Cyberpunk 2077 News

If Halloween wish-lists were a thing, then news about Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 would likely have been what many of us wrote about in our letters to Santa Pumpkin. And even though I just made him up, maybe he really does exist after all, because that's exactly what we just got: a surprise stream granting a first-look at the narrative and RPG elements of one of gaming's most long-awaited sequels.

The 18 minute video, which you can watch below, is the first proper look we've had at the resurrected Bloodlines 2 since The Chinese Room — the indie studio behind Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and Everybody's Gone To The Rapture — were announced as the game's new developers back in early September.

Bloodlines 2 is a sequel to the 2004 PC game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a cult classic which is still intensely popular after nearly two decades, despite its infamously troubled production and launch. It's a testament to the quality of the writing and world-building that many players — myself included — still count it among the all-time greatest video games, even though you famously need to mod the living hell out of the thing to get it to run smoothly.

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s troubled as Cyberpunk 2077 was at launch, it's remarkable to think back to what a CD Projekt Red game looked like just 12 years before. The first Witcher game is almost comically rudimentary next to the lavishly motion captured, ray traced first-person world of Cyberpunk. But it was fun, with a fantasy setting that felt different to other RPGs I'd played at the time. The graphical leap in 2011's The Witcher 2 was nothing short of stunning, and the quality of the sidequests in The Witcher 3's massive open world made CD Projekt my favorite RPG developer just four years later. I'm thinking about that progression now that CD Projekt is moving on to work on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel—and so are the developers...
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Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update changed so much about the game, it'd probably be quicker to list things it didn't touch than the systems it tweaked or wholesale refinished. But the most impactful, I think, is the skill tree revamp, which changes how you build V and what you're capable of. I only played about two hours of Cyberpunk in 2020, so when I really sunk my teeth into 2.0 I was shocked to look back at how the trees were designed before. There were still cool skills there, but without the more obvious build paths and synergies in 2.0. I asked CD Projekt Red how that change came about...
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Cyberpunk 2077 was never going to get an expansion designed to take place following the conclusion of the base game’s main story, as the team behind the game didn’t want to risk diluting how V’s tale ends.

This is according to CD Projekt Red narrative director Igor Sarzyński, who told PC Gamer that, prior to settling on the premise that would end up coming to life as Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk’s developers did contemplate taking things in a couple of other directions. Though, Sarzyński says that continuing on from the events that can follow V’s meeting with Hanako Arasaka at Embers wasn’t on the cards.

Acknowledging that, had CDPR selected one set of ending circumstances to serve as the basis for a post-final mission adventure, it would have risked annoying players by potentially undermining the choices they’d made for their version of V during the events of the game, narrative director also suggested that doing so wouldn’t have meshed with the team’s desires.

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If you'd asked me what I thought a Cyberpunk 2077 expansion would focus on after I first beat the game in December 2020, I would have guessed the heist on the Crystal Palace satellite casino teased in two of the base game's endings. According to CD Projekt Red narrative director Igor Sarzyński, though, the team was always firm on Cyberpunk's endings being the final word on V's story. Spoilers for 2077 and Phantom Liberty ahead...
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