The Mismatched Puzzle Pieces of ‘Phantom Liberty’: Why the ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ DLC Expansion Falls Short

One of my personal video gaming rollercoasters is CDProjekt Red’s infamous Cyberpunk 2077. A notorious disaster at launch, I initially boycotted the game due to its egregious mistreatment of working staff, reversal of key launch promises, and unfortunate issues with in-game racism and transphobia. Despite these severe reservations about the game, after a year I eventually gave a steeply discounted version of Cyberpunk a proper chance and ended up, well, loving it. Instantly, despite all those reservations, Cyberpunk 2077 skyrocketed into my top 50 games of all time. Naturally, therefore, the highly anticipated DLC, Phantom Liberty – with all its upgrades, expansions, and new story content – topped my radar for exciting 2023 releases. One year later, having rolled credits, I fear that Phantom Liberty was as overhyped as Cyberpunk 2077 was at release, only this DLC doesn’t have a future with promised patches to redeem it.

I bought Phantom Liberty on its release day, and I can’t imagine doing so without the legendary turnaround that I first experienced with the base game of Cyberpunk 2077. The original release, albeit rather patched before 2.0, blew me away with its emotionally turbulent story. Despite its launch reputation, the game ran well enough, the somewhat objectifying character creator (problematic as it may be with its “Penis 1” and “Penis 2” customizing binary) allowed me to create a trans woman that felt representative of the kind of person I would like to be in such a dystopian society. A highlight for me was the deadpan Keanu-character, Johnny Silverhand, as awful of a jerk as he is in the first half of Cyberpunk 2077, who ultimately evolved into a loveable and sympathetic incarnation of a rocker burnout, one that I nearly sided with in my first canonical ending of the game. 

I liked Cyberpunk 2077 so much that I went back from a previous save and completed each of the endings, and after credits, still returned to the world to clean up some side-quests, or “gigs,” as the game calls them. To its credit, very few optional objectives in the original Cyberpunk wasted player time. Thus, my love for Cyberpunk culminated in a lengthy redemption article that I posted towards the end of 2021, followed by a glowing review of the Edgerunners anime adaptation.

Replaying Cyberpunk 2077 for the DLC

Once September 2023 rolled around, Phantom Liberty wasn’t even a question. Though the paid DLC retailed for $30 at launch, any excuse to extract more engaging fun from the world of Night City was a no-brainer for me. The promise of famed actor Idris Elba’s presence in Phantom Liberty pushed an already tempting offer of more content into a promise of something truly cinematic with its greatness. Alas, I fell into the trap that feels inevitable for a player of Cyberpunk 2077: because the game had received so many patches since I finished my original playthrough, I was compelled to not just jump straight to the DLC with a pre-built character, though the game provided me the option; instead, I personally wanted to replay the entire game to relive the glory days of the campaign and see what sort of retooling had happened to the game’s many overlapping mechanical systems. (I would not repeat this mistake with Elden Ring’s similarly sized DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, the following year.)

Sixty hours of retreading and side-questing later, my massively overpowered Netrunner character finally prepared to enter Dogtown, Night City’s newly playable location from Phantom Liberty, I strapped in for the new content. While I think of my highlights with the base game of Cyberpunk as a tour de force in realism, intense action, and “breathtaking” moments, the takeaways from that game all have to do with V, the protagonist’s, relationship with the core characters like Johnny. Phantom Liberty introduces a few key characters that drive the new plot, and right out of the gate, it seems they will play an equally pivotal, vital role: Rosalind Myers (the President), Solomon Reed (Idris Elba), and Songbyrd (aka Song So Mi) being the major players. Ultimately, however, I feel that these characters don’t live up to their promise.

Recapping Phantom Liberty

The Phantom Liberty DLC starts with a terrorist attack on the President of the New United States of America, whose Space Force One ship is shot down, crashing into Dogtown’s destroyed urban wilderness. Without properly realizing who she is dealing with, my V is contacted by a mysterious Netrunner named Songbird to rescue President Myers, suddenly implicating herself in a national coup attempt and the retaliation thereof. Until this point in the story, and despite running my second playthrough of V as a “Corpo” character compared to my first “Streetkid” playthrough, V could care less about national politics. When Songbird contacts her, it’s under the guise that if V helps, then Songbird can help V with the degenerative relic chip implanted into her head – the same one that exported Johnny Silverhand’s consciousness into her own. But this mission is sentimentally selfish.

As the main plot of Cyberpunk 2077 concerns itself with V’s life-or-death position with regard to Johnny Silverhand’s corruption of V’s own psyche, I figured that Phantom Liberty’s main selling point is promising a new or alternative pathway for the story’s conclusion: namely, saving V from her promised fate. Having seen all the main endings to V’s story in the base game, I was motivated to explore what endings Phantom Liberty had to offer V, even if the bait offered by Songbird in the beginning of this DLC was obviously just that: a dubious excuse to compel V to save the President.

The problem with Phantom Liberty isn’t transparent based on the content offerings alone. Rather, for such a strong, fully fleshed out full game, adding a DLC that feels emptier than the Wastelands to which Panam belongs is disappointing. This emptiness stems from a mixture of character building, plot pacing, and mission structure, in equal measure. While the characters, for example, on their own, are well written, they are not compelling in the way that characters from the base game are. Perhaps I was personally distracted by Idris Elba’s star-power as opposed to Solomon Reed himself, but that doesn’t explain why Keanu’s character worked so well for me in the base game. My theory for this discrepancy is that Phantom Liberty makes too many cuts to an originally over-scoped DLC, and those cuts aren’t properly smoothed over and patched by writing and successive game design. Elba’s character feels, in comparison, hollow. We receive, thirty-dollars-deep, a bowl-cut of Phantom Liberty’s original storyline.

For such a high-profile actor, Solomon Reed’s role is bare bones. V learns that Reed is a sleeper agent who is deadlier and more professional than any spy-assassin character she has encountered heretofore in the post-relic version of her life. It’s difficult to even trust Reed, as so much of his incumbent legacy derives from stealth missions, adjacent reputations, and outdated recommendations from questionable figures like the President and Songbird. 

The Problem With Phantom Liberty‘s Main Cast

Songbird herself isn’t exactly a stand-up character either, in the sense that she only initially appears to the player as a hologram, telegraphing her virtual presence to V in a similar fashion that Silverhand’s consciousness appears as a real-world embodiment. Songbird’s reputation as a Netrunner is trustworthy insofar as her abilities, but neither Reed nor the President seem to have an airtight trust or sense of loyalty for her. Rather, as the story progresses, and the plot shifts from retaliating against the coup-actors who shot down Space Force One to the quest to find a kidnapped, imprisoned version of Songbird, it becomes quickly apparent that this character is acting selfishly, with incomplete information, and perhaps with the wrong set of moral principles to begin with. 

The problem with Phantom Liberty’s characters isn’t necessarily to do with the acting, the quality of writing, or the placement within the actual narrative. Rather, the issue I find is that so many of these interactions are confined to mere facades – empty, and remote – that is, transpire through holograms and phone calls. But, considering the grandeur of imagination within how the base game tells even out-of-body stories like the reuniting of Samurai, you can feel the missing places where these stories would have been more completely told and embodied in the remainder of Cyberpunk 2077. 

I can’t connect with Songbird and see her as fully human because half of what she says pertains to circumstances rather than characterization. With Reed, I can’t connect with him because I only see him once per five phone calls. Obviously, characters like Reed are written as sleeper agent spies, no naturally they can’t appear in person every time; but when I’m solely dealing with holograms and mission-deliverers, these core characters start to feel like the shell-characters of Mr. Hands and his mission-giving likeness. I never get to know these characters in the way that I fell in love with Judy Alvarez, or the straight-only Panam Palmer, or the recalcitrant rocker Johnny Silverhand. By the time I feel like there’s a chance, they die or disappear. If I can’t connect with these characters, then who are they, and why did they hire Idris Elba to play them when they could have – structurally and functionally – been anybody?

Phantom Liberty’s narrative never takes off. Sure, there are assassination quests, mass murder missions, plenty of vehicle-related scenarios, and the like. But what happens in Phantom Liberty is largely surface, and I find that a deep, entrenching disappointment when the base game is so fully fleshed out. The years spent writing and concepting characters feels obvious in Cyberpunk 2077; in Phantom Liberty, it feels like the now-infamous “concept of a plan” design that plagues contemporary American politics. That’s just not good game design, at least when the standard is so severely undershot in the expansion.

The Incomplete Feeling of Phantom Liberty

Returning to how the game runs, the performance of Cyberpunk with Phantom Liberty’s addition is smoother than ever. There are more coherent upgrade paths, more enticing incentives to invest in gameplay and side quests, and more overall density to the world that makes this game feel more alive. My understanding is that it wasn’t just CDProjekt patching the game every week, but that the Phantom Liberty DLC added some final deliverables that were vacant until the final 2.0 push-out. These additions are admirable, no doubt, but they don’t supplement the main campaign in a way that justifies its inclusion as a true addition. 

The biggest sin of Phantom Liberty is emptiness, but I wonder how much of that standard I am holding is due to the legacy of its predecessors. When veritable masterpieces like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt exist, including the near-perfect Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine DLCs (both of which were free and included with the base game after launch, mind), examining Phantom Liberty feels like a bit of a tired exercise. I don’t need Phantom Liberty to reinvent the wheel, but I do need the additions to feel as robust and complete as the base game’s story did. Just because the characters don’t T-pose during every transition between animations, and just because my game doesn’t crash every few missions (okay, it absolutely still hard-crashes on PS5 compared to PC, who am I kidding), doesn’t mean that the game is “fixed” – as the marketing taglines would have it. Rather, the version of Cyberpunk that exists now feels better than the version that includes the $30 DLC – after all, the 2.0 version of the game dropped coincidingly with Phantom Liberty, but even on sale, I wonder what kind of player feels like Phantom Liberty completes the package, because for me, thinking of Phantom Liberty as its own story detracted from its impact.

Phantom Liberty is the biggest disappointment to CDProjekt’s DLC lexicon in recent memory, and that’s saying something when we have the marketing track-record of Cyberpunk 2077 to contend with. The game still reeks of imperfections but I never played Cyberpunk 2077 for the graphics or the frame-rate; rather, I just want to deliver a car, upgrade my cyberware, and neutralize a hostile gang instead of having to report my bugs to Playstation. That simply didn’t happen during my replay. I can’t say that Phantom Liberty crashed more often or harder than other parts of this game, but for something that spent an extra few years in the oven, it’s eyebrow-raising that the game still feels questionable. Especially for a game so hellbent on futuristic technology, it’d be a miracle if the designers were given the space to breathe and make a game that actually feels like it belongs to such a world. As such, Phantom Liberty reads as a fanfiction more than a genuine addition to what finally became a good game.

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