How Cyberpunk 2077 Holds Up Years Later
The comeback story is well worn by now. The more interesting question is which of the original problems the rebuild fixed, and which it did not.
Cyberpunk 2077 has been rehabilitated so thoroughly that the redemption arc is now the boring part of the conversation. Everybody knows it launched badly in December 2020, got pulled from the PlayStation Store, and spent three years being rebuilt. Fine. The question worth asking in 2026 is narrower: what did all that work change, and what is still the game it was always going to be?
What the rebuild genuinely fixed
The systems
The 2.0 update in September 2023 wasn’t a patch, it was a redesign. The perk trees were torn out and rebuilt, the armour system moved off clothing and onto cyberware, and the police stopped materialising behind you like a bad joke. Vehicle combat arrived. Enemy AI was reworked enough that firefights stopped resolving themselves the same way every time.
Before 2.0, character building was a spreadsheet exercise that produced an overpowered netrunner by hour twenty. After it, the builds have distinct identities and the difficulty curve holds. This is the single largest improvement and it’s easy to underrate, because it doesn’t screenshot well.
Stability
The thing it was mocked for is genuinely gone. On current hardware it runs cleanly, and it has become one of the standard benchmarking titles precisely because it’s predictable. The T-posing NPCs and vanishing cars belong to a version of the game you can’t install any more.
The city as a place
Night City was always the strongest asset and the technical problems were burying it. With the frame rate stable and the crowd systems behaving, the density of the thing finally reads the way it was meant to.
Phantom Liberty is the best argument for the whole package
The expansion released alongside 2.0 and it’s a tighter, better written piece of work than most of the base game. Dogtown is a denser district with a different tone, the spy thriller structure gives it urgency the main campaign lacks, and the ending branch it adds is the most interesting choice in the game.
It also raises an awkward point. Phantom Liberty demonstrates what the studio learned, and playing it back to back with the base game’s second act makes the gap obvious.
What did not get fixed, because it could not be
The open world is still not reactive in the way the pre-release material implied. NPCs have schedules in the loosest sense and the world doesn’t respond to you outside of quests. Police behaviour is better but the underlying simulation is thin. If you were promised a living city in 2019 and are checking whether it arrived, it didn’t, and no patch was ever going to add it.
The life path choice at the start still matters far less than it appears to. It gates some dialogue and a short opening sequence, then largely stops mattering.
And the main story remains front-loaded. The first act is superb, the second sags in the middle, and the pacing problem is structural rather than a bug.
Who should play it now
If you bounced off it in 2020, the version on sale today is different enough to justify a second attempt, and a fresh save rather than an old one. If you’ve never touched it, buy the edition with Phantom Liberty included and treat the expansion as part of the main experience rather than an add-on.
If you’re specifically after an immersive sim or a systemic open world, this still isn’t that. It’s a very good first-person RPG with an exceptional setting and some of the best side quests anyone has written, wrapped in a world that is scenery rather than simulation. On those terms it’s easy to recommend, which isn’t something anyone could say five years ago.