Phantom Liberty might be CD Projekt’s last chance to redeem Cyberpunk 2077

polygon.com:

A third trailer for Phantom Liberty, the first and only planned expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, dropped on Sunday at Microsoft’s Xbox Games Showcase. It includes a new look at actor Idris Elba and a few additional details about the add-on’s gameplay. But what really stands out this time is the political theme, which sends V off to rescue the president of the United States of America.

This won’t be a story about life on the rough streets of Night City. It’s a tale of espionage and political intrigue, where players will be asked again and again to question their loyalties. The stakes are surprisingly high, both for V and for developer CD Projekt Red.

Cyberpunk 2077 arrived late — very late, in fact, and in poor shape. After the game’s December 2020 launch (and the admission that CD Projekt Red made its employees crunch, even after promising it wouldn’t), it took until February 2022 for the big version 1.5 patch to finally roll out. And while the cars don’t launch themselves into orbit quite as often as they used to, the game’s storyline is still a bit of a disappointment to die-hard fans of the deeper Cyberpunk lore.

In our re-review of Cyberpunk 2077 from April 2022, Cameron Kunzelman noted, “With this game’s long tail of updates, there are seemingly infinite chances to go deeper, to rethink some assumptions, and to engage with the genre at least as fully as its founding texts did. Yet none of these things were deemed patch-worthy. It is more substantive, apparently, to make sure there are new apartments and cars and guns.”

Seen in this light, Phantom Liberty is CD Projekt’s last opportunity for a more complete redemption for its biggest-ever video game. By invoking the executive branch of the U.S., they’re going for the