CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is celebrating three years of its massive 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion. After a botched launch, which the studio still feels has damaged its reputation to this day, the RPG saw one of the best post-launch campaigns in history, and is now considered a brilliant game by fans.
In a post on social media celebrating three years of Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director and Cyberpunk 2 associate game director Pawel Sasko explained that making the expansion and fixing the RPG was “group therapy” for the team.
“The initial launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most impactful, creative and personal experiences of my life,” he said. “Before release, there was pride, enormous pressure, and years of work behind us. After release, when many of you chooms were disappointed and felt let down, I had to learn to look at the game through your experience rather than only through our intentions.”
Sasko explained that Cyberpunk 2077 was built in a “structure much closer to a waterfall model” which led to many developers being siloed into their work. For Phantom Liberty, this was changed to a much more collaborative environment. Right now, Cyberpunk 2 is in development with over 150 employees working on the upcoming sequel, and its development structure is a direct evolution on the changes made while working on Phantom Liberty.
The game director explained that Phantom Liberty’s entire structure was designed after the failures of the main game. “Sometimes our choices in the base game were so subtle that players did not even realise something was a consequence of an earlier decision,” he explained. In Phantom Liberty, “we all pushed strongly for more branches and clearer consequences”, as well as making sure that there was never a “correct decision” for V.
While Cyberpunk 2077 is a fantastic RPG, Sasko explains that its success still doesn’t make up for what the game was on launch. “I do not think Phantom Liberty erases the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and I would never want to tell our story that way,” he says.
“When I stood with Gabe Amatangelo at The Game Awards in 2023 to accept Best Ongoing Game, I thought about all the developers who kept putting their hearts into Cyberpunk and about all of you who stayed with us, came back, or decided to give the game another chance.”
Sasko also adds that they’re always thinking of improving the game to this day. “Developers are terrible at declaring anything completely finished. I can always see another detail I would change, another scene I would improve, another idea I would explore,” he said. “But three years after Phantom Liberty, when I look back at what we made and at everything Cyberpunk 2077 went through to get there, I feel a bit of pride and gratitude.”
With that said, Sasko told fans that they hope the game has finally become what it was originally supposed to be. “I hope that, in your eyes, Cyberpunk 2077 has earned its place,” they wrote.
Cyberpunk 2077 is still not a perfect game, although it is a very, very good one. There are still parts of the RPG that feel disconnected or not quite in place, but the game is still fantastic. As the studio now works on Cyberpunk 2, although no one knows when that will release, there’s a hope that the sequel will be a full realisation of CDPR’s original vision, albeit with a brand-new story.
