Cyberpunk 2077
An open-world action RPG in Night City that launched broken on base consoles and became genuinely excellent after three years of repair work.
- //CD Projekt Red withheld review copies from console outlets before launch specifically to prevent base PS4/Xbox One performance from being assessed pre-release -- documented, not speculated.
- //Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store after launch, a step that's close to unprecedented for a major publisher title.
- //The 2.0 update (September 2023) rewrote the skill tree, police AI, and economy from scratch. Phantom Liberty, the paid expansion released alongside it, is genuinely excellent DLC.
- //Sits at over 700,000 Steam reviews, roughly 87% positive -- almost entirely earned post-rehabilitation, not at launch.
- //Management bonuses were reportedly tied to Metacritic score thresholds, which is part of why console review copies specifically were withheld before those scores could exist.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world action RPG set in Night City, where you play V, a mercenary chasing a way to survive a rare, fatal condition tied to the ghost of a rockerboy legend embedded in your head. The core loop is exploration, gunplay, and hacking across one of the densest, most visually ambitious cities ever built for a game, layered with branching quests and companion relationships that genuinely change based on your choices. The 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion overhauled the skill tree, rewrote police AI from scratch, and rebalanced the economy, turning it into close to the game it was marketed as in 2020.
Excellent in 2026, and worth saying clearly: none of that excellence retroactively excuses what CDPR did at launch. They knew base PS4 and Xbox One couldn't run it, withheld console review copies specifically to hide that, and took the money anyway. The game you can buy today is not the game 13.7 million people bought in December 2020, and remembering that gap is worth more than pretending it never happened.