During the latest episode of Night City Wire, CD PROJEKT RED unveiled a new cinematic trailer for their upcoming expansion, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, starring Idris Elba. Also presented during the show was an array of new information, including the changes to gameplay coming with the new expansion, new music, and the launch date for Cyberpunk 2077’sfree Update 2.0.
This special episode of Night City Wire — the show centered around discussion, news, and announcements regarding Cyberpunk 2077 — heavily featured the star of Phantom Liberty, Idris Elba (Thor: Ragnarok, Luther, The Suicide Squad, The Wire). The world premiere of a brand-new trailer starring Elba — set seven years before the events of Phantom Liberty — started the show, and was followed by additional behind-the-scenes footage of the well-known actor.
Later in the episode, more details were revealed about new elements and changes to gameplay. Game Director Gabe Amatangelo talked about the revamped perk and skill trees, and the completely new Relic skill tree that’s coming exclusively with the Phantom Liberty expansion. Also presented were three short videos featuring CD PROJEKT RED gameplay designers sharing their favorite character builds. As a bonus, the studio also released the Cyberpunk 2077 Build Planner — a free tool where players can create and plan their own builds in their browsers; everyone wanting to explore the changes made to the perk system, including the Relic skill tree from Phantom Liberty, can do so here.
The release date for Cyberpunk 2077’s free Update 2.0 was also revealed during the episode. With its revamped police system, redesigned perks, enhanced cyberware, and more, the update will be available from September 21st for all players who own Cyberpunk 2077 on current-gen consoles and PC.
Like in all CD PROJEKT RED games, music plays an important storytelling role in Phantom Liberty, and composers, P.T Adamczyk and Jacek Paciorkowski took part in this episode of Night City Wire to discuss how they created brand-new music for a spy-thriller story. The composers gave insight into Phantom Liberty’s score, and unveiled that the score is available to stream right now in full. They also discussed details of the new radio stations included in the game. One of the new stations’ playlists — Growl FM — is composed entirely of tracks hand-picked from those submitted for a music competition organized for the Cyberpunk 2077 community. During the show, a Growl FM documentary was announced, releasing on September 18th, highlighting how the radio station came to be.
Toward the end of the music segment, the theme song for Phantom Liberty was teased; the song is written and performed by Dawid Podsiadło, currently one of Poland’s top artists. Dawid previously worked with the studio to record music for the critically acclaimed anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.
