Cyberpunk 2077 has finally been allowed to redeem itself and will be introduced to many gamers, for the first time, with its Phantom Liberty expansion. From what we’ve seen, the team is taking full advantage of this mulligan.
As you may well remember, Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2022 was a disaster – to put it mildly. The game failed to live up to its many promises, which caused irreparable damage to its reputation.
Over the last few years, the developers have actively been working to resolve many of Cyberpunk 2077’s issues and by doing so, revealed a pretty good game which is now on the verge of becoming a great one, provided history doesn’t repeat itself.
The upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion brings much more than an expanded storyline. It’s also a way for the game to fix sins of the past and introduce a version of Cyberpunk 2077 that is closer to what the developers had initially promised.
To do this, Phantom Liberty will rebuild the gameplay from the ground up, including changing up many existing features like the talent skill tree.
Thanks to Dave Oshry, the CEO of New Blood Interactive, who got to play Phantom Liberty early, we now have our first sneak peek at what the new talent tree system will look like with Assault, Handguns, and Blades consolidated into a talent system that is now a legitimate tree instead of a thrown together bush.
So they've redone all the inventory tooltips and talent trees. Very nice.
All coming to the base game as well. pic.twitter.com/9Ck1lfwkAP
— Dave in LA (@DaveOshry) June 12, 2023
From what we can see in this image, the system will now consist of primary, secondary, and ultimate nodes along each skill category. At first glance, the primary nodes will be the skills that characters can specialise in, while secondary nodes provide passive bonuses.
Alongside these changes, Phantom Liberty will also add a cyberpsychosis system where players must be careful about how much they augment themselves with cyberware.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will launch on the 26th of September, and while the gameplay overhaul will come in update 1.7, which will be free for all players, players will need to purchase Phantom Liberty to access the new story content as well as a new ending for the core game.