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Two years post-launch, Cyberpunk 2077 finally feels like the game it was supposed to be

2K View2023-04-01

For better or for worse, we’re never going to forget about Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt Red’s overambitious RPG promised far more than it could deliver when it launched in late 2020, and it has become more than a mere game. It’s a symbol of games industry hubris, of marketing campaigns that break free from the boring chains of reality, and of the chaos caused by years of feature-creep. The term “Cyberpunk” now is a benchmark for badness in the popular consciousness, a mental nadir other botched launches can approach but never quite reach.

Granting all that, I’ve still loved it since day one. During the first month Cyberpunk 2077 was available to the public, I spent countless hours tooling around in Night City. It was, I’ll admit, a struggle: Initially, I could barely complete the tutorial without some technical problem causing a crash, or a gunfight dropping the framerate into single digits. Driving around was painful, quests had bugs, and the NCPD would flatten me if I even thought about nudging a pedestrian with my rear bumper.

Despite that, I loved Cyberpunk 2077. Thinking back on this now, I realize that a big part of why I felt that way is because I wanted to love it. Yes, the flaws were a bummer, but I’ve been playing games on PC since new releases were coming out on MS-DOS—I’m ready to push through some jank if I’m invested in the story, the setting, or the action.

As much as I enjoyed my initial experiences with Cyberpunk 2077, I decided to put it down for a while after getting through about half of the story. CD Projekt Red had begun pushing out patches, and I figured I’d wait a while and see how it felt once the dust settled.

I’m pleased to say that starting a new save a few weeks ago has been revelatory. The years of post-launch work the studio has poured into fixing Cyberpunk 2077 have paid off: Crashes and bugs are rare (although not completely absent), and performance has improved enough to get Cyberpunk 2077 verified as playable on the Steam Deck.

The performance gains (helped along by some new graphics hardware in my PC, courtesy of a tragic meltdown during the Diablo IV beta) have transformed Cyberpunk 2077 more than I would have anticipated back when I was first playing it. Combat is fluid and fun now, and I can squeeze off bursts of tech weapon rounds before pulling up my scanner to target enemies with damaging quickhacks at will.

It feels great, especially with the new DLSS 3 frame-generation option enabled. Running the benchmark with it on, I was getting a pretty consistent 110 fps with all the shiny ray-tracing options cranked up. That added performance changes gunfights, like the shootout with the Raffen Shiv gang with Panam, into the dynamic events they were meant to be, allowing me to actually feel the feedback in each weapon the way they were designed. It’s truly transformative.

The thing is, I think you still kind of have to want to love Cyberpunk 2077 for all this to jell into a delightful game. There are still plenty of annoyances to find for someone going in with a skeptical eye. Performance drops occasionally as I drive around at high speeds in the city, and there are still quests that fail to keep track of my decisions and lines of dialogue that play over each other. If you hated Cyberpunk 2077 before, well, it’s still the same game—better performance and improved stability haven’t changed that.

If you put Cyberpunk 2077 aside to wait like I did, though, I think now is a good time to come back. There’s plenty to look forward to: April 11 will see the launch of the new “Overdrive” mode that adds full path-traced lighting (for anyone who wants to really put their GPU to the test), and the spy-thriller DLC Phantom Liberty (starring Idris Elba as FIA agent Solomon Reed) is due out later this year.

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