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Cyberpunk 2077
We are just over a week away from the one year anniversary launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and in case you were wondering if CDPR might do something to mark the occasion within the game itself, don’t hold out any hope for that.
The roadmap released recently for Cyberpunk 2077 indicated that 1.31 was the last patch in 2021, and it turns out that wasn’t just a graphical mistake, CDPR is in fact not releasing any patches this year. And they are skipping an entire patch, apparently, focused on one that will arrive alongside next-gen versions in Q1 of 2022.
CDPR CEO Adam Kiciński spoke to Polish outlet rp.pl about this plan:
“This year, we will no longer be releasing any updates to the game. We are working intensively on the version for the latest generation of consoles, which will be released in the first quarter of 2022 with a major update - Patch 1.5.”
So, the game is skipping ahead over 1.4 completely somehow, and going straight into 1.5, unless that’s a typo. I would expect this to be a pretty huge patch, and hopefully it’s one that could come with more free DLCs, as we have not gotten any of those since earlier in the fall, and they were incredibly minor. Players are still waiting for datamined free DLC features like New Game Plus, which seems like exactly the kind of thing that should launch with the next-gen version of the game. But no word on that yet, nor any exact timing other than Q1. CDPR has been pretty allergic to exact dates when it comes to future Cyberpunk content, but even then, everything has still managed to be pretty delayed over the course of the last year.
Cyberpunk 2077
The quote everyone is pulling from this interview is Kiciński talking about how they still have long term faith in the game:
“We are proud of many aspects of the game, but - as we know - not everything went our way. Nevertheless, the awareness of the Cyberpunk brand that we have managed to build is huge, and the game universe, its character and detail have fans all over the world. We believe that in the long term "Cyberpunk 2077" will be perceived as a very good game and, like our other titles, it will sell for years - especially as the equipment will be more efficient and the game will be improved by us all the time. as well as the version for the latest generation of consoles.”
Many were mocking this statement, as Cyberpunk 2077 remains a cautionary tale of overpromising features and rushing a game to release, and yet the worm may already be turning to some extent. A flood of new players have picked up the game on sale, and have been giving the game thousands of positive reviews on Steam, where the game is now 74% positive reviews overall, with PC obviously being the best place to play the game, performing and looking better than it does on consoles. Add in fan-led mod support, and the PC version is a wildly different game than the incredibly broken launch console version (though to be fair, the PC version was plenty broken right at launch too).
A lot of this hinges on what CDPR manages to deliver both with the next gen version and future expansion DLC. If the next gen version can make the game perform and look as good as it does on PC, that’s a big step toward changing the narrative. If the expansion DLC is as good as what we saw for The Witcher’s Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine, same thing. But all of that remains to be seen, and the game has received painfully few updates over the course of the past year besides bug and performance fixes. And yet, I do see the narrative starting to change into “actually, Cyberpunk is pretty good now.” We’ll see what happens next.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and its audiobook, and The Earthborn Trilogy, also on audiobook.