Cyberpunk 2077's surprise 2.1 update aims to make Adam Smasher live up to his name, adds new racing missions, and gives love interests a life with you after their questlines
I was expecting 2.0 to be Cyberpunk 2077's last big update—which made me pretty dang surprised and excited to hear that a follow-up patch, 2.1, actually has some good meat to its bones.
A fully-functioning metro system, a radio you can listen to on-foot, and some further gameplay tweaks—which we now know about because 2.1 is here, chooms. A full list of updates is available on the game's website, alongside a summary video on its official YouTube channel.
First up, there's been some changes to NPC relationships. I like a lot of the romance paths in 2077—they're cute, interesting, and capture the utter cringe inherent in flirting extremely well. There's one issue, though. Once you're done with a character's storyline, they pretty much vanish.
You can text them and get a couple more dialogue options out of 'em—or drive out to visit them wherever they're standing in the game world to hear those same options spoken in-person. But that's it.
That's changed with hangouts, "a repeatable, unlimited event that becomes available once the romance path with a given character has concluded." Finally, I can experience the ultimate gamer fantasy: having time to hang out with my loved ones while juggling a busy job.
Another element from my playthrough that baffled me is how The Beast in Me—a quest chain of destruction derbies with Afterlife bartender Claire—didn't unlock further races as a side activity. And this is in a game with too many of the suckers to keep on top of.
Don't get me wrong, driving in 2077 isn't exactly a highlight, but those missions were a nice little break from all the running and gunning—and they'd already built the systems for them. CD Projekt Red has fixed that in 2.1 too, adding a bunch of new races to the world map alongside improvements to enemy racer's AI.
There's a bunch of other tune-ups, tweaks, and features—adding sightseeing locations, expanding gang activities, and buffing certain bosses. Namely, Adam goddamn Smasher.
Smasher's been a point of contention for a while, since he's meant to be a bonafide badass in the game's lore. A "Functional Cyberpsycho" with a body count in the triple digits, though the word 'functional' is doing some heavy lifting there. When you finally fight him, though, he's a wet blanket. Studio Trigger's Cyberpunk: Edgerunners sold the terrifying nature of Smasher a lot better.
Well, bad (good) news: Adam Smasher can use his Sandevestian now. For the uninitiated, that's a piece of cyberware that lets you move in bullet time—turning you into a horrifying blur to everybody else.
I've yet to have the pleasure of meeting him myself, so I can't say whether this has made him 'lore accurate'. Last I played, my V's throwing knife build was chewing through even the heaviest of enemies. But I'm a bit of a masochist, so boy do I hope so.