Cyberpunk 2077's excellent spy thriller expansion, Phantom Liberty, is three years old now. To mark the anniversary, Cyberpunk 2 associate game director and the expansion's lead quest designer Pawel Sasko looked back on the project with a few new details.
First up, it's pretty hard to ignore the stomping elephant in the room of Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch when talking about Phantom Liberty's impressive turnaround. To make sure Phantom Liberty dodged the base game's launch woes, developer CD Projekt Red had to "rethink how we were making games," Sasko writes on social media.
"During Cyberpunk 2077 development we had worked in a structure much closer to a waterfall model, where work moved between departments and many decisions accumulated around leads and directors," he explains. "For Phantom Liberty we moved toward multidisciplinary content teams, our pods, where designers, writers, cinematics, art, audio, QA and many other disciplines could work on the same piece of content together. It took a long time to learn how to work this way, but once it started clicking, I could feel the difference."
The team also "looked at spy fiction" for inspiration on the Idris Elba-fronted story, which sees protagonist V infiltrate Night City's even more dangerous and lawless Dogtown. "We looked at spy fiction ranging from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to James Bond, The Bourne Identity, Bridge of Spies and Ocean’s Eleven," Sasko says, with genre becoming a "very practical tool for me." You can even see some James Bond influence when V moves through the lux Black Sapphire party - not to mention the incredibly stylish musical opening sequence.
Now's the time to look away if you've yet to play Phantom Liberty and want to avoid all spoilers, because Sasko also goes into that brutal final decision where V chooses between saving Songbird or helping Reed. It was "one of the most important things for us during development," and CD Projekt Red apparently "worked backwards from it and rewrote scenes many times." Part of what makes the decision so tough is that Songbird and Reed are equally likeable and untrustworthy - sometimes all at once. You don't know quite who you can trust, but you can't help but feel for them.
CDPR knew "both of them had to have contradictions, weaknesses, secrets and reasons you could understand," as Sasko puts it. "This was also something I had learned from Cyberpunk 2077. Sometimes our choices and consequences in the base game were so subtle that players did not even realize something was a consequence of an earlier decision. In Phantom Liberty we all pushed strongly for more branches and clearer consequences while still keeping them inside the world. Messages, photographs, returning characters and different quest paths could remind you that something happened because of a choice you made. We never wanted the game to tell you what the correct decision was. I wanted you to live with your own interpretation of it."
Despite glowing reviews and over 15 million copies sold on the expansion, Sasko still doesn't believe "Phantom Liberty erases the launch of Cyberpunk 2077," but he's grateful for it all the same because of what it "taught [him] about directing games." Good thing, too - Sasko's leading the next mainline Cyberpunk RPG.
"I hope that, in your eyes, Cyberpunk 2077 has earned its place."
