WHAT IS THIS DAMN GAME?!

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game developed by CD Projekt RED, that also developed The Witcher 3. It was announced in a conference in 2012 as Cyberpunk 2020's official videogame adaptation, created by Mike Pondsmith[1]. It's avalaible for PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch 2.

It's a FPS RPG in a "hi-tech, low life" future. You are V, a customizable player character mercenary trying to become a legend in the city of Night City.


Despite everything, it's still you.

It's the very own game that launched so buggy that became a meme in the internet. Fortunately, CD fixed the game. Cyberpunk had two popurality peak: with the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and the 2.0 update[2]. More about them later.

It's a kinda long reading, but I'll try make it short what happended with Cyberpunk.


After The Witcher 3's launch in 2015, CD Projekt Red got very known as one of the best developers at time. People got hyped about CD's next game.

Cyberpunk would be know by a lot of people in 2019, when, at Xbox's E3, shared a cinematic trailer that simply Keanu Reeves would be playing the legendary rocker Johnny Silverhand. Reeves casting announce would skyrocket Cyberpunk popurality, although the game was at E3 2018.

Yeah, but what about its failure launch? How it got there? To simply put:


  • They thought it would be cool lying about a lot of things when marketing the game. Yeah, things that are NOT on the game. Yes you read right, they straight up LIED. Metro system, for example, was promised initially, but got canceled aftwards. Nowadays, we have a Metro system, added only in 2.1 update.
    • Some of the things they promised is:
    • An amazing AI that shapes the combat and NPCs daily routines;
    • The game being very well optimized for last gen consoles;
    • Weapons customization;
    • Immersive police system, with corrpution;
    • Lifepaths having bigger impact in the game;
    • Etc;[3]

Cyberpunk, got announced in 2012, but it only started its pre-production in 2016, after The Witcher 3 expansion Blood and Wine launched. They announced it early probably to attract shareholders. Cyberpunk only had four years of development [4]. They would never make everything they promised in this short timespan.

Pressure. Public, media, and mainly, the shareholders' pressure. Initially, Cyberpunk would be launched in april 16 of 2020, just when the world got hit by a pandemic. So yeah, pretty reasonable right? Everyone would be doing home office at time. New date would be then september 17, which afterwards would be november, 19, which afterwards would be december, 10. Developers claimed that they worked up to ONE HUNDRED HOURS per week. There was such a big pressure upon CD to get the game ready as soon as possible [5].

The pressure was the reason Cyberpunk would be that bugged buggy. Its developers would also joke with the game's own state, with a bug compilation video being leaked in a ransonware [6].


Some of the bugs were:


The game already had negative impressions: in june of 2019, people noticed an in-game ad that contains a transfem model with an visible body part with the tagline "mix it up" and 16 flavours you’d love to mix.. People criticized that it would be fetishizing trans people's body. Cyberpunk's art directors argued that the poster was an critic to hypersexualization in marketing. What does'nt help was, one year before, the official Cyberpunk account answered it with a joke to the trans community.[10] This situation came back around the launch, when poeple realized that the character creator was'nt inclusive, like some hairstyles was locked behind gender and pronouns are locked behind voice type. DISCLAIMER: I, Jesse Dylan, does not ensorde ANY TYPE of CD Projekt RED's past actions. I firmly believe that the character creator could be better in inclusion, and that they were disgusting joking with the trans community. Trans rights is and always will be humans rights.


THE COMEBACK

The game already had a patch day one, patches that are launched before the game comes out, that even that couldn't handle the broken chaos state. The first hotfix, the 1.04, would be launched one day after the offical launch[11]. It got two more hotfixes later, which couldn't fixes most of the issues. Besides, Cyberpunk's reputation had already gone broken.

At this point, Cyberpunk 2077 became a big joke for everyone, a game that promised everything and delivered almost nothing. Almost, 'cus behind a broken game, it still got good parts: the characters, the story, the Night City ambient, the gameplay system with good ideas but horrible execution...

The first Cyberpunk's patch, 1.1, gone live some week later, in january 22 of 2021. The game got some patches over time to fix the chaotic state.

Some time before the game's launch. in june 25 of 2020, CD Projekt Red announced that they're working with the japanese animation company, Studio Trigger, from Kill la Kill e Tengenn Toppa Gurren Lagann and the streaming platform Netflix in an original anime that takes place in the same universe, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The date launch was somewhere in 2022[12].


Cyberpunk: Edgerunners announcement poster

Two years later after the launch, most of the issues got fixed, or, at least, got mitigated. Despite everything, the anime wasn't canceled! The news came back stronger in the 2022.

2022 would be the year that Cyberpunk 2077 came back. The game got the next gen consoles update (PS5 and Xbox Series) with the 1.5 in february 15, and the anime was attracting a lot of attention, be it from new or old public.

Coinciding with the anime's launch, the game received the 1.6 update that added Edgerunners references to the game, like Rebecca's shotgun and David's jacket.

As said above, the game reached a new popularity peak with Edgerunners, overcoming for most of the people the negative reputation. Of course it was not for everyoen, and I think it's totally fair not liking the game for everything. But I'm glad that, in the end, they didn't give up on fixing it.


PHANTOM LIBERTY

In the same year, CD announced, in september 6, Phantom Liberty, which would add a new area called Dogtown, with a story focused in spionage[13]. Still in 2022, at The Game Awards, they announced Idris Elba as one of the main characters of the expansion[14]!

In this expansion, V is called by a mysterious netrunner named Songbird from a falling plane with the NUSA's president, Rosalind Myers. The plane's predicted to fall in Dogtown, a dangerous Night City district that became isolated from the city.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Keyart

Unfortunately, the expansion would only be launched for PC and next-gen consoles, offically abandoning support for PS4 nad Xbox One versions.

Months after PL's announcemnt, CD would announce its biggest update yet made: the 2.0. This update remade and rebalanced every aspect of the gameplay: specially character progression and the infamous wanted system.

This was, in my humble opinion, the update that the game needed, I didn't like how the old skill tree didn't make sense, it had a lot of useless perks, like the one that lets you hold pistols while holding a body. But nothing was too annoying than locking epic and legendary items crafting behind skills. Also, the UI was confusing and the perks was divided into tabs.

Old skill tree. Source: ScreenRant.

Skill tree after 2.0. Source: Prima Games.

Phantom Liberty was well acclaimed, by the public and the critics, and some even say that PL was better than the The Witcher 3's expansions. I personally don't know if it's true, because the expansions has its strongs and weakness. But PL is equal to two TW3's expansions, because it adds a lot of content to the game.


WHAT NEXT?...


Well, everything that I wrote for now it's just a a bit of the story. It still has updates and we know that they are cooking a new game.

Project Orion, the sequel codename, was announced in october 4th of 2022.[15]. Since then, we had few news: in 2024, after Phantom Liberty launch, Cyberpunk 2077's main team got realocated to Boston to stabilish a new CD Projekt Red north american branch. The Boston team started developing the game alongside Warsaw and Vancouver teams[16].

Some moment of peace in this chaotic city.

In may 2025, Project Orion was internally renamed to Cyberpunk 2, and entered pre production[17].

Besides the sequel, we also got a new live-action project developed by Anonymous Content, from Mr. Robot and True Detective, announced in 2023. However, we never got anymore news since then[18].

And this is the overall summary of Cyberpunk 2077 journey, lots of errors but, hey, here we are!

We are the ELECTRONIC MINDS, a group of free-minded rebels. Cyberpunks. We live in Cyberspace, we are everywhere, we know no boundaries. This is our manifest. The Cyberpunks' manifest.

Christian As. Kirtchev, february 14 of 1997.