“It was a rough few years…”
In RockPaperShotgun’s ownCyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty review, Graham summed it up as “perhaps the best expansion ever made”, which has gone down a treat with the developers. “Is it? Maybe!” cinematic designer Michał Zbrzeźniakposted. “I mean, the amount of work that was put into it results in what I think is one of the most robust and content rich expansions. But we also needed to really redeem ourselves!”
In fairness to rank-and-file CD Projekt developers, many of Cyberpunk 2077’s issues appear to have originated at the top of the ladder. Studio bosses confessed after release that they"ignored signals about the need for additional time to refine the game", and CD Projekt Red investors eventuallysued the companyfor making “materially false or misleading statements” about the condition of the game.
The game’s pre-release marketing was also blighted byfetishistic transphobic imagery, and the project as a whole is an especially vicious specimen of videogame crunch, withreports of developers working 13 hour daysand feeling as though they were “trying to drive a train while the tracks are being laid in front of you”.
No surprise, then, that CD Projekt developers were on tenterhooks over Phantom Liberty’s reception. One Xitter user asked Zbrzeźniak: did CD Projekt feel that Phantom Liberty was a more important project than the developer’s similarly acclaimed Witcher 3 expansions? “There is some truth in that for sure,” hereplied. “A lot of people worked in this for quite long, longer than Blood and Wine, for example. And the fact that we really felt like we need a hit this time was a contributing factor. Ironically, base game problems inspired us to compensate more!”
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty launches next week, but there’s a2.0 updatewith copious revisions and additions that existing owners can download and play today, for free, though be mindful that you might need toupgrade your PC.
