Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty Expansion Upping PC Requirements with New Standard of Requirement

Cyberpunk 2077 is receiving a major DLC drop in a few months, but what players may not have known is that the game will have a new layer of requirements. Adding tons of additional content and changes, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will have an updated graphics card requirement and minimal RAM requirement, with a new SSD requirement instead of a hard drive, much to the chagrin of many players.

The new system requirements on PC will be coming with the next update for the base game, according to CD Projekt Red, with the Phantom Liberty DLC package releasing on September 26th.

An Unpopular Move…

The question stands: when the update for Phantom Liberty comes in mid-September, will the version installed on a hard drive still be playable? Yes, that is still the case. However, the gameplay experience for those on a hard disk drive will most likely be suboptimal, and to ensure the best experience of the game, CD Projekt Red will no longer test Cyberpunk 2077 on PCs with hard drives. Essentially, things may become wonky for gamers playing on a hard disk later down the line.

Though the decision to require an SSD has caused an uproar in the gaming community, it is unlikely that players will entirely lose the ability to play the game on their system for the time being. As long as a player’s other components surpass the minimum requirements and include a large amount of system RAM and VRAM on their graphics card, they may still be fine playing on a hard disk. Upgrading to SSDs is a likely move that players may have to make, however, as seen with recent moves including Bethesda Softworks’s Starfield.

If players do eventually make the move from hard disk to SSD, they are recommended to reinstall it from scratch, then move their existing saves across. For Steam players, the saved games can be synced to the cloud; for other players, saves can be located at %userprofile%Saved GamesCD Projekt RedCyberpunk 2077.

New System Requirement Changes

The changes to the minimum requirements are a new standard of requirement. CD Projekt Red explains, “which we believe better represent the minimum PC configuration required to run the game at 1080p while maintaining an average of 30 FPS at low preset.”

• – New baseline graphics cards: An Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, or AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB, or Intel Arc A380.
• – The minimum system RAM requirement has been increased to 12GB (from 8GB).
• – Compulsory requirement for an SSD instead of a hard drive.