Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – an ambitious development aimed at current consoles

Cyberpunk 2077 has come a long way. The open-world RPG was first released in December 2020, and was saddled with technical issues, including bugs and extremely poor frame rates on last-gen console systems. Sony even pulled the game from sale amid a wave of negative feedback from early gamers. About three years later, most of those initial concerns have been resolved, and current-gen consoles and PCs are getting a major expansion, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty — an impressive evolution of the base game.

This expansion promises bold new gameplay features and an all-new story, along with a large new play area to explore filled with side content. It is a major piece of post-release content, and the only planned expansion for the game. So how does this new version – designed without the limitations of last generation – work on current-gen console systems? Does the accompanying game update 2.0 bring any noticeable changes to Night City?

Phantom Liberty takes place in Dogtown, a run-down area just outside the borders of Night City. It’s completely open, with wide boulevards dotted with huge residential towers, nightclubs and casinos. On its outskirts you can find newer settlements, consisting of crudely built market stalls and street-level restaurants, spilling out of the old, partially destroyed buildings. The design of these areas is evocative, and each settlement has a very vivid feel that conveys years of strife and struggle. Dogtown has a very different character from Night City, being a walled city with more visible signs of decay, and having a more open, car-friendly design than most areas in the base game.

Dogtown can be very beautiful, especially at night, when the scattered settlements and markets become bathed in volumetric light. From a technical perspective, it’s clear that the new expansion’s areas throw a lot of geometry around, and are filled with dense pockets of NPCs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the art budgets are increased for this new expansion, especially considering the abandonment of last-gen console systems, and the PC version dropping support for mechanical hard drives. Direct comparisons with the base game proved difficult, but I never felt like the new area was at all lacking in terms of environmental detail, while I think Night City is a bit more restricted.

The actual game content itself is a fun ride and essentially plays like a polished action game, which is partly facilitated by the gameplay changes in patch 2.0. There’s also a healthy degree of side content, though I definitely felt like the focus was on blockbuster main story missions. Unlike most DLC, this is a mid-game addition to the core Cyberpunk story, so you’ll have to progress about ten hours or so into the main game’s plot before you can access Dogtown. For players who just want to skip to the DLC, there’s an option to jump straight to the new content from the main menu as well.

Moving on to image quality, the Phantom Liberty has two modes on every current-gen console – Performance and Ray Tracing mode on the PS5 and Series My best to advance the game. It seems that some things have changed as of the latest update. Even when looking straight at the sky for minimal GPU load, the Series S seems to have a lower maximum resolution than previous updates, and Quality mode seems to have a basically flat resolution now. It’s possible that the game will fall below the numbers I’ve listed here, of course, but these numbers should represent a typical course of play.

However, I did notice in a few shots that the Xbox controllers sometimes had very rudimentary edge detail as I moved the camera quickly, especially in dark, low-contrast areas of the screen, resulting in the image reaching roughly half the main resolution. This likely indicates the use of hardware variable rate shaders on those systems to maintain GPU performance. I didn’t notice the same issues on PS5, so it seems likely that VRS is absent from this version. In actual gameplay, I didn’t find the VRS to be noticeable.

Aside from these major changes, the other notable tweak is a change to the game’s primary display setting on PS5 and Series In still images, the game looks less defined now, with finer details being more blurry. In fact, when playing the game at any reasonable distance from a 4K TV, it seems very difficult to tell the difference. The FSR 2’s resolution also has very similar characteristics to before, with mostly smooth resolution complicated by some flickering and disintegration in fine detail. And in a few locations where FSR 2 failed to resolve stable details before, the exact same problem is repeated in the new patch.

In terms of performance, Dogtown feels a little heavier than Night City. I’ve noticed significant frame rate issues while traversing the open world on all current generation platforms in their performance modes. This was most evident in the S Series, which could see extended declines into the 50s, though more powerful current-gen consoles are also taking some hits here. Basically, any time you walk or drive through Dogtown – especially quickly – the game doesn’t seem to be quite keeping up. I suspect these issues are primarily related to CPU performance, given the game’s performance profile on PC. Combat also takes occasional hits with some momentary pockets of dropped frames, though this is less intrusive.

Ray tracing modes on PS5 and Series The game can definitely still drop frames here, especially during fast traversal. I also noticed an extended issue in the Market area where frame rates dropped while running through it at times. I think the game plays a lot better at 60fps – and the limited ray tracing features on the PS5 and Series

New Dogtown content isn’t the only new thing in Cyberpunk this month. Patch 2.0 overhauls the core game, with major updates to the police system, adding vehicular combat, improved on-foot gunfights, reworked perk trees, faster vehicle handling, and retooled cyberware and clothing systems. These are the major developments in this patch, and on the surface any technical tweaks seem very minor. If you load the same snapshot across patch 1.63, the patch immediately preceding this snapshot, and the new patch, there are some noticeable differences between the two.

Most of the new changes basically amount to minor aesthetic tweaks that seem very artist-driven. For example, shading around the corners of the screen, which was very subtle before, has been increased slightly. Individual tastes may vary on this matter, but I’m pretty sure this has nothing to do with fundamental technical changes. The camera angle while driving has also been tweaked, with Update 2.0 showing a more claustrophobic view of the back of the player’s car by default. There are plenty of interface tweaks as well, which are clearly visible in the menus as well as the in-game HUD.

There are some minor changes to in-game assets, but nothing I can reasonably identify as a meaningful performance-based change. I noticed some tweaks to the way colors are graded in Cyberpunk 2077 across the two patches and some occasional tweaks to detail, though I found it difficult to pinpoint any substantive tweaks to the core visual settings that may have produced these changes. Performance in Night City isn’t perfect, but oddly enough it seems a little better in some scenarios, which is interesting.

The new patch on Xbox Series consoles doesn’t seem to work quite as consistently as the PS5 code. The test drive sequence you’ll see in the video above faces frame rate hurdles on the Series X and has some issues on the Series S as well. I definitely felt like the game suffered from performance issues somewhat more often in typical gameplay than the PS5 code, though none of the current-gen consoles are immune to frame rate issues in their performance modes.

Right now, Cyberpunk 2077 is a much better game than the one that was released nearly three years ago, and this month’s updates mark a major milestone for the game. The changes to gameplay in version 2.0 make Cyberpunk feel like a vastly more polished experience, and the new Phantom Liberty expansion is a quality addition that I think fans will be happy with. Console players miss the brilliance of the updated ray-reconstruction-based PC version, but they still get a very solid experience overall.

For any gamer who has stopped playing Cyberpunk, now seems like a great time to play. I didn’t encounter any noticeable bugs while playing, and the overall flow of the game seems much better than the launch game. It’s a shame that Cyberpunk – and its impressive Red Engine technology – seems to be getting a bit of a send-off with this expansion, but I’d say CD Projekt has essentially achieved the Cyberpunk vision that thrilled players throughout 2018.

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