happy to say that after playing it literally all day i do not feel any less enthusiastic. i'd love to write a longer thing once im done with both PL and the base game but it's really astonishing how much Phantom Liberty is an improvement on basically every aspect of 1.0 CP2077 that I had issues with.
It's a fundamental rethink of how it presents its universe and the stories within them, a task that's aided no doubt by having a much denser area to work in. Events feel a lot more organic because everything is much closer together and you get a cohesive understanding of what it's like to live there. 2.0 changed a lot but it can't really change that parts of Japantown feel indistinct from The Glen or Northside or Heywood. It's the consequence of designing a world that big there's just asset reuse and you can't realistically have every area feel unique without also having a budget twice the size of its already substantial dev cost. It's not surprising, then, that Phantom Liberty essentially just being a neighborhood would do this far more successfully but the way they've done that is really admirable. It's maybe the thing I've been thinking about the most when I'm not playing it.
