It is clear that Cyberpunk 2077 has come a very long way since the days of its controversial launch in 2020, with consistent and expansive post-launch updates making the game a much smoother and enjoyable overall experience. This allowed the fantastic story, characters, and locations of the title to truly flourish, with the game’s Phantom Liberty story expansion being the perfect example of the strong state that the game now finds itself in.
As the only major story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty had very high expectations to meet, and it did this well through its new locations and factions that are spliced into the main narrative of Cyberpunk 2077. As expected, Phantom Liberty raised the bar in terms of the events and overall stakes of what fans saw in the main story of 2077, and this should help the game’s upcoming sequel, Project Orion, continue this trend in a logical and meaningful way.
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Project Orion Can Shoot For the Stars Thanks To Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty
The base-game narrative of Cyberpunk 2077 does well to stay focused on its core setting for the most part, with the unpredictable and hedonistic world of Night City being more than enough to host the game’s story. By focusing on Night City and its immediate surroundings, Cyberpunk 2077‘s story can focus on V’s rise in the criminal underworld, having to face off against increasingly powerful figureheads of the city’s many dominant factions.
While some of these factions, like the Arasaka Corporation, have influence that stretches far beyond the confines of Night City, 2077 is still able to tell a fairly personal and isolated story where the player does not have time or reason to think of the world beyond the city’s walls. Although Phantom Liberty is set roughly halfway through the base-game narrative of 2077, it does well to up the ante in terms of the scale and global impact of V’s actions.
Away from the fixers and power-hungry kingpins of Night City, Phantom Liberty sees V work alongside agents of the New United States government, with V ultimately being tasked with saving the President’s life. The story of Phantom Liberty offers a fascinating insight into the wider lore of the franchise in this way, with the national gravity of its plot setting the groundwork for the huge narrative possibilities that the franchise can explore next.
The Scale of Project Orion Should Naturally Escalate From Phantom Liberty
Project Orion, the code-named sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, was announced in late 2022, and Phantom Liberty gives fans a solid glimpse as to how CD Projekt Red might handle the story for the upcoming project. With 2077 focusing on regional conflict and Phantom Liberty accelerating this to national conflict, Project Orion is free to explore the wider world of the Cyberpunk franchise and beyond.
It was recently reported that 2077 had a canceled story DLC that took place on the moon, and it seems likely that CD Projekt Red may have been saving this for a full sequel like Orion. Many of the endings of Cyberpunk 2077 involve space travel in some way, and CD Projekt Red seems very keen to show fans the scale and reach of human civilization within the IP. There is so much that Project Orion can narratively do with the decades of worldbuilding that have been put into the Cyberpunk franchise, and the logical progression of 2077 and Phantom Liberty‘s stories are already pushing Orion to explore global or even interplanetary conflicts that put the scale of these past narratives to shame.
Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 is an RPG set in a future dystopian world. Players take up the role of V, who works as a mercenary in Night City in California. Gameplay involves branching dialogue, open-world exploration, character classes, and combat.
- Released
- December 10, 2020
- Engine
- REDengine 4
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language, Strong Sexual Content, Use of Drugs and Alcohol
- How Long To Beat
- 25 Hours
- Metascore
- 75
- PS Plus Availability
- N/A
- Top Critic Rating
- 76
- Critics Recommend %
- 65
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