Last Known Meal drops some tasty facts that the current player count for 2077 hovers just over 62,000. For a 4 yr old, single player game, that is amazing frankly. For some context as of this writing the player count of Starfield is just over 7,300 and BG3 is almost 79,000. Again, very respectable. He addresses how CDPR spend around 125 million to turn 2077 around and how 2024 was as a whole a very good year for our fav game. Take a watch;
   

Lt. Litebeer gives us a run down of the latest 2077, Orion and general update news;
   

PC Gamer reports 2077 has, mostly, recovered from the beating it took in the first year of release (and a lot of it, but not all, was deserved) and crawled its way back to a solid positive rating, here is a snip;

You could argue that, as moments go, this one isn't all that terribly big, and yeah, that's fair. Despite its train wreck reputation, Cyberpunk 2077 was pretty okay on PC, especially if you had a fairly high-powered rig, and even when it first came out—which is to say, when it was in its worst condition—the Steam score never slipped below 70%, which counts as "mostly positive." That's not bad for most games, but Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't most games, and the fact that it wasn't bringing in universal praise was seen as a shock—and of course, the situation was far worse on consoles.

But as Momot said, CD Projekt has stuck with it, and things slowly turned around. The first real evidence of improvement came in November 2021, when new user reviews climbed to "very positive," helped along by a flood of input from people who picked it up for half price in the Steam Autumn Sale. The overall rating remained stuck at "mostly positive," but the new reviews continued to roll in, and the needle very slowly moved. Last year’s Edgerunners update, timed alongside the release of the highly-praised Netflix show, earned goodwill too by correcting some of the worst annoyances that’d persisted since launch, like the lack of cosmetic armor slots.

Cyberpunk 2077's quest director Paweł Sasko describes the process of making the controversial Sinnerman quest.
 

 

Gameranx covers what they feel are the 10 biggest additions, changes coming to 2077 with patch 1.7 and the expansion, take a watch;
 

Miles Tost Lead Level Designer for CDPR gives a presentation of the lessons learned during the making of 2077.
   

The Phantom Liberty tour in Europe is about to start!
   

Over on gamesindustry.biz there is a interview with CD Projekt's VP of PR and communication Michał Platkow-Gilewski. He took accountability of the poor launch and how happy he is of how well the feedback has been about the expansion. Some places like GameSpot are focusing on his ONE sentence saying some folks jumped on the hater bandwagon during the games struggles in the first year. Implying he was brushing off the (legit) criticism of the launch on the players. That is frankly out of context and not the point he makes in most of the article. None the less here is a snip;

Platkow-Gilewski has been at CD Projekt for 12 years, joining back when it was 120 people and he was part of a marketing team of six. Now the business is around 1,200 employees and his team is close to 100. And for him, the real disappointment around Cyberpunk 2077 is that it let down the studio's core fans.

"I was personally not happy with how things turned out. I was not expecting that. I knew immediately that we had to come back. I liked the spot we were in. I'm not talking about the peak of hype, but two years before that, we had our community, we liked them, they liked us, it was awesome to work at CD Projekt RED.

"After the release it was tough, but I knew that we had the same people. The gamers are the same… we just need to fix our relationship. The only thing we can truly do is just deliver what we are capable of. I have a feeling that soon we will be able to do that and hopefully that will be a new beginning for everyone."

CDPR will be at GDC this year with a presentation and deep dive on the 2077 GUI by one of the engineers. Take a look;
   

If you want even more info about Dogtown and Kurt Hanson, our boy Lead Quest Designer Paweł has you covered;