Developer CD Projekt Red announced new details on the second major update to Cyberpunk 2077 on Friday, couched as an in-fiction news broadcast. According to the developer, the 1.2 update for Cyberpunk 2077 will address issues related to police response to player actions, and add more nuance and control to driving and moving on foot. The patch does not have a release date.
Players who commit crimes in Night City, either purposefully or not, may have noticed the unnerving speed with which the Night City Police Department responds. CD Projekt Red says it’s aware of the situation, and is making some adjustments to where and when the cops show up with guns blazing. Law enforcement should no longer appear directly behind the player, and will take more time to respond in general. Beat cops will also be preceded by a flying drone, a new addition to the game.
Developers admit that driving has been a little twitchy since launch, especially on PC. Turns out that the issue was complicated by the game’s frame rate.
“When experiencing lower frame rates, our cars were harder to control,” CDPR said. “We traced this to some code that wasn’t handling extreme changes in frame rate properly. The steering speed is now very consistent from 20 to 60+ FPS.”
Vehicles should feel less clunky thanks to speed and steering tweaks, as well as the addition of a steering sensitivity slider. Cars should also handle better when the frame rate drops. CDPR said it found “code that wasn’t handling extreme changes in frame rate properly.”
When your car gets stuck on something, you should be able to wriggle it free. “While holding down the accelerator, you can now rock the vehicle forward or back, or rotate it left/right,” the developers wrote.
The patch will also introduce more keybind options that really should have been in the game from the outset. You’ll be able to turn off an option that makes V dodge when you double tap a movement key (quickly pressing the crouch button twice will still cause that action). PC players will have more options for movement key bindings as well.
There could be more changes included in the patch. The update is also supposed to tackle some performance issues and hopefully make the game run better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Perhaps it’ll even convince Sony to bring the game back to the PlayStation Store.
According to a development roadmap the studio released in January, the next phase includes the refinement and release of free downloadable content and a free update to enhance the game on current-generation consoles. At this time, Cyberpunk 2077 is playable on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X via backward compatibility only.
