When Cyberpunk 2077 first launched, it was essentially unplayable. For many players on PS4 and Xbox One, Cyberpunk 2077 would fail to render the faces of characters, performance chugged, and glitches pertaining to poor AI plagued the experience. At best, even for players who were lucky enough to get their hands on a PS5 prior to Cyberpunk's launch, the game crashed about several times in gaming sessions due to rendering issues from the lack of loading screens around Night City.
Now, though PC players with powerful setups were able to avoid the worst of Cyberpunk's poor performance, the most recent 1.2 patch looks to be affecting PC players negatively the most, causing failed loads and intermittent black-screening. However, Version 1.2 aimed to better performance across the board, especially in regards to PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk. The game has made quite a few substantial improvements since launch, but patches can't solve the core of where Cyberpunk 2077 failed.
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Cyberpunk's Day 1 patch, Version 1.02, was nearly 30 GB in size but solved a number of issues observed at launch. Now, with the 1.2 update, hundreds of more bugs and issues have been addressed. Some of the most notable ones include better NCPD AI, as police no longer spawn directly next to V and take a realistic time to travel from far away. Still, they seem to be infinite, according to players, but no longer treat basic actions like an attack either.
Overall, players on PS4s and Xbox Ones are reporting more smoothness, meaning that frame rates and lagging have been improved, though they aren't perfect, and Cyberpunk 2077 has better lighting, crisper textures, and less glitchiness in the ads. Menus and interfaces are faster to load and more responsive, and a plethora of quest-related bugs have been fixed. However, many users are also reporting very little changes with their performance. This ranges from latency and responsiveness issues, frame rates dragging when driving too quickly to freezing and crashing, various glitches still appear, and objects that should appear not loading.
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For those wondering if the game is more playable than it was at launch, the answer is yes, but it's still plagued by performance issues such as NPC textures failing to load and FPS dips. This is because, as CDPR said in an official statement, the technology of past consoles were not taken into consideration in development when aiming to make the game revolutionary, such as the lack of loading screens around Night City, for example. Because this is a hardware issue and the hardware in consoles cannot be upgraded the way PCs can be, it may be a long while, if at all, before performance-related issues aren't ruining player experience.
Additionally, there's something else that needs to be addressed when taking into consideration if Cyberpunk 2077 is "worth playing" or not. CDPR promised or implied a number of gameplay elements during the marketing phase, many of which have not been delivered. Though CDPR has posted a roadmap of upcoming Cyberpunk content, which includes free DLCs, it's unclear if any of these updates will include the content that was seen in gameplay demos, such as the Mantis Blades and legendary cyber optics.
But in this way as well, the lack of promised Cyberpunk content isn't something that can be quickly fixed. Some of the cut content includes the dialogue options, the routes conversations can go, and the influence they have on the rest of the game. This has an effect on the entire game and therefore can't be easily implemented, meaning that CDPR likely won't address it at all. So while these updates are great for those who still have their hands on a copy of Cyberpunk 2077, it will likely never be the game fans were hoping for.
Cyberpunk 2077 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One. PS5 and Xbox Series X upgrades are in the works.
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