Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC is the End Result of its Redemption Arc

Late last year, CD Projekt Red officially unveiled the first full expansion to Cyberpunk 2077, titled Phantom Liberty . As time when on the developer slowly began to reveal more information about the upcoming DLC. Symbolically, however, the Phantom Liberty DLC means a lot more for Cyberpunk 2077.

It's no secret that the game got off to a rough start in terms of performance and behind-the-scenes drama. However, as time went on user reviews for Cyberpunk 2077 gradually became more positive. Now the game is at a point where players are genuinely excited to see more content for the game and ready for a new adventure in Night City. One might say that the Phantom Liberty DLC is the end result of the game's real-life redemption arc.

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The Disastrous Launch of Cyberpunk 2077

When the game was originally released it had more performance issues than one could ever accurately keep track of. These included—but were not limited to—frequent game crashes, animations that went haywire, the AI acting in awkward ways, massive frame rate drops, corrupted save files, and many more issues. The problems were so widespread and dense that CD Projekt Red actually had to unveil a roadmap to fix Cyberpunk 2077. Reviews for the game were ultimately mixed on home consoles though the game did do better on PC.

Despite this, the game did apparently sell well and has reportedly shipped over 20 million copies worldwide as of September 2022. That said, there were consequences for releasing the game in such a state. The developer was notably sued by its investors for launching the game in such an unfinished condition. CD Projekt Red's stocks also fell by about 75 percent following the release of Cyberpunk 2077. Luckily, this was not the end of the story for the game or the developer.

How CD Projekt Red Redeemed Cyberpunk 2077

Following the game's botched release, the developer began fulfilling the promise of the road map and released a series of patches and updates for the project. Unlike other games with controversial launches, CD Project Red stuck with the game and gradually molded it into a more playable product. One of the latest patches for Cyberpunk 2077 was released in April and work continues on it to this day in preparation for the release of Phantom Liberty . This commitment was something that gamers noticed and were grateful for.

As the months and years rolled on, the user scores for the CR Projekt Red game gradually rose. As of this writing, Cyberpunk 2077 now has a mostly positive user review score on Steam. Many negative reviews were switched to positive and the game is now in the "Very Positive" rank with over half a million user reviews on record. Fans appear to be genuinely excited about the upcoming DLC which would likely not have been the case if, say, Phantom Liberty had been announced a month after the game was launched.

The latest trailer for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty looks as if it will shake things up in a big way. A new ending will be added to the game and is said to be the biggest DLC that the developer has ever attempted. There are some noticeable performance issues scattered throughout the base game and some bizarre bugs do pop up but are by no means game-breaking and more updates are coming. It remains to be seen if the CD Projekt Red can keep up this momentum for expansion. At the moment, however, Phantom Liberty appears to be arriving at a pivotal moment for Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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