Long-troubled sci-fi action RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is experiencing something of a comeback, almost two years since it was released on PC and consoles. CD Projekt have revealed in a tweet that the game has seen one million players every day this week so far, across all platforms. They say this figure includes players new to Night City, as well as those returning. I’ve never played it, so don’t look at me.
As Eurogamer reported last week, Cyberpunk’s concurrent player numbers have been climbing enough to make it one of the most played games on Steam. In the past 24 hours, SteamDB shows the game peaked at 86,130 concurrent players. Just a month ago that figure was around 16,000, and the rising player count doesn’t seem to be levelling off. Twitch views for the game also ramped up from the low thousands to nearly 70,000 at the start of September.
A few things could explain this sudden jump. One would be the arrival of the Edgerunners update to coincide with Netflix’s well-received anime series of the same name, set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. It’s likely that Edgerunners bobbing its head up and down on people’s telly dashboards has attracted some more attention to the game, along with the update itself. Looming too is the promise of Cyberpunk’s first and only single-player story expansion, Phantom Liberty, finally revealed at the start of this month and scheduled for 2023.
Cyberpunk 2077’s also been featured among this week’s NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000 series announcements, as you can see in the trailer above. The game is getting an Overdrive mode that zhuzhes up stuff like neon signs, street lights, car headlamps, and billboards with fancy ray tracing. It’ll also benefit from DLSS 3 support to boost frame rates substantially. You can read more about all that here.
Graham reviewed Cyberpunk 2077 when it launched back at the end of 2020, and called it a beautiful and broken mess. “Cyberpunk 2077 is huge, sprawling, complex, and deeply flawed,” he said. “It’s at its best as a fairly straightforward single-player action game, with likeable characters and thrilling capers in a fascinatingly detailed open world that looks better than any game before it. It’s at its worst if you want it to be an RPG, an approach-as-you-please Deus Ex successor, or a polished piece of software.”
There have been efforts to rectify the issues with Cyberpunk. The game already saw another bump in concurrent players back in February, when the 1.5 update was pushed out. Graham took another run through Night City then, but felt the game’s strengths and weaknesses were still intact. “Beyond these straightforward fixes, Cyberpunk 2077 remains a messy, mediocre RPG when it comes to the ways its combat and progression interlock,” he said. “While 1.5’s tweaks to those systems make marginal improvements, it doesn’t – and likely can’t – address the problems fully.”
Cyberpunk 2077 is on Steam, GOG and the Epic Games Store for £50/$60/€60. There’s 50% on all storefronts until September 25th.
