In today’s age of triple-A, big-budget spectacles, and monumental failures of undercooked, buggy games with big expectations getting laughed out of the room, It's refreshing to see the village idiots and underdogs having such explosive comebacks to the surprise of gamers all over the world. But why is this trend of patching up rushed games a year or two later so prevalent now? Especially with all the resources, these triple-A studios have which hold the potential to create masterpieces in gaming.

The most extraordinary example that has come to mind lately would be the revival of CD PROJEKT RED’s Cyberpunk 2077 with the release of the Edgerunners 1.6 patch. Which was put out with the release of the Netflix-exclusive anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners; created by the world-renowned Studio Trigger, known for their popular anime’s Kill la Kill and Darling in the Franxx. CD PROJEKT RED added in-game items and locations to discover which reference the newly released anime, such as protagonist David Martinez’s yellow jacket and Rebecca’s apartment can be found in-game.

We also get to see newly added weapons and cybernetics as references to the anime:

Rebecca’s shotgun “Guts” which can be found in the bushes around Corpo Plaza, as well as David’s cybernetic implant the “Qiant Sandevistan Mk. 4” which you can find at Finger’s Clinic in Jig-Jig Street around Japantown.

The iconic and overpowered Sandevistan allows him temporary boosts of superspeed which allow him to slow down the flow of time. In game, this implant allows the player character V to annihilate rooms full of goons without them even realizing, typically used for throwing knives, ninja-style builds by speedrunners on YouTube. The patch overhauled many aspects of the game that flesh out the grim reality of living on the streets of Night City.

One such overhaul was the tweaking of AI intelligence:

Following the rules of the road, staggering when bumped into, pedestrians defending themselves when shot at and crowds running for their lives when the player lets their WMDs loose. These were all additions which give the in-game world character and personality, Night City seems more like the place you would be honoured to die in a ditch beside your best choom!

We also have other slice-of-life improvements such as the ability to customize V’s appearance at your nearby ripperdoc, which was previously a permanent choice on Cyberpunk’s release. Combat mechanics have been revamped as well, with weapon buffs/nerfs, balancing bullet-spongey enemies and tweaks to the player UI such as a full preview of items before you buy them.

Some of the infamous glitches which reduced the hype machine to a laughingstock; such as cars being sent flying for no logical reason and frame rates that set even your Nvidia RTX on fire have been patched. Though some bugs remain here and there to a small extent, glitches have been drastically improved compared to the chaos and disappointment of the launch.

Many are chalking up the lazy releases of beta-stage games as corporate greed on behalf of the triple-A developers, having almost impossible to meet quotas for the game to be released, with developers having to go through crunch time to release next Christmas season. The true goal of any one developer, should be to make high-quality games that their consumers love, instead of pumping novelty microtransactions down our throats.

Despite the blistering blunders and slaps to the face we get from loathed developers like EA, CD PROJEKT RED seemed to outdo themselves to win back the favour of their fans. Going as far as to help create an action-packed anime based on the Cyberpunk Universe, which has found critical acclaim.

Though Cyberpunk has seen a major revival, there is a catch; CD Projekt RED’s much anticipated, GTA online-style multiplayer mode has been scrapped. Instead, efforts will be poured into the up-and-coming Phantom Liberty expansion, which has the potential to completely change the game as we know it today. This DLC might expand the surrounding borders of Night City to explore, with more intricate storylines, weapons, and armour like the vanilla game. With Keanu Reeves returning to voice the terrorist rocker boy, Johnny Silverhand.

Cyberpunk 2077: Did the Edgerunners patch revive the game?