According to CD Projekt RED's Gabe Amatangelo, the director of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the studio understands that a lot is riding on the expansion pack's success and reception, and steps are being taken to correct the original release's outward perception from the community. After news broke that the DLC is essentially the game's 2.0 release, expectations have grown by a fair margin.
Specifically, Phantom Liberty will upgrade Cyberpunk 2077 in many different ways, which isn't something that fans necessarily expected. Following the game's botched 2020 launch, CDPR's previously stellar reputation was marred, and the studio appears to think of the new DLC as a way to correct that wrong and get the franchise back on the right track.
Though Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten numerous improvements and upgrades over the past couple of years, the Phantom Liberty DLC appears to come with the single biggest batch of changes yet. "There's an absolute dedication to what's needed to be done to make it right," Amatangelo said to Bloomberg's Jason Schrier. Initially, there were plans to develop at least two major DLCs for Cyberpunk 2077, but these got revised into the singular Phantom Liberty package, which is due to come out late in September 2023. Amatangelo's team has been given carte blanche to get Phantom Liberty up-to-spec so that it will deliver on as many fronts as possible, and the director said that he was struck by the CDPR board's "humility and willingness to change."
All in all, it seems that the new DLC is a bigger deal than what many will have anticipated. For example, it's been revealed that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty has a new ending in store for the base game, suggesting that its central questline may have some big reveals and alterations in store for the original's main story. This comes on top of the expected upgrades to a variety of gameplay systems, such as its vehicle combat, skill trees, AI combatants, and more.
CDPR needs to be confident in Phantom Liberty, of course, and everything seems to point to the notion that the studio is finally aiming in the right direction with Cyberpunk 2077. Another piece of good news is that the studio no longer seems to be incessantly crunching on the game, as Amatangelo described his team's work-life balance as "very healthy" at this time. That may be why it took so long for Phantom Liberty to get an official launch date, too.
One thing that fans may wish to consider, though, is that Phantom Liberty bumps up Cyberpunk 2077's hardware requirements. The game is, for example, no longer going to officially support regular hard drives, and the new recommended graphics card is none other than Nvidia's super-powered RTX 4080 GPU. A tall ask, perhaps, but it may well pay off once Phantom Liberty comes out.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty launches on September 26, 2023, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Bloomberg
