Summary
Cyberpunk 2077’s open world of Night City is a technological and creative marvel that lacked substance on release, particularly when it came to its short and repetitive gigs. Years of updates preluded a major expansion,Phantom Liberty, whichbreathed new life into the game world with an entirely new district and a dynamic main story. Perhaps the DLC’s most surprising improvement, however,was inbeefing up the narratives and environments of its gigs.
For all its shimmering neon puddles and photorealistic drivebys, the base game’s Night City can feel shallow at times. Except for the main story and a handful of memorable side-jobs most activities are like NC mercs: a dime a dozen and usually finished in five minutes. NCPD contracts and the majority ofCyberpunk 2077’s gigs are mindless combat courses that seem to exist solely for XP rewards and upgrade materials. Shooting and looting are fine for more open-ended RPGs, but it feels reductive in a game with such a rich and thought-provoking setting.Phantom Liberty, however, learns from this mistake.
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Dogtown’s Gigs Tie Into One Another To Create A Sense Of Place
Phantom Liberty Improves Side Content
Whereas the base game’s gigs are stretched thinly across the entirety of Night City,Phantom Libertyconcentrates its content on Dogtown, a district not much bigger than its real-world inspiration of Kowloon Walled City. As a result of this approach, Dogtown feels far richer and more lifelike than the surrounding city. Gigs tie into side jobs, other gigs, and eventually the main story tocreate a realistic sense of Dogtown as an unstable, interconnected community.
Pull on one thread in Longshore Stacks, and another will come loose in Terra Cognita. Choose to rescue a corpo prisoner during a gig, and he’ll pop up three days later with a new side job for the player. And as V takes on more gigs, the stakes rise accordingly. They’ll be infiltrating corpo labs and high-tech academies instead of dingy scav dens, affecting everything from a local braindance store’s footfall to global politics. Compared with how flat much of the base game’s side content can seem, it’s a thrill.
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Phantom Liberty’s Side-ContentExplores The Niches Of Its Cyberpunk Setting
A Fleshed Out Night City
The Cyberpunk setting is largely a patchwork of other genre media, so it’s unsurprising that the base game’s side content is reliant narratively on intertextual references. The game alludes to almost every cyberpunk IP out there, fromBlade RunnertoAkiratoTransmetropolitan, and takes obvious inspiration from William Gibson, a science fiction writer and pioneer in the cyberpunk sub-genre. WhilePhantom Liberty’s main plot similarly struggles with its own identity (it’s basically one huge homage toEscape From New York),its gigs and side-jobs scratch at the fringes of the setting and unearth some brilliant original material.
Gigs like “Spy in the Jungle"offer precious glimpses of the situation outside North America, whereas “Talent Academy"demonstrates the toll of corporate commodification of human beings. It’s pulpy, but genuinely intriguing stuff that’s light years beyond the brainless hack-this, shoot-that formula of the base game gigs. Theplayer choices, too, are murky in a way that echoesThe Witcher 3. Take “The Man Who Killed Jason Foreman,” for example, in which V must decide whether to murder a killer suffering from severe mental illness in order to satisfy the victim’s family.
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The success of the microcosm of Dogtown suggests that CD Projekt should go smaller, not bigger, for their nextCyberpunkgame. Night City is a breathtaking simulation, but it stretches itself so thin that the illusion starts to tear in places. IfProject Orionwants to live up to the immersive promise of its predecessor, it needs to scale back the loot mills and endless checklists and focus instead on the kind of dynamic and player-involved narratives that makePhantom Liberty’s gigs so memorable.
