Fly Me To The Moon: How Edgerunners Saved Cyberpunk 2077

By Benjamin Rose

Since September 2023 when Phantom Liberty debuted alongside the radically game-reworking 2.0 update, an air of triumph, and occasionally, grudging concession to triumph has dominated the media conversation around Cyberpunk 2077. When a stone-faced Idris Elba promised us during the Phantom Liberty teaser trailer that “the game is fixed”, everyone got the joke. Cyberpunk was a fiasco when it launched in 2020. Teased as the second coming of the world’s greatest RPG maker, rolled out with “headlines heralding it as the most anticipated title of the year, if not the century” in the words of The New York Times, 2077 was famously so bug-plagued on last-gen consoles that Sony delisted it from the Playstation Store and offered refunds for six months after its release. When it was finally patched enough to be relisted, it came with a warning label discouraging consumers from buying the game on PS4. Ouch. Even The Economist, of all places, had a bit of fun at Johnny Silverhand’s expense.

The last few months have been a victory lap for CD Projekt Red. Beside the critically acclaimed Phantom Liberty, patch 2.0 and 2.1 have effectively restored 2077 to something like what was promised at E3 way back in 2019, when Johnny first told us to “wake the fuck up, samurai”. All elements of gameplay, from driving to the cop system, to leveling, perks, combat and so on have been totally reworked and upgraded. No more grinding to get 3% better with melee weapons; now I can deflect bullets. Dashing is now a thing, which has saved my ass more than a few times now that Adam Smasher, too, is now a thing. Phantom Liberty saw an attachment rate to the base game of about 25% after its release, selling 5 million copies in 2023, in line with the attachment rates of Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt back in 2016, with the difference that those paid expansions came out less than a year after the release of their base game rather than nearly a full three years after. So Red is riding high, and at this point the critical hate around 2077 that began in widespread, justified ridicule has largely become the holdout of one very popular, malcontented gaming website whose journalists are more incensed about its lack of 4.86th wave feminist bona fides than anything else. 

But its worth asking an obvious question at this point: why the hell did anyone wait around this long for a Cyberpunk 2077 redemption arc at all? With the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 (more or less) and a stream of new titles continually being released on next-gen consoles, why notice or care when in September 2023 Cyberpunk 2077 suddenly became an eminently playable, dare I say it, great game? There were several reasons, as Rob Fahey notes here in his cautionary article on just how exceptional and not to be repeated 2077‘s redemption arc was. First, including post-release and Phantom Liberty expenses, Cyberpunk 2077 was the second most expensive video game to market and develop of all time, at $436 million. This kind of herculean expenditure, he notes, would’ve been dead on arrival if CD Projekt weren’t an independent studio free of the fiduciary pressures of a much larger conglomerate. Their entire reputation rested on fixing the mess that was 2077‘s initial launch and, when put to the task, they did not falter. Second, it’s a misconception that between the game-saving patch 2.0 and the initial back alley abortion that was Cyberpunk that there were no incremental improvements. I started playing 2077 in early or mid 2022 during the era of Patch 1.5/1.6, and at that point it was a fully playable and moderately enjoyable game with no major issues on PS4. Much of the online 2077 chatter prior to 2023 on Reddit, Quora, and elsewhere revolved around the efforts of Cyberpunk diehards to persuade naysayers that the game was, in fact, actually good. They were right. But the point at which Cyberpunk 2077 really came back, as everyone knows, was Edgerunners. In the month after Cyberpunk: Edgerunners released in 2022, consecutive players of 2077 on Steam rose by several million overall, with over a million a day in the first week . CD Projekt themselves acknowledged in their 2022 Q3 earnings report that Edgerunners’ highly acclaimed release was essential in driving them to their then-highest ever third quarter revenue. Edgerunners made Cyberpunk cool again, and one year later, patch 2.0 made it great.

But beyond fiscal or popular opinion analysis, I would argue that the phrase Edgerunners made 2077 “cool” or “popular” again tells only half the story. Rather, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is the story. Beyond the immense technical improvements CD Projekt Red made to 2077, their superb collaboration with Studio Trigger, not Keanu, not Idris, not the plotline, not V is the reason Cyberpunk 2077 rose from the ashes. All the technical marvels in the world couldn’t save a universe no-one was invested in, or at best only moderately invested in. Cyberpunk 2077 has a subtler approach and merit to its writing than I initially acknowledged. But what it gains in originality and conceptual scope over Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, it looses in intimacy; and this intimacy, the emotional resonance of the tragic rise and fall of David Martinez, is what players are connecting to and filtering the game through whenever it touches them on an affective level. As Frankie-Robin Cooper noted in her review of Edgerunners way back:

“In [Night City] this wasteland of poverty, violence, and madness, no one has special privilege, and everyone will die. But despite the futility and meaninglessness of this world, there are characters like David who believe that they are special. You could call that poetry or stupidity, and you would probably be right either way.”

Yet if the poetry of Edgerunners consists in the way it deconstructs David’s sense of specialness, that very failure is the point. Turning to Frankie again:

“The Dark Future isn’t real (yet), but tragedy is more real than most of us are comfortable admitting. So what do you do in the face of such bleakness? That’s the important question–and it’s entirely what Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and the Cyberpunk franchise as a whole, is about. Nobody is going to save the world, but who can we save? What differences, or changes, can we make, even if no one is watching, even if it won’t be remembered, even if it was all in vain?”

We give a damn about V’s drama, or are willing to listen long enough not to skip through Johnny’s anarcho-posturing, because of the sincerity of Edgerunners, the way its light refracted in a mirror filters through the gloom and cynicism of 2077-proper’s malaise. In the cynical hellhole that is NC, there was once, for a moment, light and beauty. And two years later, this is still David Martinez’s world. V’s just living in it.

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