Cyberpunk 2077 – A Year Later

About a year ago, CD Projekt released the highly-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. And while the game was successful financially, it didn’t exactly become the cultural phenomenon both the developers and some of The Witcher fans wanted it to be. The game was plagued by bugs, poor performance, and a general lack of features and RPG elements.

And as a result, a year later, after at least some of those issues have been addressed, we now have this PC Gamer article that compares the game in its release state with the currently-available version. Here’s a couple of sample paragraphs:

I’m especially happy to see some quality of life changes, like fewer messages from fixers trying to sell me cars (this, and the rest of the near-constant phone call spam was a major irritant for me), the improved zoom level on the minimap so I don’t miss turns while following the GPS, and the fact that open world NPCs now react differently to events instead of all crouching or running or exiting their cars in perfect unison, which was pretty immersion breaking.

I am, however, getting far more frequent crashes to desktop than I ever did. In about eight hours of playing, the game crashed five or six times. That’s not great, especially since crashing was one problem I never really had originally (and I’m using the exact same PC). And I’m pretty pleased to report that the cars outside V’s apartment no longer ram mindlessly into that barricade.

But like I said, bugs aren’t the only problem. I still can’t change my appearance after starting the game. The lifepaths still feel entirely pointless. And playing the game again I’m remembering other things I was excited about, like brain dancing, which turned out to be used only a few times to solve some low-level puzzles, and the fearsome Trauma Team, who show up… what, once? Twice? And have absolutely no other part in the game? Surely there was meant to be more of them.

And if that doesn’t sound too promising, there’s also this TweakTown article quoting a Polish interview with CD Projekt’s studio president Adam Kicinski where he states that in the long run, Cyberpunk 2077 “will be perceived as a very good game.”