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One of the greatest tragedies in the gaming industry back in 2020 (apart from COVID), was Cyberpunk 2077‘s ridiculously broken launch. The bug-ridden, incomplete, and underdelivered mess that was Cyberpunk 2077 1.0 signified a bleak trend for AAA games. Many wondered whether their darling RPG maker, CD Projekt RED (CDPR), was losing its touch. Fast forward nearly five years later, however, and things have turned around for Cyberpunk 2077 in one of the most protracted redemption arcs in gaming.
Now, at the start of 2025, Cyberpunk 2077 is in its best shape with the public reception to back that up. The game has achieved a new milestone, mainly the “Overwhelmingly Positive” review mark on Steam which necessitates a 95 percent positive review rating from Steam users.
Granted, this mark is for the Recent Reviews and not for the All Reviews score, but nevertheless, CDPR’s CEO and Cyberpunk 2077‘s game director were ecstatic. It was something they never dreamt possible, especially after the scathing reception they received during the first few months of Cyberpunk 2077‘s release.
In addition to the redemption arc, Cyberpunk 2077 just became the first game to implement and support DLSS 4.0, which is Nvidia’s upcoming proprietary upscaling tech for its RTX 5000-series GPUs.
Regardless, the new rating milestone for Cyberpunk 2077 essentially puts it in the same tier as the greatest video games of all time, including The Witcher 3.
Did CDPR Pull Off a ‘No Man’s Sky’ Redemption?
Of course, this renewed positive reception to Cyberpunk 2077 is only possible because of CDPR’s devs and their hard work– and fans’ patience. The Phantom Liberty expansion also certainly helped turn Cyberpunk 2077‘s reputation and quality around, along with the numerous fixes and improvements to several of the game’s aspects.
Going from mixed review scores to Overwhelmingly Positive is reminiscent of another redemption arc, namely No Man’s Sky. The space survival game was notably released with a barren gameplay loop and was thus welcomed with a mixed reception. But through months and years of free content updates and both general and deep gameplay improvements, No Man’s Sky became the best space survival and crafting game right now.
What worked for No Man’s Sky was that its devs never stopped trying to redeem themselves and their game, continuously outdoing their previous improvements. The same practically happened with Cyberpunk 2077, and it goes to show how continued love and passion for a project go a long way and can make the game relevant in ways that a live service format cannot.
In CDPR’s Defense, the 1st Game in a Series was Always Going to be Broken
There’s no arguing that what the CDPR did during the initial launch was highly disgraceful as they essentially hid the mountain of issues to sell Cyberpunk 2077. However, as a longtime fan of The Witcher games and as someone who has unintentionally seen CDPR’s development through the decades, the Cyberpunk 2077 release fiasco was typical for them.
It was a new video game IP (intellectual property) and my experience with CDPR’s new IP attempts has been brutal and goes as far back as the first Witcher game in 2007. Now that release was brutal, but the difference was not many people knew CDPR back then.
The first Witcher game on release had outdated graphics, progression bugs, missing dialog, questionable animations, and tons of other issues that couldn’t be fixed by updates such as the awkward Eurojank combat, convoluted story, and potato animations.
In fact, CDPR had to release a huge update and fix in the form of The Witcher: Enhanced Edition a year later in 2008. The Enhanced Edition added missing content, improved visuals, polished dialog, and general all-around improvements not unlike what CDPR did for Cyberpunk 2077 over several years.
If Anything, Cyberpunk 2077’s Initial Failure Makes the Potential Sequels Exciting
Guess what? The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and eventually The Witcher 3 went on to revolutionize the gaming industry. The gap between the three games in terms of improvements and outdoing their predecessors is monumental and goes to show that CDPR could learn from their mistakes (at least they did back then).
So it’s fair to expect that the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be CDPR back in its element, hopefully. Based on CDPR’s development practices, the first game in a new series is always going to be a rough experiment. The second in the series will be a blockbuster. The third? A masterpiece.
The fourth game could be there to bring their reputation back up in case a new IP tanks it– just kidding, I’m confident The Witcher 4 would look good at the very least.
Let’s just hope this kind of pattern recognition for CDPR doesn’t betray us and that they can still learn from the mistakes of their earlier attempts to help them produce industry game-changers. Their Cyberpunk 2077 redemption arc seems to indicate so.
