Night City is going to get bigger next year with Phantom Liberty, an expansion adding new characters and a fresh location to Cyberpunk 2077. It’s a spy thriller starring V, the game’s protagonist, and Johnny Silverhand, the ghostly character played by Keanu Reeves, and it involves espionage work for the New United States of America. However, Phantom Liberty is only heading to Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5, PC and Stadia, skipping Xbox One and PS4 altogether.
CD Projekt RED’s decision to drop last-gen console support isn’t surprising, considering the difficulties developers had delivering a functional game on those platforms. Cyberpunk has received plenty of patches since its release in December 2020, with most of the focus on fixing major issues with the game’s performance; it was incredibly buggy and unplayable in some cases at launch, and it particularly struggled on older-gen hardware. Phantom Liberty is a narrative and world update featuring new content, locations and characters, and it marks a significant step forward in the game’s post-launch development cycle, even though it leaves Xbox One and PS4 players in the dust.
Ahead of Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a bit of DLC tied to Edgerunners, the coming anime based on the game. The anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, will hit Netflix on September 13th, and the game update is live right now. Patch 1.6 is known as the Edgerunners Update and it adds items from the Netflix show to the game, including the protagonist’s jacket and another character’s shotgun. It also unlocks new secrets to be discovered in Night City — but like the Phantom Liberty rollout, these won’t be available on Xbox One or PS4.
“Due to some technical challenges, this change isn’t available on the previous generation of consoles,” the update blog reads. To get around these challenges in future patches, CDPR is halting work on previous-gen consoles: Patch 1.6 will be the last for Xbox One and PS4.
The Edgerunners Update adds three new gigs, six new firearms and five new melee weapons, plus it unlocks cross-progression and brings a new mini-game called Roach Race to the arcade cabinets scattered throughout Night City. Roach Race is also available on Android and iOS today, no Cyberpunk required. On top of all this, there’s a litany of gameplay, UI and other updates hitting Cyberpunk in Patch 1.6.
Author: J. Conditt
Source: Engadget
