Cyberpunk 2077's system requirements are going up ahead of the Phantom Liberty launch, hard drive support is being dropped

pcgamer.com:

With the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion Phantom Liberty set to arrive on September 26, CD Projekt is making some changes to the game's system requirements «to ensure that players have a better understanding of what will be needed» to run the game at an acceptable level of performance. The changes also reflect the evolution of PC gaming hardware in the three years since the original game's release, including support for new GPU hardware that wasn't available back then.

«The changes to the minimum requirements are a reflection of our new standard of requirements, which we believe better represent the minimum PC configuration required to run the game at 1080p, while maintaining an average of 30 FPS at low preset,» CD Projekt said. «The reason for making these changes is that updating the requirements is an important part of the game improvement process, and of enhancing and adding new features.»

One significant change, at least symbolically, is the end of hard drive support: The amount of storage space hasn't changed but the new minimum spec says that an SSD is required, not just recommended. CD Projekt said that hard drives will continue to operate (and, in general, Cyberpunk 2077 will continue to run on the older minimum hardware) but active support for them will be ended, and future updates will no longer be tested on HDD-based setups.

Cyberpunk 2077 is actually the second game we've seen move to an SSD minimum requirement in recent days: Starfield's minimum system requirements also calls for an SSD. I initially wondered when Starfield's hardware demands were announced whether it was a mistake, but it seems that developers are simply embracing the many benefits of solid-state technology. 

And rightly so: SSDs are small, fast,