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Exploring Night City & Dog Town
CDPR, back before the Cyberpunk 2077 launch fiasco, was known for providing a hell of a lot of value for gamers in The Witcher 3 era. There was the sprawling game itself, but as players would eventually discover, CDPR would also go on to make two massive expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, that were practically the size of separate games themselves, especially Blood and Wine. At the time, it was thought that CDPR had created a new standard for DLC.
It…has not really been matched since. The industry has in general has shied away from large, expansive DLCs to single player games, with few exceptions, and even among those that have done it, and done it well, I’m still not sure anything has matched The Witcher 3’s DLC.
But Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty might.
The Cyberpunk expansion is going to be out in 2023 at some point, and will have V joining some sort of government agency before the end of the main game’s story (given how the ending plays out). Keanu Reeves returns as Johnny Silverhand, and now, Idris Elba has shown up to play a central role.
According to CDPR’s Marek Bugdoł, who works in investor relations and recently spoke with Polish outlet Parkiet (via The Gamer), he says that the game has the biggest budget for an expansion CDPR has ever done. “We hope that the new adventures and characters will attract those who are already familiar with Cyberpunk and also encourage many new players to start playing Night City,” he said.
Whether a bigger budget means the size and length of the expansion will also be physically bigger than Blood and Wine is unclear, but it certainly seems possible.
Cyberpunk 2077’s post-launch plans changed dramatically when the game launched in an unfinished state, and instead of immediately transitioning into expansion content, CDPR had to spent an inordinate amount of time fixing the game. The original plan appeared to have been Witcher-like. Free DLCs right away, then two sizable expansions later. In Cyberpunk 2077’s case, there were rumors about a multiplayer component floating around too, after a spin-off game was cancelled. Instead, the free DLCs were massively delayed, and two big expansions became one big expansion, Phantom Liberty. After that, CDPR will move on to its huge slate of upcoming projects which includes a new Witcher trilogy, a new IP and a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel.
As someone who has followed Cyberpunk 2077 through all its ups and downs, and probably has 200 hours into the game across three endgame-level Vs, I am eagerly awaiting Phantom Liberty, and news of a sizable budget is certainly welcome. We’ve still barely seen anything from it, and it would be nice to hear about a date at some point, but my best guess for now would be some time this summer. We’ll have to see.
Get ready for Phantom Liberty — a spy-thriller expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 set in an all new district of Night City. Coming in 2023 to PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Stadia.
In 2077, local fixer Dexter DeShawn (Michael-Leon Wooley) hires V and Welles to steal a biochip known as “the Relic” from Arasaka Corporation. They acquire the Relic, but the plan goes awry when they witness the murder of the megacorp’s leader Saburo Arasaka (Masane Tsukayama) at the hands of his treacherous son Yorinobu (Hideo Kimura). Yorinobu covers up the murder as a poisoning, and triggers a security sweep in which T-Bug is killed by Arasaka’s netrunners. V and Welles escape, but Welles is fatally wounded in the process, and the Relic’s protective case is damaged, forcing V to insert the biochip into the cyberware in their head.
DeShawn, furious at the unwanted police attention, shoots V in the head and leaves V for dead in a landfill. Upon awakening, V is haunted by the digital ghost of war veteran turned iconic rock star Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves), believed to have died in 2023 during an attempted thermonuclear attack on Arasaka Tower. V learns from their ripperdoc Viktor Vector (Michael Gregory) that DeShawn’s bullet triggered resurrection nanotech on the biochip. In a few weeks, Silverhand’s memories will irreversibly overwrite V’s. The biochip cannot be removed, so V must seek out a way to remove Silverhand and survive.
Through reliving Silverhand’s memories, V learns that in 2023, Silverhand’s then-girlfriend Alt Cunningham (Alix Wilton Regan) had created Soulkiller, an artificial intelligence able to copy netrunners’ minds through their neural links. However, the process destroyed the target’s brain. Arasaka kidnapped Cunningham and forced her to create their own version of Soulkiller, which would store the minds of its targets in Arasaka’s digital fortress, Mikoshi. Silverhand led a rescue effort to save Cunningham, but failed to find her before Arasaka used Soulkiller on her. Silverhand sought revenge through his attack, but Arasaka captured him and used Soulkiller on him as well.
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