Cyberpunk 2077 is finally where it should have been from the start

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 as part of its major new update.

I dutifully played through Cyberpunk 2077 in the weeks after its rocky December 2020 launch, but I always felt that it was aggressively fine. I loved sneaking through levels as a netrunner that stealthily hacked into enemies. But things like the cringey edginess that permeated nearly every line of dialogue, a clothes / gear system that forced me to look like an absolute clown to get the best stats, and even small details like a frustratingly zoomed-in mini-map all brought down the experience.

Nearly three years in, a lot of those quibbles are now fixed, and after spending more than a dozen hours with the new update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty expansion, I’m finding myself eager to keep exploring Night City.

Let’s start first with what’s added in update 2.0, which will be available for free on Thursday. It brings a litany of significant changes. The biggest is the revised skill tree. Now, as you put points into the different attributes (body, reflexes, technical ability, intelligence, and cool), you’ll open up new levels of skills you can choose to put perk points into. There are a bunch of new skills to choose from, and you can see each attribute’s available skills on just one page. 

If you’re continuing a Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough, you’ll have a chance to redeploy all of your attribute points. Since you can redistribute all of your perk points whenever you want