put all that aside for a second; assuming the game is running on your platform of choice. There are a few glitches all over the place, it seems to be present on all platforms. What I wanted to talk about, and what impressed me the most, was all the other changes that happened throughout the patch.
There have been balance changes like whole weapons being rethought, new weapons being added, and mechanics being completely re-tuned so you can’t completely ruin the game by guaranteeing that every hit is the key. There are some neat qualities of life, like showing what your character’s made clothes look like before production. Outfits are often rethought, reorganizing their stats, abilities, and perks. Skills have been rebalanced, moved, merged, and even removed entirely – because why keep something that doesn’t work? Some of the most powerful networking software has been given new mechanics, moves, and finishing moves.
It’s just…a lot. There are now neat custom animations when you first equip certain types of weapons. While there are still no vehicular police chases (and I don’t think there ever will be, since the game really wasn’t designed for that), you’ll now occasionally see police cars chasing gang members down the street – you can follow along and get involved yourself in that battle. In fact, there are many such dynamic events scattered around the world: NPCs are actually doing things, rather than just standing or walking in circles to give the illusion of activity. Many of them come with new sound effects and other elements to add legitimacy to the ambience.
YouTuber One Dragon does a particularly good job of tracking changes, noting that there seems to be a timeline for what some NPCs actually do now. If you go to a store during the day, it will be crowded with customers, but at night there will be cleaners mopping the floors. The security guard, who used to be motionless outside, now walks around from time to time, sits down and rests.
These things sound small, but I’m a firm believer that in an open world game like this, the little touches add up to a lot. When the core game is pretty stable from the start, it adds more, aside from performance issues – which was the case with Cyberpunk 2077. There are a lot of changes, and they make this update more than just covering up the cracks: it’s trying to fill and finish them properly so there are no more cracks.
Basically, I think CD Projekt RED has a chance here. This studio might actually have a chance to save the game. With the recently updated larger versions 1.3 and 1.5, the studio has found a good pace of updates and a strong trajectory that these patches are executing. We’ll need more though – and possibly some free DLC – and then they might do something about actually rebooting the game to turn around public opinion.
In short, I am impressed. This is the biggest post-launch improvement I’ve seen in a game in a long time, and it gives me hope for the future of Cyberpunk 2077. Hopefully this is just the beginning of the redo.
