Cyberpunk 2077 is receiving an expansion called Phantom Liberty in September 2023. And even though I never finished the base game a single time… I’m excited. In fact, it’s hard for me to remember how excited I have ever been for any DLC for a game.

Why? Because the designers are actually addressing my deepest disappointments in the main game: the Skill/Perk tree and cybermods more generally.

The devil, as always, will be in the details. But we have some clues that they realize that hundreds of nodes of +3% Headshot damage is goddamn stupid. This screenshot shows how the current “Skill bush” will resemble a proper Skill Tree, with more consolidated abilities.

Then there is this hands-on Kotaku post:

CD Projekt Red has completely overhauled growth progression in a way that feels in-line with what the game always promised. If there was an alternate version of Cyberpunk 2077 where you can actually craft playstyles that don’t inevitably end with a shootout, this is it. The expansion brings new character builds and revamps old ones, and is geared toward build-defining abilities and augmentations, rather than the base game’s tedious numbers-go-up grind of incremental but meaningless stat boosts.

[…] For the hour I spent in Phantom Liberty, I played a build centered around agility, doing things I couldn’t have pulled off in the main game. I was able to dash on the ground and in the air, deflect bullets with my sword, and execute devastating finishers when I got in close. I was practically Genji from Overwatch, slashing my way through the militant forces of Dogtown. This was only one of the builds the demo offered, but a cursory glance at Phantom Liberty’s updated skill trees was enough to send my mind racing to the new possibilities.

Thank. Christ.

I’m a systems kind of guy. I enjoy thinking about possibilities, synergies, optimizations. And while it is very easy to reduce things too far and otherwise be overly prescriptive… the true danger is building your system to be boring. And Cyberpunk’s current system is extremely boring. It is full of “perks” like “Reduce draw time for pistols by 50%” and “Reduce time to aim down sights with Rifles and Sub-machine guns by 10%.” Even if the design argument is that there needs to be speed-bump perks to soak up excess points, would it kill them to make it more interesting? Why not make those perks affect all guns? Or have pistols get a 5% chance to cause bleeding, and then allow that to synergize with a different perk in another tree that increases critical strike chance by 10% on bleeding targets, and combine with a third perk that increases bleeding duration?

I wasn’t a fan of The Secret World generally – having to tab out to a Wiki to get through “basic” quests was not much fun – but its synergies between talents and such were top-shelf.

Now, is “Genji from Overwatch” potentially a bit too far? Maybe. That said, right around when I abandoned my playthrough I stopped using sniper rifles because I could already instantly kill people from similar ranges with Quickhacks without having to worry about bullet drop. So perhaps having a little Genji up in here is precisely what Cyberpunk needs more of.

In any case, the new system sure as shit can’t possibly be worse than what Cyberpunk already has. And yeah, I dare the Monkey Paw to try and jinx that one.