Yes, Phantom Liberty and patch 2.0 really are Cyberpunk 2077's 'last big updates' and it's finally time to start the sequel, director confirms

(Image credit: CD Projekt)

Cyberpunk 2077 is, finally, having its big launch moment. On Tuesday, buoyed by the 2.0 patch and expansion Phantom Liberty, the game hit its highest peak playercount since 2020. We loved Phantom Liberty, saying in our review that it's "CD Projekt firing on all cylinders to tell a great RPG story." It's been a long but impressive comeback for Cyberpunk, and the fact that the game is finally getting universal praise made me wonder if CD Projekt was reconsidering its plan to move on to a new game. After all, The Witcher 3's Hearts of Stone was good, but Blood & Wine was even better…

But no, this really, truly is it, game director Gabe Amatangelo said in an interview with PC Gamer on Wednesday. "2.0 and Phantom Liberty are the last big updates. We'll do a little something more, but those are the last big ones," he confirmed.

There are still some bugs for CD Projekt to clean up in Cyberpunk 2.0, like the one I wrote about on Monday that caused Johnny Silverhand's glitchy effect to "stick" on my screen. CD Projekt told me it's working on a fix for that one, and I'm sure there's more to be done. But in terms of expansions, features, and systems reworks? Cyberpunk 2077 is donezo. Once those little bits are wrapped up?

"Then it's Cyberpunk 2. Or 'Orion,' I should say, whatever we end up naming it," Amatangelo told me.

It's the answer I expected—after all, CD Projekt has been working on this one game for about a decade now, between initial development, post-launch fixes and the expansion. I'm sure even a sequel will feel like a liberating fresh start after spending so long with this one project. Now I'm wondering when the sequel will be set—will it jump further into the future, or jump back to 2045, the time period of the latest Cyberpunk tabletop rulebook?

Either way, I hope they're already talking to Studio Trigger about the next anime tie-in. Maybe next time it will coincide with the release of the new game, rather than dropping nearly two years later. Then again, Edgerunners did turn out to be exactly the shot in the arm Cyberpunk needed to get fans back on board.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).