This article was republished on 9/22.

Cyberpunk 2077 is experiencing something of a renaissance on the back of the release of Cyberpunk Edgerunners on Netflix, along with an accompanying patch and sale. Many people are getting back into the game, or trying it for the very first time since launch. And they all may have a common question.

What exactly has been changed in Cyberpunk 2077 since release?

We just hit patch 1.6 with the release of the Edgerunners update, but there have been many, many updates before that. I thought it would be wise to go through what’s changed over the last almost two years now, though I am not digging into every bug and performance fix. Suffice to say, there have been thousands upon thousands of bugs that have been squashed, and the game performs better on all platforms than it used to. The game also now has dedicated current-gen console versions, which it did not have when it was released.

So, what’s changed? Let’s go through the patches:

This patch was almost entirely emergency “put the fires out” fixes for quest progression bugs and performance issues. This also fixed an issue with save files that were becoming too large and eventually corrupted. It also introduced an infamous new bug where you’d get stuck on a Takamura quest, which was eventually fixed.

This was a massive patch, 8,000 words of patch notes, which again, was 99% fixes, and the word “fix” appeared 274 times in the patch notes. But there were some in-game changes.

This arrived in August of 2021, and started to add more fan-requested changes to the game.

This patch also brought with it the game’s first “free DLCS”:

This was a relatively minor patch that brought with it a few fixes from the much larger 1.3, but this was the patch where I really started to notice a visual transformation in the game, as specific improvements were made to wet/reflective surfaces.

This was an absolutely massive patch in February 2022 for the launch of the game on next-gen consoles that was so big, they actually just skipped 1.4 entirely.

And this is it, the last patch that was launched just ahead of Edgerunners. This is also the last patch that will launch for last-gen consoles, as future ones will only be next-gen/PC.

I tried to be as comprehensive as I could here, though I know I missed some stuff. Again, this does not include the thousands of fixes and performance improvements that made up most of these patches, but rather the long list of additions and changes you’ll feel in the game. Or if it’s your first time, an indicator of what’s there that wasn’t before. Enjoy.

Update (9/22): Some developments since this was published, as the players heading to the game to see all these changes has dramatically increase its overall playercount. CDPR released a post saying that a million players a day were playing Cyberpunk 2077 for a week, a massive total for a game that again, is single player and has been out for nearly two years now. You just do not see that.

Past that, it does not seem like interest has even started to fade yet. Yesterday, Wednesday, we saw Cyberpunk 2077 surpass its concurrent playercount resurgance record that had been previously set the past Sunday, during the height of the anime hype. The fact that the playercount total is still going up means more and more people are getting back into the game or grabbing it on sale, and this surge is not over yet. It’s possible this upcoming weekend could be even bigger. I would have frankly already expected a slowdown, but that’s not what the data is showing.

Some people have asked me if I thought that this new surge would change CDPR’s plans for Cyberpunk 2077 going forward, like would they greenlight the second DLC that they were originally planning, but have since scrapped in favor of releasing just one next year. It’s possible, but I would say it’s still unlikely, as those decisions have to be made really, really far ahead of time, and I don’t know if CDPR is willing to reshuffle its entire workforce to accommodate that (the majority is currently working on the first DLC, and it would take the majority of the studio to make a second, instead of moving on to Witcher 4). I do think, however, that this will accelerate plans for more non-games Cyberpunk content, including a possible Edgerunners season 2, and also a true Cyberpunk sequel for years from now.

As for the current state of the game, as I’ve said, I think a clean slate, fresh playthrough is going to be the right call. There are too many changes that have been made over the past two years that you might miss if you just load up an old save. I also forgot to talk about the future changes that they said will be coming to the game in a future patch, though whether that’s a patch before the DLC or the DLC patch itself, I’m not clear on. Those coming changes will be:

These changes will not be coming for everyone, however, as 1.6 is the last patch for Xbox One and PS4 players, who will also not be getting the DLC next year. Whatever CDPR has planned from here, they are done trying to accommodate last-gen consoles, which caused so many problems at launch, and are likely what’s holding back some of the stuff they want to do in the future. Still, not great that those systems had the toughest time at the start, and now they won’t even get the DLC that fans have been waiting for for two years now. I guess sacrifices must be made.

I am also continuing to wait for one big addition that never seems like it’s going to arrive, New Game Plus, which has been cited as a technical challenge to implement given how the game is built, even though it’s a pretty standard thing that most other single player games have at launch or get patched in over time. They say they’d have to rebalance the difficulty of the entire game based around it, but we’ll see if they ever get to it. Past that, I think we have finally gotten through most of the major fan requested additions. I think the game needs more clothing that isn’t fan-made mods, and the ability to see the damn minimap icons when you’re at a fast travel station. Other than that though, it’s really added a lot of stuff I wanted to see, most recently transmog, which is a great system in practice.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.