Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty August Livestream Breakdown

CD Projekt Red hosted the first “REDstream” livestream for the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty expansion on August 24th, 2023. They provided a deeper dive into what was shown in the recently release trailers related to gameplay and story.

You’ll gain access to Phantom Liberty after completing the quest with Brigitte and the Voodoo Boys in Pacifica, though there’s a way to skip ahead to the DLC from character creation.

Players that have already beaten the game will get their phone call from Songbird upon loading into the save before the point of no return.

Songbird is the top netrunner for the NUSA and is traveling with the President. She talks with you through the Relic, so she knows about your condition and says she has a way to save you if you help her.

Songbird utilizes some Militech program that was apparently just lying around to partially repair the Relic and unlock the associated skill tree. The tree is focused on enhancing your Cyberware, and

As I predicted in my recent “New Ways to Play” trailer breakdown and analysis, you’ll unlock talents in the tree not by leveling up, but rather by locating and accessing Militech data terminals that are scattered throughout Dogtown that will give you Relic Points to spend on new talents. In other words, it’s exploration-based.

For those of you who don’t know, Dogtown is the new region in Night City where the Phantom Liberty DLC takes place. It was where a battle took place between Arasaka and Militech, and a warlord named Colonel Hansen controls it now.

The Relic Tree is significantly smaller than that of the Attributes, and the talents really do seem to be exclusively focused on providing some sort of boost to one of the active abilities you can get from your Cyberware, like the different Arms or the Optical Camo.

It seems that they’re also integrating each of the Arms Cyberware to one of the Attributes. For example, you’ll want to use the Monowire in an Intelligence build because you’ll get access to perks that allow you to do things like hack enemies and recover RAM with the Monowire.

Perk Access within a given tree will remain gated by the number of Attribute Points you’ve invested in the associated Attribute, with the additional limitation of some talents being dependent on others.

From reading the (often partially covered) Perk descriptions that they moused over in the skill trees, it’s clear that they did a complete combat overhaul from the ground up.

It’s not just a simple restructuring. They have held onto some of the core elements of the old skill web system, but the buffs offered by each branch in a given tree are a lot more defined and cohesive, which will offer far more refined and focused playstyles and enable lots of new builds.

For example, within the single Intelligence tree, it looks like there’s a branch centered around this now Quickhack Queue feature and another that’s centered on using and spreading Quickhacks with the Monowire with stronger perks higher up.

If you just want to focus on one branch within an attribute, you’ll be free to do that too, but Attribute Points are finite, so you can’t be a master of everything.

It seems like each branch is roughly based on a skill web from the previous version, so like for Reflexes, there are 2 branches with one focused on upgrading Blades and the other on Assault Rifles and SMGs. Then, there’s a third branch that seems to be more about mobility and acrobatics.

They really are trying to address the gameplay issues with all these revisions. For example, there’s a perk in the tech tree that improves the recharge speed of health items and grenades, and another that gives more charges of each, which implies that they’re thinking about how spammable such items were in what I keep trying to refer to as “the last game” when writing this article before catching myself because these changes are just that significant.

The amount of changes they’re making to the skill trees and gameplay are commensurate with what you’d find in a sequel that tinkered heavily with the combat, not a DLC for a nearly 3-year-old game.

You know how sometimes it’s hard to go back and play earlier, non-remade/remastered, games in a series after playing the sequels because the game is a little rougher around the edges, lacking quality-of-life (QoL) improvements and gameplay refinement? It feels like they’re going back adding all those improvements to the existing game before implementing them in the sequel, which is awesome.

As expected, Cyberware interacts more heavily with Perks and there is a new Cyberware Capacity stat that governs “the amount of Cyberware your body can handle”.

The Edgerunner perk from Technical Ability seems to be responsible for the existence of the red portion of the bar. Otherwise, you’ll only be allowed to equip an amount of Cyberware that is safe. I guess V already has enough to worry about with losing control to Johnny.

That said, if you keep attacking civilians or doing other such illegal things that Cyberpsychos do, the police may start calling you a Cyberpsycho because it’s no different to them even if you as the player are still in control.

It’s unclear if the Attributes will still play a significant and direct role in what you’re able to equip. I get the impression that rather than having flat restrictions, the Cyberware Capacity will be the main limiter with Perks for specific Attributes making certain types and pieces of Cyberware more attractive to use. They mentioned that there will be more freedom with respeccing, and players will even be able to reset their Attributes once.

The best part though is that it seems like much or even all of the stuff I’ve mentioned in this section will be coming to the base game as part of Cyberpunk 2.0, so you won’t even have to get the DLC to experience it!

If you don’t get the DLC, you won’t be able to get into Dogtown, but you’ll still see that it’s there, it’ll just be from beyond the gate like all the other people who can’t get in.

Dogtown is part of Pacifica and was supposed to be this amazing luxurious vacation spot and “city of dreams”, but it was ravaged by war and is now incredibly unsafe. The devs are exploring how such a magnificent place will look as it decays, though without as much of a time jump as you may have seen with the ruins of Las Vegas in Horizon: Forbidden West.

The devs really emphasized that Dogtown is an incredibly dangerous place, even more so than the rest of Night City. The people who choose to go there might be there because they’re on the run from the NCPD or they want to conduct super illegal activities. They could also be something more akin to refugees as well that are just trying to make ends meet, as there is a far more limited Corpo presence in Dogtown, so this might be the only place they can go.

Dogtown makes me think of a less dense version of the Kowloon Walled City within Hong Kong, even though Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole is already reminiscent of that place if it were to exist in the future. To the laughter of the others, one of the devs likened it to the borders of the Vatican City within Rome. But that was also more related to size rather than purpose.

Later on, the devs added that there will be an apartment for V in Dogtown that is connected to the story, and that Phantom Liberty will take you out of Dogtown “a bit”, but they don’t want to spoil things.

The devs gave some details on some of the other major characters we’ll meet besides Songbird, who was introduced earlier, and Alex, who is featured on cyberpunk.net, but was not mentioned in this live stream.

Colonel Kurt Hansen is the leader of Dogtown and commander of a group of soldiers called the Barghest. He has a military background, and took over Dogtown during the Unification War, but he’s also a shrewd businessman, so it isn’t just about blood and violence.

The devs showed off a bit of a mission where you pla as him (a memory episide, like what we got with Johnny in the base game), though they didn’t give too much detail as they want players to learn about him for themselves in the game.

She’s the seemingly popular President of the New United States of America (NUSA, pronounced like the yogurt brand) and former CEO of Militech. Her Space Force One spacecraft crash-landed in Dogtown and it’s V’s job to rescue her. Myers herself is capable, but she can’t handle it on her own.

Here she’s trying to lay low and blend in while Kurt Hansen is playing political games and trying to hunt both of you down.

Solomon Reed is portrayed by Idris Elba, he’s a sleeper agent in Dogtown and was instrumental in the Unification War, but he has a very complicated past with Myers and Songbird.

The devs had a lot of trouble describing him without spoiling things. They explained that everyone has their own agenda, so a lot of the fun is figuring out how you should behave around these people. They emphasized that “he’s a big part of the story”.

They also clarified that there will not be any new romance options available to players in the Phantom Liberty DLC because it would have felt forced and exploitative, distracting from the story they are trying to tell.

In presenting the new subject, the devs made it clear that they were super aware of the community’s strong feelings about the police system. Early on, the devs touted that the police will employ tactics against you to try and stop your car, like t-boning, running you off the road, and presumably, blockades.

When you first commit crimes, the police show up at the scene trying to figure out what happened, and they only engage if the action is still happening. If you keep ramping things up, so will the police response. At lower levels of heat, it’s just additional manpower, but then they start bringing in the fancy vehicles and eventually MaxTac.

There are 5 different MaxTac classes with the 4 members that come to fight you being some random combination of the 5 and each of them has their own boss health bar.

The devs explained that MaxTac is never easy to deal with, even in Story mode, so CDPR is really trying to make them a cut above the rest. Several times in the stream, they commented on how impressed they were at how long the player was surviving against MaxTac.

One of the devs brought up that they noticed some gang members joining in the fight and shooting at the NCPD and this led into a little discussion about making the world feel more alive with NPCs that look like they have their own agency, and they used random car chases zip past you as an example.

They also touched on the need to strike a balance between realism and player agency when you want to be done fighting the cops. Internally, they refer to the evasion process as a game of Pac-Man where you’re trying to lay low and avoid their line of sight on the roads and then you’ll have an easier time hiding on foot or going into a quest area.

You build Heat (the blue stars) anytime you commit a crime, and this will apparently happen during several story moments in Dogtown. The rate of escalation depends on the district, with wealthier districts escalating things faster since they care more and have more funding.

Within Dogtown, you’ll mostly be dealing with the Barghest (Hansen’s militia), not NCPD, and MaxTac will only come in if you start acting like a Cyberpsycho. Outside of Night City in the Badlands, you’ll be dealing with Militech instead.

Vehicle combat appears to be more basic by comparison. Some vehicles have mounted turrets or missile racks, and now there’s some Quickhacking you can do to vehicles (and the passengers inside them) as well. Skilled Netrunners will even be able to control vehicles remotely!

While the hacking possibilities sounded cool, in the video, they depicted aiming the mounted guns with a laser sight, which seemed quite clunky and imprecise. Hopefully, Perks or Cyberware like the Ballistic Coprocessor and Draw the Line will enable you to aim better.

You’re still able to shoot out the window too, but in the DLC, you can use melee weapons if you’re on a bike, and shooting a gas tank or slashing a tire is also possible.

You’ll actually obtain such vehicles from completing new Vehicle Contract Gigs for Muamar “El Capitan” Reyes, the fixer in Santo Domingo with the terrible haircut, after he learns you’ve made it inside Dogtown.

The vehicle missions have dynamic objectives, but the weapons that vehicles have are static, so you won’t be able to customize the weapons that a vehicle has. They are adding weapons to some of the vehicles that are in the base game, but it sounds like that will probably happen as some sort of upgrade after you’ve done some vehicle gigs with El Capitan.

At the end of the stream, the devs answered some questions compiled from various sources. Here are all the questions and (paraphrased) answers:

Q: What will be coming with the free 2.0 update? What will be coming with the Phantom Liberty Paid DLC?

A: This table shows what you’ll be getting specifically with the free update and what you’ll have to pay for:

Both Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty will only be coming to current gen consoles and PC, not PS4 or Xbox One.

Q: Will Netrunners have significant changes in the expansion?

A: Yes, Netrunners are getting some significant changes. They want the focus to be more on Netrunning, so more Quickhacks, less shooting. The Monowire and Smart Weapons will be more heavily integrated into the playstyle and have dedicated Perks on the Intelligence tree.

They’ll also be adding a Quickhack queue system so you can upload multiple Quickhacks at the same time and there will be Perks that grant buffs if you have certain combinations in the queue. It seems there may be less emphasis on Breach Protocol as well, but we couldn’t get a good look at the third branch.

Q: Are there different types of vehicle gigs or are they all just “grab-a-cars”?

A: Objectives are more variable than that, but they do all have a vehicle component. Alternate objectives include things like:

Q: Will the level of friendship we have with Johnny Silverhand have an impact on the dialogue in Dogtown?

A: Yes. There is a story arc specifically between you and Johnny that takes place in Dogtown and your dialogue choices do have ramifications for the relationship, even in the base game.

Q: Why is it called Dogtown?

A: It’s a colloquial term that refers to Colonel Hansen and his Barghest militia. The Barghest is a large black dog from British folklore and mythology, so they’re calling it Dogtown because it’s full of dogs. There are, sadly, no actual dogs in Dogtown.

Q: How strong is the connection between the story in the base game and the story in Phantom Liberty?

A: It is a self-contained story, but it is integrated with the rest of the game because V is there. V’s reasons for getting involved at all relate directly to his troubles with the biochip, though you can still play it by itself.

The devs didn’t say this, but I get the impression that the story will act like the other optional major questlines where it will unlock another ending like you get for working with Rogue and Johnny as well as Panam and the Aldecaldos. This could easily end up not being the case though.

Q: How post-apocalyptic is it? Will there be overgrown areas, etc.?

A: Yes, there will be overgrown areas, abandoned areas, and buildings that are falling apart. People are trying to survive there, but it is a very harsh environment. They are trying hard to balance making it feel like a unique district, but also part of Night City.

Q: What will the level limit be increased to with Phantom Liberty?

A: Level 60, so 10 levels higher than it currently is. The cap for Street Cred will remain at 50. It seems that each Attribute still caps out at 20, so you’ll end up being able to expand your capabilities in other Attributes rather than become more powerful in your main one.

Today’s stream was a deep dive into many of the topics from the recent trailer including:

CDPR plans to have another stream in the coming weeks that will be focused on changes coming to Cyberware, Armor, combat (outside of Perks), UI, and more Q&A. Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty releases on PC/PS5/Xbox Series S and X on September 26th, 2023.

Stay tuned to Vulkk.com for full coverage of the DLC and 2.0 Update. If you’re looking for something now, check out my breakdown of the “New Ways to Play” trailer, or if you’re itching to do another playthrough before the big updates, check out my Netrunner build guide.

Endonae