Cyberpunk 2077
How eager are players to play Cyberpunk 2077 now that it’s “fixed”? Quite eager, it seems. Despite the fact that only the 2.0 update to the game has launched, not even its Phantom Liberty DLC, concurrent Steam players have spiked 500-650% from earlier this week, and its overall peak last month. It’s gone from 20-30,000 players as a high to 151,000 in the last 24 hours. It’s about to go even higher than that as Sunday continues. And again, this is all happening before Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, launches on Monday night in the Americas, and Tuesday everywhere else.
Cyberpunk 2077
I am glad to see that people are following my advice to just start playing the game when 2.0 hit, because there’s little reason to wait until Phantom Liberty. If you’re starting a new character, chances are you won’t even hit the point in the story when Phantom Liberty triggers by launch, and even if so, I also recommend you wait until the end of the game to play Phantom Liberty, as it allows the game to peak with its best content saved for last (you may recall I gave the expansion a 10/10 score).
The 2.0 update has plenty for both new players and returning veterans to mess around with ahead of Phantom Liberty itself. The new skill trees, cyberware and vehicle combat systems are all in the game already, so you can start powering up your V or rearranging the skill points you already have.
As for this early peak playercount, that’s really quite something, and I’m wondering how high it’s going to go when Phantom Liberty actually launches. These are impressive numbers for a three-year-old game that had as many issues at launch as the original did. However, you may forget that Cyberpunk did have an insanely huge launch, 830,387 concurrent players, which is actually on the all-time Steam concurrent total list. We are not going to get anywhere near that now, but we are certainly still in “redemption territory” when it comes to how this is performing, and how much Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty have fixed and upgraded the game.
This is, of course, the end of the road for Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR has said that there will be no more large updates for the game, no second expansion, even if that was once the plan, along with a multiplayer component/spin-off that got canned when they had to spend two years just fixing the game. However, CDPR has confirmed they’ll make a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel eventually, with hopefully lessons learned from this one.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
