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10 BIGGEST Changes in Cyberpunk 2077s Next-Gen Upgrade

10 BIGGEST Changes in Cyberpunk 2077s Next-Gen Upgrade
VOICE OVER: Ty Richardson WRITTEN BY: Caitlin Johnson
If you're curious about the changes in “Cyberpunk 2077's” next-gen upgrade, we've got you covered! For this list, we're looking at the major changes and additions brought with “Cyberpunk 2077's” next-gen upgrade and patch 1.5. Our list includes changes to AI behavior, expanded romances, new weapons, and more!


10 BIGGEST Changes in Cyberpunk 2077’s Next-Gen Upgrade

Welcome to MojoPlays! Today, we’re looking at the 10 biggest changes in “Cyberpunk 2077’s” next-gen upgrade. Are you ready to return to Night City?

For this list, we’re looking at the major changes and additions brought with “Cyberpunk 2077’s” next-gen upgrade and patch 1.5.

New Weapons

Upon booting up your freshly updated copy of “Cyberpunk”, you’ll immediately get a text message from Wilson that he’s having a sale at 2nd Amendment. A handful of new guns and attachments have been added to his inventory, all there for you to play with to your heart’s content. The two new weapons are a new power assault rifle, the Darra Polytechnic Umbra, and a power submachine gun, the Budget Arms Guillotine. There are four new scopes you can equip on a variety of weapons to suit your needs and ten new muzzles. If you’re not spending a lot of time near V’s original apartment in Megabuilding H10, which you may not be considering some of the OTHER changes, then you can also find all these items as loot and drops.

Rebalancing

The combat in the base game had issues, to say the least. But the latest patch has aimed to rebalance the entirety of combat, tweaking weapons, mods, cyberware, armor, and even overhauling the skill tree. Former boosts to critical chance have been significantly nerfed now, so you won’t be able to stack crit buffs and one-shot bosses like you could before. The changes to the skill tree are in fact so extensive that you’ll have to reassign all your attribute points. Many useless skills have been removed while new ones have been added, thanks to CDPR’s fourteen months of player feedback from the original release. These changes also expand to NPCs, and you’ll see enemies using some attacks and cyberware against you more than they used to.

Expanded Romances

One of the more subtle changes was CDPR’s revision of the in-game romances. “Cyberpunk” veterans will know the game has four main romance options for male and female Vs alike. But after completing the romance questlines, you didn’t really get the chance to interact with your significant other until the end of the game. This has all been improved with the patch, which adds interactions between you and your beloved outside of quests. Not only will they text you periodically, with some of those texts getting risqué, but you can also just go to their apartments and sleep next to them whenever you want. As well as providing more depth to the relationships, this also gives you an XP boost.

Driving

It wasn’t the most glaring issue with “Cyberpunk”, but you couldn’t help but notice it. The driving never felt great, and most of the time you couldn’t do things that are pretty basic in most other games that include driving – drifting, for example. CDPR has definitely listened to people criticizing the driving and has overhauled the system. Now, you can drift, do doughnuts, and more. This means there’s more of a skill level to driving where there wasn’t much before, making the game’s races more fun and challenging. Just driving around Night City feels better now. CDPR isn’t done updating the game and we’re sure more vehicles will be added in the future, and we can’t wait to check them out when this happens.

Eddies

Though it was never particularly hard to get eddies in “Cyberpunk”, it did take a while of grinding through NCPD encounters and repetitive gigs to get what you needed to buy a new car or a piece of flashy cyberware. But the costs of cars and cyberware have now been reduced, making them easier to get. You’ll also get more money from doing quests and other in-game events, so you won’t be working your way through boring side activities just to get a mid-range car from a fixer. This should also make it easier to buy any new cars or pieces of cyberware when they drop in future DLCs. It’s a small change but will certainly increase your enjoyment of the game.

Apartments

Though V’s first apartment is pretty cool and does get slowly populated with trinkets and mementos, many players thought there was a missed opportunity here. More than that, some thought that the ability to buy different apartments was cut from the finished game. Whatever the case, apartment buying is now here, and there are four new ones that V can buy with those precious eddies. They’re in Corpo Plaza, the Glen, Northside, and Japantown, and vary wildly in quality. Corpo Plaza is a huge luxury apartment, while V’s Northside digs are the cheapest and smallest, costing just 5,000 eddies to rent. You can also customize V’s starter apartment, however, with a series of six, new color schemes. So, there’s something for you to do even if you’re so attached to V’s first home that you don’t want to move.

Performance

Even for high-end hardware, “Cyberpunk” has proven a difficult game to run. And even if you’ve got the most expensive, powerful hardware on the market, you’ll still encounter plenty of bugs. CDPR has slowly but surely been fixing the bugs, and has now boosted performance with this latest upgrade on consoles. Now, the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions run at a relatively steady 60fps in performance mode. There are some dips here and there, but you’re not going to have the severe FPS drops that used to be standard when playing the game. It shoots for 30fps when RTX is turned on.

Change Your Look

Possibly the most conspicuous omission in the base game was the total lack of a way for V to change their appearance outside of the character creation screen. Sure, you could equip different cyberware and some of it would bring cosmetic changes, but you couldn’t cut or dye V’s hair. In a game all about body modification, this absence was completely absurd. Luckily, CDPR has now fixed this, and you can change V’s look at a mirror in any of the in-game apartments. These can be either the apartments you’ve bought or the apartment your love interest eventually gives you access to when you complete the romance. You can now change V’s hairstyle, hair color, and eyes whenever you want.

AI Behavior

Another glaring issue with the launch game was the behavior of its NPCs. This was the crowds, enemy combatants, cops, and traffic – all of it left much to be desired. Finally, though, CDPR has begun properly addressing these issues. Crowds have been revamped so that they won’t despawn and respawn when you look away, and now they’ll actually react with fear when you start shooting near them. Some will even pull out a gun themselves and retaliate. They’ll also react to your car if you keep crashing and will actively drive away from you to avoid getting hit. And the AI of combatants has been improved too, with hostile NPCs getting added behaviors; they may be aggressive or defensive, for instance.

RTX

This is the big one. When “Cyberpunk” launched in December 2020, only the PC version was able to handle powerful graphical settings if you had a high-end enough machine. These options weren’t available on consoles because they’ve been running the last-gen version until now. But finally, ray-tracing has made it to PS5 and Xbox Series X. “Cyberpunk” already had arguably the most impressive lighting of any eighth-generation video game even without RTX support, with its neon signs and non-stop lens flares, but now everything looks even better. We have real shadows, real lighting systems, better colors, and a better atmosphere. If you want the absolute best graphics possible and you’re willing to sacrifice FPS, make sure RTX is turned ON. Unfortunately, if you’ve got an Xbox Series S, this still isn’t an option, though that’s not really surprising.
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