The revisionism around Cyberpunk 2077 and the reception of this DLC makes me feel like I’m going fucking insane. It’s like everyone forgot how bad this game was because a mediocre anime launched on Netflix.

Cyberpunk 2077 had a myriad of foundational and structural issues regarding its world design, writing, quest design, and mission structure that cannot be fixed by making slight edits to the leveling system.

It wanted to be every kind of AAA game simultaneously without succeeding at any single junction (probably because it’s impossible to combine some of these game styles). It wanted to be an open-world RPG with the density of an Immersive Sim and a Grand Theft Auto-style game with bombastic, setpiece-driven missions like Call of Duty.

Phantom Liberty septuples down on the latter pairing in particular. It is a meaningless open-world that buffers what are essentially Call of Duty missions centered around set pieces, complete with walk-and-talk and press F to pay respects segments.

It’s a shame because, for all of the original game’s faults stemming from a hellish development cycle with a lack of a cohesive vision, with multiple rebooted versions of the stacked on top of one another to create a freakish AAA homunculus, Phantom Liberty offered a second chance on a fresh slate.

Instead, it’s just more of the same inharmonious game design, except this time, the characters and writing are even less interesting.

Cyberpunk 2077 was never good, and it can’t be good until CDPR makes a new game. I think people struggle to accept that CDPR dropped a massive fucking turd, and the reception to this DLC and the 2.0 version of the game is just a sunken cost fallacy for the games media hype machine.

Now that the game isn’t in a state where it’s literally falling apart at the seams, it can receive the ecstatic fanfare that people have been edging on for the past three years.

As great as Cyberpunk 2077 looks and sounds, it’s nothing more than a celebration of shallow AAA tropes and bad taste in a hollow open world. Now that the stink of its fraudulent launch has been cleaned up and laundered by an anime, post-launch support, and media fluff pieces, people can hop back to touting CDPR as an industry paragon.

If you already like this game, then Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 update will probably be up your alley. For people like me who didn’t enjoy the original game, they will not change your mind.

It’s also funny that after all of the controversy surrounding the transphobic imagery in this game, they couldn’t be fucked to remove it after three years and a “game changing” update.

Oh, I also ran into a game breaking bug that prevented me from beginning the last mission that made me have to go back two hours and replay multiple missions.