Night City Is Calling Again
CD Projekt Red has said almost nothing publicly about the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, codenamed Project Orion. No release window, no screenshots, no early concept art drops – just occasional confirmation that the project exists and is in early development. That silence, rather than dampening enthusiasm, is doing something unexpected: it is pushing players back into Night City in significant numbers, specifically through the Phantom Liberty expansion.
The pattern is becoming familiar across gaming. When a sequel feels distant and unknowable, fans do not simply wait. They return to the last entry and treat it as though it is the only version of that world they will have for years – because it probably is. For Cyberpunk 2077, that return is landing at an interesting moment. The game is no longer the broken launch product from 2020. It is a polished, critically reconsidered RPG with an expansion that many players skipped the first time around.
Phantom Liberty as the Default Reentry Point
Phantom Liberty launched in September 2023 alongside the 2.0 update, which overhauled the base game’s skill trees, police system, and vehicle combat. The expansion itself added Dogtown, a walled-off district with its own political ecosystem, story beats, and one of the game’s strongest side character rosters. At the time, reviews were strong. But a portion of the player base had already moved on after spending hundreds of hours in Night City earlier in the game’s lifecycle, and the expansion did not pull everyone back.
Now those players are circling back. The motivation is partly practical: if Project Orion is going to take several years to arrive – CD Projekt Red is still building out its new North American studio and the game is reportedly in pre-production – then Phantom Liberty represents the last substantial piece of new Cyberpunk content for a long time. Treating it as a must-finish becomes rational when the alternative is waiting with nothing.
What Players Are Finding on Return
The 2.0 update changed the feel of the base game enough that returning players are describing it as close to a new experience. The perk system no longer rewards dumping points into a single stat. Builds require more deliberate thought, and the combat loop responds differently depending on how you approach that system. Players going back specifically for Phantom Liberty are often discovering that the overhaul extends far deeper than a patch note summary suggests.
Dogtown itself holds up well as a contained environment. It is smaller than Night City’s sprawl, which works in its favor – density replaces scale, and the district has a distinct visual identity that separates it from areas players explored years ago. The main story involving Songbird and Reed is more morally uncomfortable than much of the base game’s writing, with an ending structure that genuinely branches in ways that feel consequential rather than cosmetic.
There is also the completionist pull. The 2.0 update introduced enough systemic changes that previous character builds are no longer valid, which gives returning players a clean reason to start fresh. A new V, a new build, and a new approach to the skill tree effectively reframes the whole game. Players who finished the main story once are treating this as a second, meaningfully different playthrough rather than repetition.
This is similar to what Bethesda’s Fallout 5 silence has done to New Vegas – when the next entry feels years away, the previous game becomes the default archive people live in. The difference with Cyberpunk 2077 is that a major post-launch overhaul created a version of the game that many players technically never experienced at all.
CD Projekt Red’s Strategy, Deliberate or Not
CD Projekt Red has not said anything to suggest this return wave is engineered. There have been no remaster announcements, no anniversary promotions specifically timed to drive Phantom Liberty traffic, no social media campaigns pointing back at the expansion. The silence around Project Orion appears to be genuine development caution rather than calculated drip-feed marketing.
But the effect is real regardless of intent. A growing number of players on social platforms and forums are posting fresh playthroughs, asking for build advice, and discussing Phantom Liberty endings as though the expansion just released. The activity is organic and self-sustaining – each new post pulls in someone else who decides now is the time to finally finish the Dogtown questline.
What This Means for Project Orion’s Expectations
The return wave is also setting up a complicated expectations problem for the sequel. Players who are discovering Phantom Liberty now, or rediscovering it through the 2.0 lens, are engaging with Cyberpunk 2077 at its best-received version. That becomes the baseline they carry into anticipation for Project Orion – not the chaotic launch build, but the refined, expanded product that took three years to materialize.
CD Projekt Red is developing Project Orion on Unreal Engine 5, moving away from REDengine for the first time. That shift has unknown implications for everything from development timelines to how the world is constructed. The studio’s North American team in Boston is leading the project, which itself represents a departure from the Warsaw-centric development model the studio has used through its entire history.
Players returning to Night City right now are essentially building a memory of Cyberpunk 2077 at its ceiling. When Project Orion eventually surfaces with real information – trailers, gameplay, a release window – the comparison point will be Phantom Liberty’s best missions, not the 2020 launch. That is a high bar set not by marketing, but by players choosing to spend another hundred hours in a world the sequel has to follow.
