The Cyberpunk 2077 Expansion You've Been Waiting For

Even though it has been one of the most awaited games in 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 has had a bumpy ride all throughout its stages of development. The game released by CD Projekt Red (CDPR), which is a leading and massive Polish game development studio best known for the Witcher series, was announced almost 10 years ago and had fans hyped up as such a massive open world adventure game in the cyberpunk genre was yet to be available on the market.

Nobody could have predicted what a wild ride it would have turned out to be and the way things happened, but today after almost a year and half on the market the game has shaped out quite well and is in a pretty good state, we are currently awaiting the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC release date for patch 1.6, which promises to even further smooth and refine one of gaming’s most anticipated titles ever.

Today as the 18 millionth copy has already been sold and CD Projekt Red released their latest reports on the title, we are going to overview a lot about the technical specs, gameplay improvements and what is yet to be unfolded in the futuristic word of Cyberpunk 2077, but first a brief history of events.

Prepare all your cyber-enhancements and line-up for the system update, as there is a lot to be discussed!

The difficult and hard road leading up to Night City.

After a few delays and setbacks the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC roadmap seemed to reach its final stages and everything seemed to approach the so desired title release date in early 2020, there were beautifully made DEMO videos, presentations and even Keanu Reeves got to play a major role (as the legendary in-game character Johnny Silverhand) in the Night City storyline of the game. You were offered to join in a guild system and that choice would have affected your storyline branch it depending on your choices in-game. Getting tasks done, could give you great enhancements and your character would evolve into a killing machine according to your preference and style. It sounded as if it was a bit too good to be true.

All eyes were on CDPR, expecting a fully finished game, but then disaster struck… In this review we are going to discuss the recently announced Cyberpunk 2077 DLC and how it would change things for the fans of the game, has it been too long and would it be able to rectify the carnage that has been one of gaming’s biggest scandals? Would the newest advancements in the game’s build be attractive enough to bring the playerbase the developers envisioned?

Let’s start with some of the more troubling elements that were discovered upon arrival, at first glare the Cyberpunk 2077 game impressed with its vast environments, attention to detail and intriguing storyline, it all looked so good in the videos, as it has been seen only on the 40+ minute long available DEMO video that showcased the project and its exciting features, but when the fans actually got their hands on a copy of the game, some were very disappointed to discover a glitchy mess that did not look as polished as they expected it to be.

The game had noticeable difficulty to run properly on last-gen consoles as they could simply not handle all the rendering and environmental textures across the massive map of Night city. There were a variety of bugs and glitches that obstructed the storyline progress, gameplay activities and visual scenery, NPCs were fewer and acted in an inadequate manner that was just too different from what we saw on the showcased DEMO.

The PS4 version even got taken down by SONY as it did not cover the quality requirements of the company and that caused a major turmoil among console fanatics, as the PC release had a bit more of a stable performance and promise in its build, it could also handle much more of the load the game required to run as intended. So, what had happened behind the scenes to have such a disastrous launch?

Was Cyberpunk 2077 a too big of a spoon to handle or was the reason hidden elsewhere? We are certain many factors combined and interlaced in order for this to happen such as, tight deadlines, the pandemic situation and understaffing as well as a disruptive management that just was shooting in random directions while asking miracles from developers to make the game run smoothly for all major consoles in both last and upcoming generations. The problem was definitely more technical than monetary as due to the multiple delays and drawbacks the title had seen in its timeline, it got really close to the next generations of consoles releasing to market and being stuck between a rock and a hard place, the studio had to take some difficult decisions, should the game run on both generations? How could it be made so that it does not differ too much from version to version and still deliver a great experience to players? There is no easy answer but with the story up to release and launch cleared, we can now go further!

Welcome to Night City, a place where you can have some fun, but not all of it is available yet!

With so many things planned for the game, it is difficult to manage and deliver all of them at once so a timeline was made that promised to fix and improve everything gradually and step by step to get us to the actually planned game that we were promised and should have gotten on release.

Cyberpunk 2077 DLC and patches were lined up to get rid of the ongoing problems with graphics, mechanics and gameplay features as well as the story, and as time went things started to shape up and actually getting resolved or improved, but the pile of trouble was not getting smaller, at least not that much.

Some fixes were really urgent as players could not progress without them, others were purely cosmetic and enhanced the performance a bit, but it still needed a lot of work to be done. One by one problems got uprooted and left in the past, the game got enriched with skins, outfits, car models, NPC behavior improvements, missing content replacement, texture fixes and so many other bugs getting removed or resolved but some of the bigger ones were still not addressed and no matter how much we like skins and minor changes to details, we felt a sort of an emptiness when it came to the promised Cyberpunk expansion in its features such as better police systems, enemy A.I. and multiplayer mode.

The game simply is so massive and has many moving parts that compile its mechanism, making it a complex and difficult to handle project, but surely one by one it all started to get sorted and with each next patch which all had an extensive list of improvements that actually made things much more playable and more importantly enjoyable for the fans. Progress was being made and the studio was going through a tough time during the pandemic as it had to send its teams in home-office making it even more difficult to roll-out the patches, but they were dedicated enough to do so and we got some major updates during the bumpy ride the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC roadmap has been.

The Cyberpunk DLC 1.5 patch was especially crucial in furthering the development and introduced major improvements and fixes as well as delivering a plethora of additional free content such as equipment, skins, weapons and even apartments you can rent across Night City, making the wait a bit more worthwhile. It also eliminated glitches and environmental problems that some players experienced which enhanced and integrated next-gen console like never seen before. With this all said it nicely leads us to the current times and what is coming up as DLC for Cyberpunk 2077.

The road up to Cyberpunk 2077 DLC patches and the goodies the next one should offer to fans.

It’s been more than two months since the release of the previous hefty Cyberpunk 2077 DLC 1.5 patch and the 2022 plans for the game ahead include major technical improvements, so here are a few of the highlights that we got on the previous patch; stable 60 FPS rate, Ray tracing and overall shadows enhancements, as well as better 4K performance mode with 2240x1260 – 3072x1728 dynamic resolution across next-gen consoles, and some specific additions to the PS5 and Xbox series X.

The city looks sharper and much more detailed with smoother graphics and temporal anti-aliasing. The Ray tracing mode goes up to 1440p and looks pretty stable too, out of the two experts suggest that performance mode is the better option. Xbox series S does not get all these features, but still carries a good gaming experience at 1440p and 2304x1296 – 2560x1440 dynamic resolution. The game really performs quite better indoors now with all shadows getting improved design and overall performance. Shadows now follow a more real-world logic and disperse much more evenly depending on your position towards an item looking more realistic with more depth.

Reflections have also been getting some boost of performance and are now much better viewed especially with the neon lighting that is set from signs around the city’s environment.

Crowd density is now randomized and has gotten it fair share of work done for all platforms and the results seem to be good enough even on Xbox series S, which does try its best to reach to the other two stronger consoles on the current generation market.

The 1.6 patch is probably going to be the last major one before the very long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 Expansion that we can expect to be released somewhere during 2023. There have been tons of work done up to now by the studio, but it definitely took them some precious time away, a year and a half to be more specific and that probably means that the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC plans have gotten a serious push further in time and so far, we have gotten only 6 of the 18 promised in total that have been rumored. Cyberpunk downloadable content has been released in volumes even today and there are many added packs for attire, decals and cosmetic changes, you are able to setup your own apartment and give a more personalized look to it, adopt pets and so much more.

The studio has opted to first address the game’s health and playability state, as there would be no point in releasing big amounts of Cyberpunk DLC or major expansions while the in-game experience is poorly done and executed, which would definitely make sense and logic having in mind the initial state the game was in when it was released. But this however introduced a new problem on itself, the period of patches and fixes may have tired fans who do not just want new skins and eye-candy, but rather thirst for new modes, gameplay features, scripted and branched storyline events and more interactive ways to traverse the Night City streets, a better acting Police A.I. system (with even an arrest and prison mechanic, since there were leaks of such a location that had been designed) and cross-play multiplayer.

It would be a difficult stunt for CD Projekt Red to perform, but is it impossible and has the initial spark been extinguished? We have to dive deeper into things and to do that we would have to turn our heads to recent announcements regarding some of these features.

So, with close to a dozen of upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 DLC updates left on the table it would seem that things are behind schedule by quite a bit and we very recently got some information that shed some light on the multiplayer development for the game. It stated that “in the wake of the recent decision to start strategic cooperation with Epic Games and to use Unreal Engine 5 – which offers advanced multiplayer solutions – we ceased further development of our own multiplayer technology and created respective write-off in the amount of nearly 21 million”, meaning that REDengine is getting swapped for UE5 when it comes to the multiplayer aspect of the Cyberpunk 2077 DLC plans , which means the studio dropped all ongoing progress it may have had to add such features to REDengine and transits their efforts in a new direction to integrate them in UE5 technology as it has it all already implemented and in a ready state. Does that mean that Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer would have a separate production and be sold separately?

As the core game may not mesh with using different engines at once or for its different modes, it may very well be a stand-alone project that gets released apart from the single player campaign. We could say tough times call for radical solutions, but does this go a bit over the line of sensible ideas or is it a completely new approach towards making the best out of a bad situation? We would have to wait and see what decision gets made on that matter, as the CDPR team has been doing some restructuring as we saw from the employee spread in the recent reports, where a smaller portion of the team are working on supporting the game as it is currently, while a bigger fraction is working on the Cyberpunk 2077 Expansions , this gradual shift was mentioned in the report and their focus would be geared to it much more after the 1.6 Cyberpunk 2077 DLC release date , which still has not been specifically and officially announced.

As time goes by, we are certain to get newer and newer improvements on the title, such a massive IP is not easy to deliver and our instinct tells us that there are lots more in the works that is ahead for the cyber themed game. The studio has a very impressive reputation when it comes to expansions and DLC as it has shown and demonstrated that through the Witcher series (which has had a recent announcement update as well, but this is a matter for a separate article that we would prepare) over the years, but the upcoming developments must bring out their best of the best as it is at such a critical stage right now.

Even the most dedicated fans of the game are getting more eager by the day for new Cyberpunk downloadable content and others that have abandoned the game might not return for just a new vehicle or weapon only, there should be more story and mission types, features and in-game mechanics that show it was all worth the wait and delays.

So, is there going to be Cyberpunk DLC? You can sure bet there will be, it is just too hard to say exactly when, but one thing is for certain – when we hear about it you will most surely get a more in-depth article from us.