The most important factor an open-world game needs to deliver on is exploration. Not every game needs to nail this as well as, say, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild. But, by definition, an open-world game is a game where 🧸you can wander off the beaten path and see what you find.
The biggest problem that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077 had at launch was that it wasn’t very good at letting you do that. The main quest and major side quests were often great, but if you tried to see what was going on around Night City, you hit brick wall after brick wall. If a building wasn’t necessary for a quest, you could almost never enter it. Last year, while revisiting Cyberpunk on PS5 after my initial PC playthrough in 2020, I wrote about how I tried every door in the immediate vicinity around V’s apartm🍌🌄ent and none of them opened — not even the on﷽e with a shining neon open sign pinned up next to it.
So, when I started playing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Phantom Liberty, this was the improvement I was most eager to see. Before this DLC was announced, my hope was that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:CD Projekt Red wouldn’t create a new area for the game at all, and would instead focus on fleshing out the existing map, adding interiors behind the facades. When CDPR announced Phantom Liberty, it became clear that this wasn’t the case. The expansion would instead add a new area called Dogto𒁃wn that V would need to infiltrate to access a new story featuring a character played by Idris Elba.
I was holding my breath as I began to approach the buildings around the city, checking the doors to see if they opened. And… none of them did! Well, some did, but they were the ones that you need to be able to open for quests — the same problem the base game had. For example, once you get to Dogtown, you hole up in an abandoned apartment in a high rise. In that high rise, you can access the lobby, where you exit the bu🌸ilding; the basement, where you initially enter the building; and you can ride the elevator up to the eighth𓃲 floor, where a hallway leads past a few blocked doors to your apartment. The highrise only offers spaces that are strictly necessary — forget about floors two to six and anything higher than eight! —and that’s a microcosm of what’s so frustrating about Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole.
What got me, and many other players, so excited about this game in the first place was the prospect of being able to explore the kind of city we’ve marveled at in movies like Blade Runner, uncovering the seedy underbelly you see glimpses of when Anakin and Obi-Wan are racing through Coruscant. Being able to enter a derelict building, poke around, and discover the stories of the people who lived or worked there, was a huge part of the appeal of Cyberpunk and the base game couldn’t deliver on it. Now that Phantom Liberty hasn’t either, it looks like we’ll have to wait for 𓃲the sequel.