This week, CD Projekt Red CEO Michał Nowakowski said that the Cyberpunk 2077 developer is considering whether the game’s sequel, currently codenamed Orion, will have multiplayer. Given that GTA Online-but-cyberpunk is a dream of mine, I’m tempted to get excited about the prospect of making my way through a futuristic metropolis with my closest chooms. But then I remember what I put myself through in the year leading up to the first Cyberpunk, and force myself to calm down.

You may have forgotten, given the sheer amount of news stories that have come out about Cyberpunk 2077 in the last several years, but it was sold on the promise that it would get multiplayer a few years after launch. When I bought the game in December of 2020, I planned to play a bunch of it, finish the campaign, set it down for a while, then come back for a deep dive once multiplayer was available. But, after the game’s incredibly rocky launch, CDPR had to make some tough choices about its future, and those choices resulted in the studio breaking some promises. One was its decision to cut down the DLC expansions from a promised two, to just one — last year’s Phantom Liberty. The other was to cut the multiplayer component entirely.

That was disappointing to me because a huge part of my excitement around the game centered on the prospect of just hanging out in its world, drinking up Night City’s neon lights. A multiplayer mode designed to be supported long-term like GTA Online (which wasn’t explicitly what CDPR was pitching, but seemed like the most obvious direction) would have been the perfect place to do that.

I’ve talked before about how much I ended up buying into the Cyberpunk 2077 hype cycle because of the pandemic. During that first year of COVID, when I largely wasn’t leaving my house except for essential things, the promise of Cyberpunk was a neon light at the end of the tunnel. I might be stuck in my apartment, but Night City would be an escape. When the game ended up disappointing, it was partially CDPR’s fault for overpromising and continuing to hype the game up in Night City Wires, but it was also my fault for expecting more than a game could deliver, i.e. for the world to feel not completely broken and awful.

As I look ahead to Cyberpunk 2, I’m being much more cautious. It was easy to take the promise of Cyberpunk 2077 and run with it, but this time around I’m preparing to believe nothing; not until I see it with my own eyes and play it with my own hands. Wanting to play Cyberpunk-but-multiplayer isn’t going to make it real.

I’ve learned from the hype cycle, and I only hope that CD Projekt Red has, too. The studio did a good job of under-promising and over-delivering on Phantom Liberty. I hope it can maintain that commitment to not feeding the hype beast in four or five years, when the mess of 2077’s launch is a decade in the rear view mirror.

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2024 Will Be The Year I Finally Play Cyberpunk 2077

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