The big release of 2020, didn’t exactly have the best track record and it seriously ruined the overall opinion of the developer and publisher, that until then was considered The golden standard for the gaming industry.
Despite the valid criticism and disappointment surrounding the title, the developers didn’t abandon the project and instead worked slowly but constantly on fixing the game. Both on the optimization side as well as the gameplay, with its current state of the 2.0 and the release of the PL DLC, a full blown expansion, solidifying the effort in bringing what the initial experience should have been. Helping also to earn the more recent Best Ongoing prize at The Games Award 2023 and the Best Game Trailer award during the 41th Golden Joystick.
The game history
The project started back in 2016, with a fairly small team. Based on Mike Pondsmith tabletop RPG series, who also acted as a consultant for the team. Not to mention with Keanu Reeves acting as the starring role of Johnny Silverhand, as well as working on the promotional campaign. But soon the project grew in proportions. It’s Cyberpunk 2077.
With a total of 4 delays, the launch wasn’t exactly in the best shape with a extremely buggy release and a pitiful state on older gen console, PS4 and Xbox One, despite being confirmed as “surprisingly good”, which instead turned into a whole mess with refunds and being ultimately pulled from the Playstation Store. While the visuals were certainly impressive, the overall feeling was of an almost incomplete title, needing several fixes and patches. A thing that was going to be addressed and took over the priority on the supposed Multiplayer standalone DLC, which led to it being completely scrapped.
Then starting from September 2023, the team showed a few trailers of the long awaited 2.0 update coming along with the Phantom Liberty DLC set to be a proper comeback for the title. That was addressing several gameplay issues, as well as bringing new content. With the recently released 2.1 adding even more Ray Tracing features
How Cyberpunk 2077 stacks against newer titles
Despite being technically 3 years old, Cyberpunk 2077 still lives up to its initial expectation, with amazing visual fidelity, one that over the course of the years also integrated slowly all the new performance enhancement options like FSR 2.0 and DLSS 2.0, with the more recent Frame Generation by Nvidia with DLSS3 and the AMD equivalent FSR3 coming soon in 2024 to help achieve a better balance of visuals and performance. Things that along with the constant updates earned it the Best Ongoing award at The Games Award this year.
The most apparent comparison would be Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, boasting truly next gen visuals, one that is probably the most impressive in either raster and ray tracing options, but that doesn’t seem to comes as impressive as Cyberpunk 2077, due to the more subtle and toned lighting conditions of Bright Falls and explorable areas. As these are more rural than the futuristic neon lightings of Night City and the new district of Dogtown, with plenty of light sources and reflective surfaces as well variations with the open world aspect.
The Breathtaking Ray Tracing experience and 2.1 Update
While Cyberpunk did come with Ray Tracing with its initial release, at the time during a pretty rough GPU market and an early attempt at Ray Tracing, the visuals weren’t all that fleshed out with out of the 4 initial options being Ray Traced illumination,reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion. The next real innovation was with Nvidia Path Tracing in April, allowing more realistic reflections, shadows and illuminations coming from more lighting sources.
With the 2.0 Update bringing, among various content, also DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction when using Path Tracing, improving the quality of RT effects. While the latest 2.1 Update brings ReSTIR GI, that improves the RT lighting even more, with tweaked impact on performance and less ghosting, and Ray Reconstructions available in RT Ultra with other RT modes being available when RT Reflections is enabled.
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Truly one of the best looking games to this date, while some may disagree about CP2077 winning the Best Ongoing Game award, I think it’s well deserved. Besides the fixes, they improved and revamped the game both visually and gameplay-wise, and gave extra DLC for free. It’s no excuse to how the game was initially but most companies wouldn’t put the amount of effort CDPR did into making their game better.
Truly one of the best looking games to this date, while some may disagree about CP2077 winning the Best Ongoing Game award, I think it’s well deserved. Besides the fixes, they improved and revamped the game both visually and gameplay-wise, and gave extra DLC for free. It’s no excuse to how the game was initially but most companies wouldn’t put the amount of effort CDPR did into making their game better.