Cyberpunk 2077 - Phantom Liberty

Playtime: 174h 39m.

This is it. This is what the game could have been at launch. Well, if you ignore all the hyping b-shit that its marketing lied about.

That is not to say that the game is now without flaws. Oh hell no, there’s plenty of driving physics shenanigans, clueless and cloned NPCs going around doing who knows what, summoned cars spawning from the sky… you name it. But one can’t deny that the inherently broken and sometimes buggy systems have been polished to the best they can be.

The skill tree feels somewhat meaningful (although being able to freely move stats and perk points around points to a lack of confidence from the devs that the players have enough information to make good choices), the mini map scales up and down according to your movement speed (walk, run, drive slow and fast), transmog was added and works great, and the list of improvements and quality of life changes goes on and on.

Although some of the changes feel like “just incorporating user mods and calling it a day” (the metro travel system feels very half-baked and what some hacky kid could put together - oh look, they did!), the game that one had a soul, felt sometimes really good to play, now is most of the times really good to play.

But I can’t in good conscience give it 5 stars. It would take an Unreal Engine 20 remake in actual 2077 to pull that off.

Bug Bonanza

They’re well documented and plentiful, but here is a list of the ones that I found so silly that I had to screenshot myself:

Plot

I won’t spoil it. I loved most of the main story an non-fodder side quest characters. Well, were it not for stupid River, that I could never relate to, so much that I didn’t even bother to help him rescue his nephew on the 2nd playthrough and felt remorseless even after receiving a message saying that both had died, I’d have loved them all.

The main story plot is still gripping. And I was still happy and on the edge of my seat when playing the final mission for the n-eth time, choosing a new (actual old, pre-expansion) ending to go with.

The expansion is as good as it gets. Reminded me much of the Witcher 3 ones, in how they took an excellent game and managed to improve on it, game design and plot wise.

One of the major grips I had with the game (but wasn’t aware of until I watched this Extra Credits video) was the level design. One never knew where they were in the game. You always had to open the map and/or resort to quest markers for navigation. Phantom Liberty does away with that with a recognizable and understandable landscape. Once I learned it, I could just drive and/or jump/dash like a madwoman to get where I wanted to.

But the expansion plot. Oh, it is fire. Quite often I pause an RPG game because of a meaningful decision that’s in front of me that’s not clearly black or white and I want to take time to soak the information I have and make a choice I won’t regret later. PL sent me early to bed to think about what to do in the game twice.

No spoilers, but I’m very happy with the final decision I took in the game, even though every NPC seemed to be sad/mad/angry with me about it and it didn’t give me an additional main game ending.

Gameplay

Interestingly, there was very little variance in my character build between playthroughs. Despite choosing different story paths, my characters were shooters that had a close, mid and ranged arsenal of Power weapons, ready to dispatch goons with headshots.

I believe that the 1st person perspective kinda drew me to play it as a FPS. I tried to use some blades (Mantis inclusive), but it just didn’t click, and they always felt underpowered.

Driving around was always fun. If a little buggy every now and then.

Graphics

Breathtaking… ly blurred.

In order to shine, the game needs RT + DLSS. To try Path Tracing, I’d even suggest Frame Generation.

I don’t know what’s with the rendering tech, but it always felt too blurry. Specially if you go the Path Tracing route.

But even so, once your eyes get used to the lack of sharpness of everything, and the blurry trails that high-contrast moving objects leave behind, it is a thing of beauty. Sometimes even overbearingly so.

Performance

I never played the game on 100+ FPS, but that’s because as a test bed of many new and upcoming rendering techniques, I kept trying the bleeding edge of realtime rendering. That was Ray Tracing with my RTX 3090 and Path Tracing with the RTX 4090.

But it always felt like a fair cost on the GPU side. On the CPU side though… not so much. NPC dense areas were always a drag, and given how dumb and buggy they are, it felt like this part of the game could’ve been more optimized.

Conclusion

It is certainly a landmark game for the industry, but also in my life. More than The Witcher 3, playing CP2077 was what I did as a gamer and PC builder for quite some time.

It left a mark and I don’t think I’ll ever play something quite like it for a long while, if ever.