Cyberpunk 2077 treated fans, what few still remain, to an hour-long showcase today to detail the new updates. I understand the personal touch from a company once heralded as the people's champion before the Cyberpunk launch ripped that reputation to shreds, but it really could have been a three-minute trailer. We learned a lot of things about Cyberpunk 2077's latest update, but mostly we learned the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The stream made the odd choice to open with a drawn out playthrough of An Inconvenient Killer, one of the less popular quests, before launching into some minor updates to driving and the perk tree, as well as the introduction of raytracing. These are fine updates, but they're not the type of things anyone will get excited by. I've put around 130 hours into Cyberpunk, and I had to explain to people who had played the game why the removal of the underwater perk and the fix to the throwing knife bug were a big deal. I could explain it, but the truth is they aren't, not really. They're fixes, but the water perk update removes a useless thing no one used anyway, and the knife throwing update repairs a broken thing that, again, was used sparingly.
I lost my best knife to the original system of just chucking your stored knife away during the throwing knife attack, so I've felt your pain. I just… don't care enough. A next-gen update cannot fix Cyberpunk 2077. Even if it went on Game Pass that would not be enough. These are all small tweaks that improve the game, but not in any meaningful way.
Following that, we saw a lot of gameplay supposed to illustrate the improvements that had been made but instead reminded us all of how empty and hollow the original game was. Most of the reaction to "we've added this thing!" was "oh yeah, I can't believe it launched without that…"
This brings us to the character creator, which was revealed around halfway through the showcase and was the first actually new feature. Again, one of those things that reminded us of what Cyberpunk 1.0 lacked, we will now be able to actively customise our V (no, it will never not be funny to say that) throughout the game rather than just at the start. There also seems to be a greater range of finer customisation, especially around makeup. Added to this, we can also customise and switch between apartments. We're around 35 minutes into the stream at this point, and we get our first real, bona fide, genuine, stick-it-between-your-teeth-and-bite-down improvement. And ‘it’s the character creator has lipstick and is now available in your apartment mirror’. Gamers, I don't think we should expect Blood & Wine from this generously titled DLC.
These are minor improvements that should have existed anyway. I'm glad they're finally here, and for the tech minded amongst us, going new-gen and adding raytracing is somewhat exciting, but this stream was an hour long and was filled with nothing. What Cyberpunk needs is new things, not improved versions of the old things. It drew a chuckle when they joked about the water perk, but not having a pointless perk anymore isn't going to make me want to play it again.
I'm aware that I fairly recently wrote about the Cyberpunk DLC packs and said that in ignoring the crunch and pushing the devs to add new story content or put back in features like wallrunning was a deep failure to learn from the original botched launch. I still believe that, and that's why there's no rush on my end to add a bunch of new story content. But if you don't have a bunch of new story content, why host an hour-long stream to tell us you've added a lot of minor updates, most of which were glaring omissions at launch? Who was that stream even for? I'll likely dabble again, if only to play around with my V (told you, it's always funny), but this isn't a new Cyberpunk experience. It's the same one except the puddles are better. I'm not sure what the point in any of that is.
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