Cyberpunk 2077 has hit a milestone that outside observers may not care about, but the CDPR team who worked on and is still working on the game are celebrating it as a significant milestone.
After nearly three years and 546,484 reviews on Steam, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally crawled its way to an overall “Very Positive” score, where 80% of players have reviewed the game positively.
While recent reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 have been “Very Positive” for a while, it takes a ton of reviews for a game to drag its overall review total up over time, especially if you debut negatively like Cyberpunk 2077 did. While PC may have been the best overall platform for the game at launch compared to consoles, it was still buggy, still missing loads of features, and fans were not amused.
The rest is a redemption story that could be considered alongside No Man’s Sky as one of gaming’s great turnarounds. CDPR pushed off DLC and spent essentially two years on optimizing performance and tens of thousands of bug fixes. Later, quality of life improvements and some small new gameplay additions. Most recently, with the released of an “Overdrive” ray-tracing mode, Cyberpunk 2077 is quite literally the single best-looking PC game on the market, if you can run those cutting edge settings. The results really are miraculous.
The turnaround may not be complete until Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty releases, a massive expansion larger in budget than even The Witcher: Blood and Wine, one that hopes to learn the lessons of the game’s launch to produce something that’s great at launch, instead of needing to be fixed for years after.
The secret of Cyberpunk was that it was always fundamentally a very good game at its core. Night City is probably the most vibrant city in gaming. The core story and its major NPC side-storylines are all pretty fantastic. V herself is the best-acted first person lead in a game I’ve ever seen. It was just that horrible bugs and goofy glitches and poor performance were holding all of it back. But now that they aren’t? These are the reviews you get from players.
Phantom Liberty, out September 26, won’t just add new story components, it is coming with enormous overhauls for everything from skill trees to police AI, huge, fundamental changes to the game to get it in an even better place. It really is a wild saga for the game, but CDPR should be given credit for never throwing in the towel, and polishing it to a shine after all these years.
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