Has Cyberpunk 2077 become playable after latest updates? (July 2022)

The disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 remains the most significant cautionary tale for AAA game development for this decade.

Hyped up years before release, this game had to chase the shadow of The Witcher 3's overwhelmingly positive reception and reputation as the biggest role-playing game of that generation. When the time came, however, Cyberpunk 2077 failed to deliver the perfect synthesis of role-playing agency, scale, and depth of world it was trying to market.

On top of everything else, its technical stability was questionable across different platforms. While the PC port struggled to optimize resources properly, the last-gen console versions had borderline unplayable framerates.

Compounded by the buggy, unpolished state of the game at launch, it eventually led to Sony taking it off the PlayStation store in December 2020.

Since then, CD Projekt Red has been working hard to reclaim its image as one of the most beloved AAA RPG developers in the current era of gaming.

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Cyberpunk 2077 patch 1.5: How much does it change the game?

The breadth of changes that patch 1.5 brings to the table ranges from engine-level technical changes and fixes to a significant revamp of game balance.

To sum up, the gameplay rebalance is mainly geared towards a top-down reimplementation of body mods work and a rework of the quest reward economy to be more consistent. The long and short of it culminates in more rewarding jobs in general.

The combat AI itself has also received some much-needed love. Players can now expect the enemy to be more logical and efficient with their use of cover, blocking, evasive maneuvres, and tool usage.

Follower NPCs will also benefit from the new behavioral updates to weapon equipment, reload, and shooting logic. They can, however, now be temporarily disabled after crossing a damage threshold.

There is also some content addition packaged with the update, including new equipment and guns:

• Two new weapons: Darra Polytechnic Umbra (Power Assault Rifle), Budget Arms Guillotine (Power Submachine Gun)
• Four new weapon scopes: Kang Tao Jue long scope, Tsunami Gaki sniper scope, Arasaka Kanetsugu short scope, Handyman short scope
• New type of weapon attachments - muzzle brakes: 10 new muzzle brakes: 5 for handguns (RC-7 Ifrit, RC-7 Liger, RC-7 Dybbuk, RC-7 Kutrub, RC-7 Babaroga); 5 for assault rifles & submachine guns (RC-7 Aswang, RC-7 Varkolak, RC-7 Zaar, RC-7 Yokai, RC-7 Strigoi).

For the most part, a great deal of these changes are features that ought to be part of the release candidate, such as cyberware finally being resalable.

The other major aspect, the technical side of things, manifests in the inclusion of a new RTX mode in Cyberpunk 2077. Ray tracing as a catch-all term can make the actual changes vague, but the general idea is that shadows and ambient occlusion have received a major update.

Rather than only sun-cast shadows, all shadows can now be tweaked to have ray tracing. The performance cost varies depending on hardware, but the reference point for consoles is persistent 30 fps with raytracing on at native 4K for Xbox Series S.

The final word, instead, should be a look at the performance and stability of the general game. The biggest complaint leveled at Cyberpunk 2077 at launch was its frame drops, loading times, and general inefficiency at loading assets in real-time.

The new Cyberpunk 2077 patch includes a switch to Added AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0 algorithm, replacing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS). There is also an additional dynamic range of render quality that tries to adjust performance to maintain a target framerate.

A further change to HDD loading optimization switches out crowd variety and street-level details while driving in favor of performance.

To sum up, the 1.5 patch makes Cyberpunk 2077 a sufficiently polished game in terms of stability and a significant upgrade compared to its sorry state at release. However, whether this will substitute for its fundamental design-level insufficiencies is a matter of debate.

Note: This article is subjective and reflects the author's opinion.