Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

I really enjoyed the DLC of the phantom Liberty (PL) DLC and the story is fantastic. The new patch also brings a lot of new gameplay aspects but story first. The story involves you going to Dog Town; a new area within Night City. It represents all the BAD aspects of Night City and it shows with the debris, stealing, murder, gangs and people just wanting to get out. The story involves you saving the NUES President and getting trapped within a spy game. It is very similar to a James Bond Film. The themes from the main story is very apparent within the DLC of workers vs corperations, humanity vs machines. These themes bleed into story of how even soliders working in the spy game get eventually screwed over. The PL DLC is NOT an expansion and should be seen as a DLC within the middle of the story of the main game. The ending from the PL is a BAD ending, like mid game ending. CDPR didn't let the characters go to waste either as all of them have their own personality, motivations and goals. They really stepped up their game and I really liked how your choices with each character really had an impact on them. Huge Props their because it breaks a lot of status quo games convention. Im going to have a new play through with the new netrunner build to change things. But congrats to CDPR to the fantastic DLC.

Now we have brand new bugs - keybinding options bugging so hard that it required alt+f4, relic graphical malfunction bugged after quest in the Clouds or Nomad start being impossible to finish on very hard due to scripted parts, where chasing cars can't be destroyed, which leads player to take too much damage and just die. And on top of that the "jevel" that is 2.0. Clothing slot missing now any point besides some odd parts having some small bonuses, basically now working as 6th slot for appearances so one layer of character building gone for good. Then there's whole biomods system, where player can install mods only to value given by humanity, which can be increased by leveling. It's not cyberpsychosis system, it's just a lvl limitation to what toys player can wear at the given level... which is kinda same thing as it was before, with level and streed-creed requirements to get an item. Well, to sell you mechanics perk tree as a way to get those limits up! You know, taking power from you only to give it back to you, in different way. And this leads to another thing, said perks. You see, new talent tree is horrible because its sole purpose is to return you power, that you had previously even as lvl 1 character - like stamine consumption on firing a gun. So you spent points to regain things, that you had previously as base. New perks are also underwhelming as hell to the point where I barely can justify spending points on anything besides few % damage modifiers that can be grabbed. While previous system wasn't perfect - ultimate perks were laughably bad and barely possible to get during playthrough - the freedom of making hybrid or very specialised builds were much, much better back then. Then comes level scalling. Now it doesn't matter if you level up 5, 10 or 35 times - enemies are always gonna be as strong as they used to be... and you will get small increases of power with it - or even become weaker, as you need to update your gear as you go.

I'm slowly making my way through the DLC area, few main quests & several side jobs/gigs in. My thoughts of the DLC & game in no particular order. Playing a sneaky hacker with silenced pistols * The DLC intro walk & fights were quite long and fairly challenging (at least for my build), but the difficulty in the area proper has relaxed quite a bit. * The DLC intro fights were quite railroaded and "cinematic" more than the usual * Quite a few bossfights. They're tanky. The tanky-mc-tankface doubly so. * The DLC area is pretty "fallout -ish", more delapitated and grimy than rest of the NC. Feels like a completely different city, which I guess it technically is. * Missions and story have felt cool so far. Technical side: no game breaking bugs so far, but some visual glitches, like characters suddenly losing skin color & turning glossy bright white, has happened 2-3 times. Performance: R9 3900x, rtx3090, 32GB ram, RT=psycho, otherwise mix of high/ultra settings. is more or less the same as in the basegame, apart from more crowded areas where it dips to ~43 fps for me. While not desireable, it's still friendly zone. Otherwise it seems to mostly hold 60 (capped) in action areas, which is essential to me. All in all, I'm enjoying my time in the DLC.

The base game is a semi-finished product and not cheap. I bought it, but the DLC is still so expensive. I think it hurts players’ feelings.

I like this game (5 Stars) but on first Patch *EP1_RL_(67718) it was necessary to replace 'GameServicesGOG.dll' with the 2.0 Version to play without GOG Galaxy. Patch 2.1 now starts with *Phl_(67791) instead of (67718) from above to *0_(68001). So the Game starts but does not recognise the DLC and reinstallation of DLC will not work because of Version difference. In Vienna it takes me now about 6 hours to downlad the DLC and 16 hours for the Game. which was not my expectation when i paused playing the DLC to make an update !!! And on my 2nd Flat in Hungary, i use mobile EU Roaming with 6GB, so neither Download nor GOG Galaxy will usefully (i also use Steam in offline mode and transfer the gamefiles via hdd from Vienna) This means that GoG/Project Red will have massiv problems on quality and/or they betray their Customer and ther own communicated values, which gives a 3 stars subtraction.