The playable demo of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty that CD Projekt Red brought to Summer Game Fest 2023 confirmed a long-standing fan theory about the upcoming expansion. This development follows the premature start of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty pre-orders which suggested that the DLC's long-awaited release is on the horizon.
The RPG's first and only expansion has been shrouded in mystery ever since its April 2022 announcement. And while its second teaser from December revealed the addition of Idris Elba to Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's cast, that promo still offered more questions than answers. Summer Game Fest 2023 was an opportunity for CDPR to break the silence on the DLC, but the developer's participation in the show has so far been limited to a playable demo of the expansion that it's offering behind closed doors to people physically attending the conference at its YouTube Theater venue in Inglewood, California.
Be that as it may, some gameplay footage from the demo still found its way online on June 9, courtesy of GameStop's Instagram Stories. And while the brief clip does not appear to show much at first glance, there's more than meets the eye in these few mundane seconds of V walking down a corridor. For starters, the footage confirms that Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will bring V face-to-face with Rosalind Myers, as the objective to find the current NUSA President pops up on the screen near the end of the video. The original teaser for the DLC opened on a crashed Air Force One, but it has so far been unclear whether Myers was actually on board the plane while it was taken down.
Secondly, the closed captions from the playable demo show that V is talking with someone named Songbird while going through the aircraft wreckage early on in the DLC's story. This is significant because it adds to the credibility of Cyberpunk 2077's big DLC leak from mid-2022, which revealed some major story beats from the upcoming expansion and was the first piece of evidence suggesting Songbird will be one of Phantom Liberty's central characters.
One final thing that can be gleaned from the footage of the SGF 2023 playable demo is a notable UI revamp that seems to be coming to CDPR's hit RPG; namely, it would appear that the players will soon be able to map grenades and Cyberware abilities to different buttons thanks to multiple quickslots that are clearly seen in the brief clip.
As a result, the HUD is now always displaying the player's Sandevistan or OS (hacking) implant of choice, with the clip also revealing that phone and car button hints have been redesigned. It's plausible that these tweaks won't be exclusive to Phantom Liberty but instead debut as part of the Cyberpunk 2077 1.7 update, seeing how CDPR previously confirmed that the said patch will incorporate a variety of quality-of-life changes.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty launches sometime in 2023 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: GameStop / Instagram
