Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is the first expansion for one of the games most demanding, advanced and successful who has released CD Projekt RED so far. The original game was surrounded by a certain amount of controversy, especially since the version for PS4 and Xbox One was very poor on a technical level, and had a rather low-key start, but in the end it has become a true best seller.
I have to tell you that, from the moment CD Projekt RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty was going to be exclusive to PS5, Xbox Series XS and PC, my expectations skyrocketed, and for a very simple reason, this meant that the polish study he was finally going to free himself from the ballast that PS4 and Xbox One representand that it was going to be able to develop said expansion starting from a more advanced technical base.
Obviously this also raised an important question, which by changing that technical base of the original game for a more advanced one the minimum and recommended requirements could go up considerably, something that in the end has been fulfilled as we saw yesterday in this article, where we reviewed all the levels of requirements that CD Projekt RED listed. Those requirements will apply to both the expansion and the original game.
All these changes that the Polish studio has introduced, and the information we have about Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, has also allowed us to read between the lines five important secrets that we are going to share with you in this article, and that we think you will find quite interesting. I remind you that the launch of this expansion will take place on September 26.
1.-Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty will be what Cyberpunk 2077 should have been from the beginning
It is something that I have already told you on previous occasions, and that I am sure our regular readers will remember perfectly. CD Projekt RED already had issues with Xbox One and PS4 hardware during development of The Witcher III, a game that looked better in its early 2013 trailers than in later 2014 and pre-release trailers. The Polish studio itself acknowledged that they had to adjust it to work well on those consolesand that’s why the graphic downgrade occurred.
With Cyberpunk 2077 something very similar happened. When CD Projekt RED embarked on this ambitious project, it was conceived as a title for that generation of consoles, and also for PC, but the arrival of PS5 and Xbox Series XS, together with the advances that were taking place in the PC world, They made the title reach a technical level that it was very difficult to port to the old generation consoles.
The ideal would have been to put PS4 and Xbox One aside and launch Cyberpunk 2077 as a PC exclusive and the, then, new generation. The Polish studio chose to also release the game on the old generation of consoles, and we all know what happened, this title was too demanding for the modest hardware of both, and the result was never good. You already know that we cannot ask for pears from the elm tree.
With Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty we are facing an expansion that has been developed, from scratch, starting from the current generation of consoles. Now the minimum hardware base is much more advanced than the one we had on PS4 and Xbox One, and thanks to this we will find an expansion that will border on an excellent level in all regards to the technical plane, and that will show us what Cyberpunk 2077 should have been if that intergenerational focus hadn’t been kept.
2.-It will claim its position as the “new Crysis”
It is not a secret, Cyberpunk 2077 is today one of the most demanding games that exist, and if we take into account the PC version with path tracing support I think it is without a doubt the most demanding. The arrival of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, and that increase in requirements that we have seen, will only reinforce its position as the most demanding game of the moment, and will maintain it as “the new Crysis”.
That reference is a nod to one of the best games, technically speaking, and also one of the most advanced that came to the PC world just when the jump to unified shaders began, the first Crysis. Said game was so demanding that there was no version for Xbox 360 and PS3 until the final phase of its life cycle, and said version It was not even close to the level of the game on PC.
Crysis became a benchmark at a technical level, and one of the essentials in any test bench. Exactly the same thing has happened with Cyberpunk 2077, and this increase in requirements will only reinforce its position as one of the ubiquitous in any performance test latest generation graphics cards.
It goes without saying that this increase in requirements also it will make it a little more “unreachable” for those users who have relatively old equipment, something that curiously is also a nod to the original Crysis. I remember perfectly that this title was unable to move smoothly with an acceptable level of quality on graphics cards that did not use a unified shader architecture. Even models like the GeForce 7900 GTX, released in 2006, had issues with Crysis, released in 2007.
3.-It will continue to set the technical ceiling for games on PC and consoles
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty sports a superb graphic finish in the latest trailer shared by CD Projekt RED. Both the modeling of the characters and the complexity of the geometry, the level of detail of the settings, their amplitude and the effects They are at an impressive level.
This alone would be enough to place it at the top of the games for PC and console from the technical level, but we must add that, in addition, this title supports path tracingwhich is ready to work with leading image rescaling and reconstruction technologies, and also supports NVIDIA frame generation (DLSS 3).
To mark the technical ceiling in the world of video games it is not enough to have beautiful worlds and well-focused raster artit is necessary use state-of-the-art technologies that really allow to improve the realism, and counteract the impact that these have on the general performance of the equipment using other technologies that optimize and improve the general result.
That is the case of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, a title that will feature the most advanced technology available currently to render fully realistic lighting, shadows, reflections, and caustics, and also with the resources to make the game more affordable and scalable on different hardware configurations.
4.-Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is a clear goodbye to hard drives
And we can see it in the list of minimum requirements, where the need for a SATA SSD is indicated, while the recommended requirements refer to an NVMe SSD. SATA drives have an average sequential read speed of about 550MB/swhile NVMe drives reach 3,500MB/s if they are of type PCIe Gen3, and can reach the 7,000MB/s in the event that they are PCIe Gen4.
Saying goodbye to hard drives allows you to optimize and improve the game by taking advantage, from its base, of the higher performance offered by SSD drives. With this type of units we can not only reduce loading times, but it is also possible improve asset streaming from the storage unit, something that is essential in games with a high graphic load, and also in open world type titles.
With a high-performance SSD, the loading of graphic elements on the screen is significantly improved, and this helps to reduce or even completely eliminate classic problems such as late loading of textures and popping at the geometry levelthat is, the sudden appearance of polygonal elements that were not on the screen at the right time because they were not loaded.
A few years ago I already touched on this topic in a guide that is still valuable, and that I invite you to review by following this link. In the end, hard drives they have become a “ballast” for the video game sector due to its high latency in terms of access times, and its low sequential reading speed. The transition to SSDs is inevitable, and Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is a clear step in that direction.
5.-We are facing an established franchise that will continue to grow
When Cyberpunk 2077 arrived, I remember perfectly that many said it was a “dead on arrival”, a term that has become very fashionable in recent months and is used in a more than questionable way. It is true that said game had shortcomings, but the PC version was bordering on a very good level, beyond the bugs it had, and his implementation of ray tracing was a huge breakthrough.
Beyond what it meant on a technical level, the game had a lot of charisma for the universe it had created, for its successful setting and for all the storyline and the “lore” on which the city of Night City had been built. Yes, from the beginning it was clear that Cyberpunk 2077 was “franchise fodder”, that it had a lot of potential, and in the months after its release this reality was only confirmed.
Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is the first step towards the consecration of this franchise, and in a few years we will see the launch of a second part that will probably once again set a precedent on a technical level. We still do not have information about it, but it is likely that CD Projekt RED will take the opportunity to launch some kind of spinoff of the franchise before the second part.
The truth is that I am very happy that in the end everything had a happy ending. CD Projekt RED has been one of the few companies that has dared to risk with Cyberpunk 2077, a title that was designed, from the beginning, to demonstrate the superiority of the PC, and that made it clear that already in 2020 the next-generation consoles were not up to what we could achieve with a GeForce RTX 20 and the DLSS 2.
