Cyberpunk 2077: where is the February patch?

Cyberpunk 2077: where is the February patch?

Cyberpunk 2077

Arriving at February 21, 2021, it is questionable where is the new major patch of Cyberpunk 2077 promised for February 2021. Will CD Projekt Red be able to close it and launch it within the next seven days? Or will we see it go further?

The question is particularly interesting, either because of the past of the game, or because at the beginning of January an anonymous developer had talked about the concrete possibility that the patch would slip to March, as at the epoch reported:

"The first two major patches should be released by mid-March and not before, as stated by the executives. Meanwhile the studio is undergoing a major internal restructuring and many key figures are about to leave, as we will see in the next few months. "

If he is right about the second patch, his other statements would also gain strength, despite the denial of the top management of CD Projekt. Of course, it must be said that working on a patch for a game as complex as Cyberpunk 2077 can always reserve some surprises, especially in the testing phase, and that a delay of a few days would certainly not be a drama. Better a working patch than a running patch.





Is Cyberpunk 2077's 1.2 Patch Still Coming Out In February?

Cyberpunk 2077

CDPR

As ever, it’s been pretty much radio silence about the state of Cyberpunk 2077, though this time around, with an added complication.


CDPR did in fact manage to get out the promised 1.1 patch for Cyberpunk in January, but with a week left in February, the supposedly much larger, more substantive 1.2 patch has not been previewed or released yet, when it was supposed to arrive this month.


The complication, of course, is the recent, sprawling hack of CDPR which pilfered everything from employee data to the source code of Cyberpunk, The Witcher 3 and Gwent. There are conflicting reports about whether the code has actually been sold or not, and CDPR is reportedly trying to use takedowns to prevent anyone from doing anything substantive with it.


This means that it sure seems possible that the 1.2 patch could end up delayed if the hack has caused too much disruption as CDPR. Granted, teams chasing down hackers and those who would purchase stolen info from them are probably different than those chasing down bugs and glitches in Cyberpunk, but it’s logical that there may be some overlap if the chaos caused by the extensive hack is too damaging. For instance, it seemed as if the hackers encrypted CDPR’s servers, which they had to restore from backups. Who knows if any work was lost there.

Cyberpunk 2077

CDPR

Cyberpunk still badly needs a major patch, which it really has not had since release in December. There have been a number smaller scale hotfixes, and even the original 1.1 patch felt like a larger hotfix rather than anything transformative. Sony has still not allowed Cyberpunk 2077 to be sold on the PS Store digitally after it took it off shortly after launch due to technical problems and constant refund demands. That’s the version of the game for both PS4 and PS5, and console sales of Cyberpunk actively dipped in January because well, it wasn’t for sale on the digital store of the biggest gaming platform in the world.


It’s not clear what it will take to get Sony to deem the game “ready” enough to be sold again, but CDPR kind of burned that bridge when they told people to chase after Sony for refunds when Sony did not have a digital return policy at all (they had to make one just for Cyberpunk).


Cyberpunk remains full of bugs and performance issues, and longer term problems like traffic and police AI are not likely to be fixed in even a large upcoming patch, most likely. And no one expects the promised free DLC for the game, whatever that may be, until late spring or early summer at this point. The official Cyberpunk account has not tweeted since February 5 when it released a hotfix to patch an issue discovered with unsafe mods.


CDPR did slide in under the wire with the last patch in January, so it’s possible they’ll do the same this week. But the hack complicates things and the long, long term fixes for Cyberpunk including a next gen upgrade on consoles seem an eternity away.


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