Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is the first expansion for one of the games the most demanding, the most advanced and the most successful which has so far been released by CD Projekt RED. The original game was surrounded by a certain amount of controversy, mainly because the version for PS4 and Xbox One was very poor on a technical level and had a rather low-key start, but eventually became a real bestseller.

I have to tell you that ever since CD Projekt RED announced that Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty will be exclusive to PS5, Xbox Series XS and PC, my expectations have skyrocketed and for a very simple reason it meant that the Polish studio was finally about to break free from the ballast that the PS4 and Xbox One representand that it will be able to develop said extension starting from a more advanced technical base.

It also obviously raised the important question of which by changing this technical base original games for more advanced minimum and recommended requirements could be significantly increased, something that finally came true, as we saw yesterday in this article, where we reviewed all the levels of requirements that CD Projekt RED stated. These requirements will apply to both the expansion and the original game.

All these changes introduced by the Polish studio and the information we have about Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty also allowed us read between the lines for five important secrets which we will share with you in this article and we think you will find them quite interesting. I remind you that the launch of this expansion will take place on September 26.

1.-Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty will be what Cyberpunk 2077 should have been from the beginning

It is something I have told you on previous occasions and which our regular readers will surely remember perfectly well. CD Projekt RED had problems with the Xbox One and PS4 hardware already during development of The Witcher III, a game that looked better in its early 2013 trailers than in later 2014 and pre-release trailers. Polish studio itself they acknowledged that they had to tweak it to work well on those consolesand therefore the graphics were downgraded.

Something very similar happened with Cyberpunk 2077. When CD Projekt RED embarked on this ambitious project, it was conceived as a title for this generation of consoles and also for PC, but the arrival of the PS5 and Xbox Series XS, together with the advances that were taking place in the PC world, Thanks to them, the title reached a technical level it was very difficult to port to old generation consoles.

It would be ideal to put the PS4 and Xbox One aside and launch Cyberpunk 2077 as a PC exclusive and next gen after that. The Polish studio decided to release the game on the old generation of consoles as well and we all know what happened, this title was too demanding for the modest hardware of both and the result was never good. You already know that we can’t ask for pears after an elm.

With Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty we face an expansion that was developed from scratch, starting with the current generation of consoles. Now the minimum hardware base is much more advanced than the one we had on PS4 and Xbox One, and thanks to this we will find an expansion that will border on technical excellence and show us what Cyberpunk 2077 should have been if this cross-generational focus was not maintained.

2.-It will claim its position as the “new Crysis”

It’s no secret that Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most challenging games out there today, and if we consider the PC version with track tracking support I think it is without a doubt the most demanding. The arrival of Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty and the increase in demands we have seen will only strengthen its position as the most challenging game of the moment and keep it as “the new Crysis”.

That link is a nod technically speaking one of the best games, and also one of the most advanced, which came to the PC world just as the jump to unified shaders began, the first Crysis. The said game was so demanding that there was no version for Xbox 360 and PS3 until the last stage of its life cycle. It wasn’t even close to the level of the PC game.

Crysis has become a benchmark on a technical level and one of the must-haves in any test bench. The exact same thing happened with Cyberpunk 2077, and this increase in requirements will only strengthen its position as one of the ubiquitous in every performance test the latest generation of graphics cards.

It goes without saying that this increase in requirements also this will make it a little “out of reach” for users who have relatively old equipment, something that is oddly also a nod to the original Crysis. I remember perfectly that this title could not move smoothly with an acceptable level of quality on graphics cards that did not use a unified shader architecture. Even models like the GeForce 7900 GTX, released in 2006, had problems with Crysis, released in 2007.

3.-It will continue to set the technical ceiling for PC and console games

Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty gets a great visual treatment in the latest trailer shared by CD Projekt RED. Both the modeling of the characters and the complexity of the geometry, the level of detail of the settings, their amplitude and effects They are at an impressive level.

This alone would be enough to place it at the top of PC and console games from a technical level, but it must be added that in addition, this title supports path trackingwhich is ready to work with leading image resizing and reconstruction technologies and also supports NVIDIA image generation (DLSS 3).

Mark the technical ceiling in the world of video games it’s not enough to have beautiful worlds and well-focused raster artit is necessary use the most modern technologies which actually allow to improve realism and counteract the impact they have on the general performance of the device with other technologies that optimize and improve the overall result.

This is the case with Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, a title that will feature the most advanced technology available currently to render fully realistic lighting, shadows, reflections and caustic and also s resources to make the game more accessible and scalable on different hardware configurations.

4.-Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is clear goodbye to hard drives

And we see it on the minimum requirements list, where the need for a SATA SSD is mentioned, while the recommended requirements are for an NVMe SSD. SATA drives have an average sequential read speed of approx 550 MB/swhile NVMe drives achieve 3500 MB/s if they are of PCIe Gen3 type and can reach 7000 MB/s in case it is PCIe Gen4.

Saying goodbye to hard drives allows you to optimize and improve your game by taking advantage of the higher performance offered by SSD drives from the ground up. With this type of units we can not only reducing loading time, but it is also possible improve asset streaming from the storage drive, something that is essential in graphics-heavy games as well as open-world titles.

With a powerful SSD, the loading of graphic elements on the screen is significantly improved and this helps to limit or even completely eliminate classic problems such as late loading of textures and cracking at the geometry levelthat is, the sudden appearance of polygonal elements that were not on the screen at the right time because they were not loaded.

A few years ago I already touched on this topic in a guide that is still valuable and which I invite you to read through this link. Finally, hard drives have become “ballast” for the video game sector due to its high latency in terms of access times and low sequential read speed. The transition to SSDs is inevitable, and Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is a clear step in that direction.

5.-We are facing an established franchise that will continue to grow

When Cyberpunk 2077 arrived, I perfectly remember many saying that it was “dead on arrival”, a term that has become very fashionable in recent months and is used in a more than debatable way. It is true that the said game had flaws, but the PC version bordered on a very good level, apart from the bugs it had, and his implementation of ray tracing was a huge breakthrough.

Apart from what this meant on a technical level, the game had a lot of charisma for the universe it created, for its successful setting and for the entire story and “lore” that Night City was built on. Yes, it was clear from the beginning that Cyberpunk 2077 is “franchise fodder”, that it has great potential, and in the months since its release, this reality has only been confirmed.

Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty is the first step to consecrate this franchise, and in a few years we will see the release of the second part, which will probably again set a precedent on a technical level. We still have no information about it, but it is likely that CD Projekt RED will take the opportunity to launch it some kind of spinoff franchise before the second part.

The truth is, I’m very glad that everything had a happy ending in the end. CD Projekt RED is one of the few companies that dared to take risks with Cyberpunk 2077, a title that was designed from the beginning to demonstrate the superiority of the PC, and which clearly showed that already in 2020, next-gen consoles did not reach what we could achieve with GeForce RTX 20 and DLSS 2.