Phantom Liberty is CD Projekt RED's masterpiece. Not only is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty graphically easily three generations ahead of the entire industry and redefines how we experience video games with pathtracing, it's also written even more thrillingly and staged even more explosively. Anyone who doesn't enjoy this several times in different play styles has never loved video games. Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion is a reminder of how incredibly explosive gaming has become – and the perfection with which CD Projekt RED manages to involve its actors. When Idris Elba is on a train out of Dogtown, joking with Songbird about how they really need to eat that one famous burrito of his together sometime, and there's such an eerie silence to the flirtation – the nervous looks of the head hacker because she's about to betray him – these are moments that feel like they'd belong in House of Cards or 24.

Only the neon-colored OLED walls remind us that this was once a district of Pacifica, the Dubai Night City, a luxury oasis that ran out of money in the corporate war. We stand on high scaffolding that was supposed to be a sports stadium. We look up – rockets scream towards a plane, it goes down, literally whizzing over our heads before crashing with a thunderous explosion. But this isn't just any plane, it's Space Force One, the government plane of President Myers of the New United States of America in Cyberpunk 2077's hotly anticipated Phantom Liberty expansion. This article was translated from German to English, and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.

Cohn points to the game's 1.5 patch in February as the beginning of this resurgence, an update that not only brought PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S versions up to performance standards of the current generation, but introduced a host of changes that restructured the game, how it unfolds and how its setting, Night City, feels. The game at launch encouraged unbalanced builds, but by adding and removing certain abilities while rebalancing how weapons are used, CD Projekt Red made building a character of special abilities feel consequential and engaging. Traffic and pedestrian behavior was fixed to bring Night City's bustle up to standards of other open-world games.

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. "The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen," an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that "Star Wars" came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking "Star Wars" rogue played by Billy Dee Williams.

Gaming never went out of style, but in 2020, it evolved from a fun hobby into an essential lifeline. Staying sane isn't easy when you're stuck in isolation for months on end. You can only watch so much Netflix before your brain starts dripping out of your ears. Games provide more active experiences that can help you forget that you've been staring at the same walls for weeks, letting you explore far-away virtual worlds or hang out with friends in multiplayer lobbies. In 2020, gaming became vital.

That's what it says on my jacket. Because Cyberpunk 2077 operates almost exclusively in a claustrophobic first-person, I can't actually see the slogan sloppily written on my super-cool popped-collar jacket except when I'm tinkering with my loadout on the inventory screen. But I know it's there. I know it's there all the time. I mean, that's part of the psychological deal we make with video games, right?

Push past the beaded entryway of room six at the No-Tell Motel in Cyberpunk 2077, and there she is: a statuesque, blondish woman perched on the edge of an animal-print-covered bed. "Bet you didn't expect to see me here," she says. After the blockbuster video game's main character, V, has sex with her, the reward lays on the bed. It's the same dildo from before, only now transformed into a melee weapon. The dildo "may not be lethal," according to its profile in the weapons inventory, but "it's perfect for when someone is just asking to get fucked."

While some forms of entertainment like movies and sports were hit hard by the pandemic, gaming actually thrived in 2020. Since we were all stuck indoors, we spent a lot more time in front of screens, discovering new experiences, replaying older classics and a few of us even made a dent in our backlogs, aka the "pile of shame." To that end, the Engadget staff presents a slightly different list of our favorite games of 2020: not just the most impactful titles that came out this year, but also the older games that kept us company during this crazy time. I have already spilled so much digital ink on this game this year that, had you asked me to pick my best of 2020 a month ago, I would have picked something different like Miles Morales or Fall Guys. Animal Crossing is fun, I thought, but I've done everything I want to do in the game and I really should be focusing my critical eye on the fancier, flashier titles from more powerful systems. But then the winter update arrived, bringing with it new holidays and reactions and hairstyles, oh my!

Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year was released last week. A dystopian romp around a Blade Runner-inspired city, it had all the ingredients for a perfect storm of hype: it's been nearly a decade in the making; its creator, Warsaw's CD Projekt Red, was behind one of the greatest games of the last decade (The Witcher 3 – think Game of Thrones but grimier); it stars Keanu Reeves, who is as popular with gamers as he is with everybody else. Eight million people had pre-ordered and paid for the game before it came out. But since 10 December, it's all gone horribly wrong. On launch day, the reviews were good – great, even.

Step out onto the streets of Night City, Cyberpunk 2077's futuristic vision of a dystopian Californian metropolis, and very little looks immediately familiar. The city's buildings have been replaced with squat brutalist apartment blocks, hologram-coated concrete towers, and neon-lit side streets where people with metal computer implants stare at strangers with glowing eyes or clench high-tech guns with gleaming cybernetic hands. Still, Night City, despite how alien its strange technology and architecture may appear, represents a future very much in touch with the concerns of our present day. Cyberpunk follows V, a character created by the player who ends up entangled in the politics of Night City's most powerful megacorporation, Arasaka, and fighting for their life after a heist gone wrong. Like the genre it's named for, the game is rooted in the 1980s futurism--in a time when the rise of home computers and rapid technological innovation butted up against increasing economic disparity caused by privatization-happy political leadership in America and abroad. So many cyberpunk staples appear quaint in hindsight.