As someone who personally likes to utilize the time I have, video games are one of the areas where I do my best to spend enough time on each new game I have before moving onto the next. While there are certainly plenty of games I have played that have a ton of replay value like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I have not gone back to replay them much only because I want to give all the other games waiting to be played their chance in the spotlight.
After playing and beating a first playthrough with Cyberpunk 2077 last year, I have been mostly waiting for the promised DLC CD Projekt Red said would be coming much later. Now with their most recently released 1.5 Patch Update, it has been touted as an entirely new experience and one the studio should have released from Day 1. However, going back into a game I already considered “done” has me feeling a bit reluctant to replay from the beginning.
Like many who have been excited to play Cyberpunk 2077, I made the rare decision to pre-order the game. When it came out in December 2020 early reviewers said the game was not what they expected. It was full of game breaking bugs and had a number of console issues. What everyone presumed would be potentially Game of the Year material had been, instead, mired in bad publicity and threats of lawsuits against CD Projekt Red. Despite the game’s woes I was committed to playing it.
Unlike some gamers who have played the game when it first came out, my issues with Cyberpunk 2077 had been very minimal. I hadn’t experienced the game breaking bugs many on the Internet complained about, and it didn’t suddenly crash my Xbox One in the same way it did for a friend of mine who also tried playing the game when it was released. All in all, I would say my time with the game had gone smoothly.
The new patch brings massive amounts of improvements and changes to the game that make playing it now feel like a whole new game. Apartment upgrades, map improvements, additional interactions with your romance of choice, and much more are some of what the huge patch update has. While all this new content is enticing for anyone who hasn’t written off Cyberpunk 2077 completely, it’s also a big ask to get players who have already finished the game to go back in and start again.
I truly enjoyed playing the game even before CD Projekt Red’s latest update. Exploring Night City and hunting for all the different threads you can customize your V in are some of my favorite parts about playing the game. But Cyberpunk 2077 is massive and does take months to finish if you’re like me and want to do almost all of the side missions the game has. When you don’t have a lot of time to play in general, it’s tough to want to retread the same game you already played when there are so many other games you could be playing instead.
The only time I ever bothered to replay a game I already finished was Life is Strange: True Colors. What makes this game easier to go back to than Cyberpunk 2077? The main thing is True Colors is a shorter game. I can breeze past another run with it while still being able to play other games in my backlog. Trying to replay Cyberpunk 2077 requires more of a time commitment, even if you skip the more trivial side missions, and if I’m playing a game like Cyberpunk 2077 I will want to focus on that more than any other game I might have decided to play currently.
It’s not that I’m not interested in seeing all the improvements CD Projekt Red has worked so hard on adding to the game. It’s just that I wish, like many others, all of this had been part of the game since the beginning.
Have you played Cyberpunk 2077 before the 1.5 patch? Were you excited to play the game again, or do you feel less motivated to jump back in when you already played the game to your satisfaction?
simpleek 