Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

One of the rarest redemption arcs in the medium

Pull the lens back and Night City matters far beyond a single game. It launched in December 2020 as one of the most anticipated titles ever made and came apart on arrival — the worst-hit last-gen builds got yanked from storefronts and refunded, and a studio co-founder had to record a video and apologise in person. It was the industry's most brutal cautionary tale about treating a release date as a finish line. And then, over three years, CD PROJEKT RED patched it back inch by inch, until three years after launch it lifted Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards, took a BAFTA for Best Evolving Game, crossed thirty-five million copies sold, and became the most profitable thing the company had ever made. A complete arc from industry joke to genre benchmark is vanishingly rare in this medium, and it gets mentioned in the same breath as that other famous comeback for good reason.

Look at Night City now and players no longer argue about clipping and frame drops. They argue about the ache the ending leaves, the fates of the characters, and that sleepless city forever burning in its own neon. That shift in what the conversation is even about — from technical embarrassment to genuine emotional reckoning — is, by itself, the best footnote those three years could ask for.

Who belongs in this city, and who should drive past

So who is it actually for? If you are the kind of player who rates narrative density and character writing above raw spectacle, if you are willing to sink into a first-person view, sit through dialogue that carries real weight, and lose yourself for a while in a vertical city, then Night City is close to tailor-made for you. The payoff it hands back — an emotional aftertaste few games can manage — is the rare kind.

Flip it around. If all you want is a clean, tidy sandbox, if long stretches of conversation wear you out, if a dense city gives you a headache the moment you step in, this one will tire you. Its pleasures need you to slow down, to listen, to take the forks seriously; chase fast, snappy fun instead and Night City's wall of information and slow-burn storytelling can turn into a burden. That is not a flaw, it is a refusal — the game knows it is offering immersion, and immersion is welded to a threshold by nature. As for which version to buy, the answer is simple: the base game plus Phantom Liberty is the complete shape of Night City, the expansion folding in both a top-tier spy narrative and the whole 2.0 system rebuild. Skip it and you simply have not seen the city at its best. Three years ago it was a punchline; three years later it is a yardstick — a road it walked the hard way, but it got there, and getting there is worth taking seriously.