Cyberpunk 2077 has received its biggest patch to date in the form of the 1.2 update, and while it fixes hundreds of bugs, typos, and other issues, the game is still far from what fans imagined it would be. Players have been compiling many of the problems that still persist in developer CD Projekt Red's now infamous sci-fi RPG, ranging from physics glitches to bizarre NPC behavior, and it shows just how far Cyberpunk 2077 has to go before it can live up to fan expectations.
Cyberpunk 2077 promised to be a revolution in open world RPGs, but what fans received at launch in December of 2020 left much to be desired. Glitches and bugs were everywhere. Performance, especially on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles, was atrocious, with a framerate in the teens and frequent crashes and freezes. The game was so buggy and ran so poorly that Sony took the unprecedented move of removing Cyberpunk 2077 from its digital PlayStation Store a week after the game's launch. Even after this new 1.2 update, Cyberpunk 2077 still can't be purchased digitally by PlayStation owners, and there is no word on when it might return. The game has now been unlisted from PlayStation Store for 100 days.
Cyberpunk 2077's 1.2 update was originally supposed to arrive in February of 2021, but a ransomware attack against CD Projekt Red significantly delayed the update's release. Now that it's finally here, fans are diving into the update to discover that while many problems have been fixed, plenty of issues still persist.
Cyberpunk 2077 Issues Persist After Patch 1.2 Update
Cyberpunk 2077's Patch 1.2 is massive, with more than 500 fixes being implemented. Major issues like police spawns and response times have been addressed, as have performance issues, glitches, typos, and bugs of all sorts. Unfortunately, fans are discovering there are still a number of big problems in the game, ranging from performance issues to physics bugs.
As much as the 1.2 update seemed like it would fix Night City's well-document police problem, they still seem to behave rather strangely. While they no longer appear to spawn instantly on top of the player when a crime is committed (they instead spawn in a larger radius around the player), they don't seem to be particularly great at their job. Sometimes they will vanish into mid-air, while other times multiple crimes can be repeated en masse and cause no police response.
Another major issue revolves around vehicle physics, with one major example that continues to make the rounds on social media like Twitch showing the game's vehicle spawn system could use some work. Players can call in vehicles they own at any time, causing them to spawn nearby. The issue is that if players call in multiple vehicles at once, they all spawn in the exact same location. This causes them to start exploding within one another, which then leads to the game struggling to render all of the debris and particle effects, leading to a massive downgrade in performance. It's not a huge problem in the grand scheme of things (how often does a player need to spawn multiple cars at once?), but it's still a bit of an oversight on CD Projekt Red's part. Cars still don't have great collision detection and can get stuck inside other vehicles or objects, players can leap out of cars full speed while taking no damage, and driverless cars immediately stop as soon as the player exits the vehicle.
Performance still remains a major sticking point as well, as documented by various YouTubers. Though the patch certainly improved performance, particularly on last generation consoles, the game still fails to hit a stable 30 frames-per-second on the Xbox One specifically, with moments of high intensity action still tanking the framerate down into the teens. The PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 seems to perform a bit better, staying at a stable 30 frames for the majority of the time, with combat scenes dropping the game into the low 20s. Both versions, however, still seem to suffer from minor freeze-ups, particularly when moving into a new region of the game's world.
Many players still report seeing various NPCs T-posing, textures failing to load properly, and numerous other issues. Taken all together it seems clear CD Projekt Red still has a long way to go if it wants Cyberpunk 2077 to live up to its full potential. Patch 1.2 is a major step in the right direction, but it will take many, many more major updates to to get Cyberpunk 2077 where it needs to be. More updates, including the game's next-gen update, are still slated to arrive in 2021.