Cyberpunk 2077’s first DLC expansion won’t release until 2023

Time Stamp: April 15, 2022 4:49 AM

In their latest financial call, CD Projekt Red has stated that the first DLC expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive in 2023. More details can be expected to come later this year, and the expansion will feature a major new storyline to follow.

CD Projekt Red has also announced that Cyberpunk 2077 has now sold over 18 million copies. This would be a huge success for many games, but after the game sold 13 million copies at launch in December 2020, shows a huge cooling off of sales through 2021 after the game’s high profile struggles. With the game now enhanced for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S with free upgrades, they will be hoping that this will help the game get close to the popularity of The Witcher 3 – this game has now sold 40 million copies.

Thinking of the build up to Cyberpunk 2077’s release, it’s quite shocking that it would take CDPR over two years to develop and release a first paid expansion for the game, especially when The Witcher 3 received two huge expansions within the first year after launch. Of course, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was mired with problems that CDPR had to resolve as best they could before moving on to adding significant game content.

The first half of 2021 saw the studio working hard to fix bugs and patch up the game to the point that it could be restored to the PlayStation Store and refund policies ended, before turning their attentions the new generation enhancements. Those were planned for late 2021, but eventually pushed back to the start of 2022, eventually coming alongside some more sweeping improvements and changes to the core gameplay.

Further support for Cyberpunk 2077 is also planned, beyond the paid expansion, though it’s not clear how large in scale this will be, whether it will be free or paid, or anything really.

CD Projekt Red recently announced a new partnership with Epic Games to jump to Unreal Engine 5 for the next The Witcher game. This will see the company give up on their internally created RED Engine, though promises to be a deep technical partnership that will help UE5 better cater to open world games.

In other The Witcher news, CDPR has had to delay the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S enhanced versions of The Witcher 3. They are taking development of the enhancements in-house, having previously outsourced its development to Saber Interactive. Saber’s main studio is in Russia, so while technically very competent and capable of pulling off some fantastic ports and game enhancements, CDPR’s cutting of ties with Russia through the now 50-day way in Ukraine has forced them to make this change.

Source: Twitter

Time Stamp:

More from TheSixthAxis