I played Cyberpunk 2077 at launch on PC and it was a disaster. Not in the way PS4 players experienced it — my rig handled it — but in the way the game itself was broken: quests that wouldn’t complete, bugs that corrupted saves, design decisions that felt unfinished. I uninstalled it after 30 hours and didn’t come back for two years. That was a mistake, because the version that exists now is a masterpiece.
Patch 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion fundamentally rebuilt the game from the ground up. The skill tree was redesigned into something coherent. The police system now actually works — commit a crime in Night City and the NCPD will pursue you with escalating force rather than spawning behind you. The driving is better. The AI is better. The open world, which always looked spectacular, now feels alive in a way it didn’t before.
Night City remains the most impressive piece of game architecture ever built. Walking through Japantown at 2am, neon reflecting off wet asphalt, the megabuildings looming overhead, sirens somewhere distant — it’s the closest any game has come to realising the aesthetic of cyberpunk fiction rather than just gesturing at it. The density is real. Every street has its own texture.
The story is better than I expected. V’s situation — stuck sharing a body with the ghost of Johnny Silverhand — creates genuine tension and some of the most interesting philosophical conversations in a video game. The relationship with Judy Alvarez has more warmth and genuine chemistry than most games manage with their main romantic leads. And the multiple endings, once I understood how to reach them all, gave me hours of thinking about what the right choice actually was.
CD Projekt Red turned a disaster into something remarkable. It took years, but Cyberpunk 2077 is now worth every hour. If the launch reputation kept you away, it’s time to give it a second look. Night City is waiting, and it’s better than it’s ever been.