Two months later, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ really hasn’t changed in any meaningful way

It’s now been a little over two months since Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, and yet, after a number of hotfixes and patches, the game, and almost all of its issues, remains fundamentally in place, and it seems that even after all very little has changed this time.

The biggest changes I noticed about Cyberpunk 2077 were some tweaks to the visual settings that made the game look a little better on Xbox Series X a few weeks after launch. But other than that, they’re just bug fixes all over the place, but with hundreds more not is still resolved. And while there are some signs of improvement in the way the game runs on last-generation consoles, it’s still nowhere near “ good, ” and I’m not just saying that despite the hotfixes and patches, Sony is still still has not agreed to sell Cyberpunk 2077 again on the PS Store, resulting in low console sales in January for the game overall.

In fact, the biggest stories of the past two months have not been positive. The game’s first major patch actually introduced a gamebreaking bug bigger than any problem it was trying to fix, which needed to be fixed soon after. Then modders discovered an exploit that caused CDPR to take a long time to close when it exposed a vulnerability that allowed people to access your system via mods or edited save files.

Finally, perhaps the biggest story of the past two months is the extensive hack of CDPR, in which the motivation mentioned was retaliation for CDPR’s recent behavior and the problems surrounding Cyberpunk. The game’s source code has been stolen (as has Gwent and The Witcher 3’s) and it is unclear what long-term problems this could pose. Cyberpunk would get a February patch that’s bigger than January’s and potentially fix more important issues, and yet it’s certainly possible that the fallout from this hack could delay that as resources now need to be spent securing everything, from source code to employee information.

You will notice a common thread here, that pretty much everything is that has Worked on in the past two months has just been repairs for broken parts of the game. No quality of life updates, no missing or cut or promised content. Nothing like that. And things that seem “buggy”, like traffic AI or police AI, are much bigger problems that cannot be solved simply quickly because they represent systemic problems within the game. The quality of life upgrades and new content can all be included in Cyberpunk’s free DLC later in Spring / Summer, which has been delayed due to all these bug / performance fixes. Meanwhile, players are waiting for something as simple as the ability to get a haircut in the game.

I’ve played Cyberpunk occasionally for the past two months and it’s really striking how little has changed in the PC or console versions in the end. Minor improvements here and there, and avoiding a few quest bugs maybe, but obviously, even another 2-3 months delay wouldn’t have been enough to fix what’s ailing the game, and it would take at least a year needed to combine bug fixes and more profound content issues.

I’ve always said there’s a basic level of fun here, which is true, otherwise I wouldn’t be on my third V variant. But things are moving very, very slowly here, and it’s not clear when meaningful change will come into play. Let’s hope it’s with this February patch, which may still be on track.

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