Cyberpunk 2077's latest patch is, after February's absolute whopper that made a truckload of improvements in every area, more of a maintenance job on bugs and glitches. The fun thing with these is finding out what players have been running into without it ever quite coming to wider attention: for example, some players found when they were driving fast that "wrecked cars or multiple Nomad cars" would start spawning around them, which must rather cramp your style.
In addition to tweaks like this, the patch has fixed some in-game triggers for stuff that could be accessed too early, open world events that weren't spawning at the right time for some, and—my favourite of all, relating to a mission called Automatic Love—"Walking into a wall in the elevator in Megabuilding H8 will no longer cause instant death."
But wait: there are more. One fix refers to this in-game occurrence, which is that you'll occasionally see NPCs jump to their deaths from corporate offices:
Not shown: apparently some of them would just... get up after that. Now "Suicidal Corpos in Corpo Plaza will no longer stand up after the fall."
Then there's the bug that could apparently see the character River "drive out of the market area erratically" during the I Fought the Law mission "and push V out of world bounds." What a way to go.
Various other quest progression bugs have been nixed, spawning glitches stamped on, and there's some small UI fixes and one change: rewards will now have a quest tag showing where you got them from when you first see them in your stash and when opening menus. There's finally a very Stadia-specific note, because apparently that version of the game was a hippie wonderland until now: but CDPR has "enabled aggressive crowds."
The full patch notes can be found here.
This is a minor update but it arrives in the context of much bigger news for the studio. Yesterday CDPR teased the next game in the Witcher series and part of this announcement was that it is being developed using Unreal Engine 5. That is a major move for CD Projekt as a whole which has used its own in-house REDEngine to build almost all of its games: Cyberpunk 2077 was built on REDEngine 4, which was a ground-up rebuild of the tech.
For the next installment in The Witcher series of video games we're moving from REDengine to Unreal Engine 5. However, REDengine, the technology which powers Cyberpunk 2077, is still being used for the development of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 expansion. https://t.co/429xmgMbQsMarch 21, 2022
Part of the Witcher news was that, while the flagship series is going UE5, Cyberpunk 2077 and "its upcoming expansion" will remain on REDEngine: I mean, of course it will. Why did CDPR clarify this? Probably because internally it feels a bit bad about the fact, whatever the economic realities, it is definitively leaving its own tech behind: and make no mistake, the modern CD Projekt was built on the REDEngine.
Cyberpunk 2077's story is far from finished, but in all likelihood it will be the last major game developer by the studio using its own in-house tech. Arguably, it is also the game that made CD Projekt Red switch to a thirdparty engine: the game clearly came in hot, the launch was a commercial success but an unmitigated reputational disaster, and some element of that surely comes down to the choice of tools. Otherwise why switch. Either way, it's a sad coda for Night CIty.
