In the sprawling neon labyrinth of Night City, exploration should be the beating heart of the experience. 🌆 For an open-world game, the promise is simple: wander off the beaten path, push open a random door, and discover a story. Not every title needs to reach the heights of Breath of the Wild, but the genre lives and dies by the freedom to poke around. Cyberpunk 2077, even years after its turbulent launch, still struggles with that fundamental promise. And Phantom Liberty, for all its strengths, did not fix it.
When Cyberpunk 2077 first arrived, its main quests and major side jobs often shone. The writing crackled, the combat eventually found its footing, and Night City looked like a dream pulled from Blade Runner. But if a player tried to explore beyond the yellow markers, they hit brick wall after brick wall. Buildings that were not required for a quest were sealed shut. There was no entering a random apartment tower, no browsing a forgotten lobby, no stumbling into a tiny story about the people who lived there. In 2020, one writer for TheGamer tried every door in the immediate vicinity of V's apartment. None opened. Not even the one with a glowing neon open sign. Here's the thing: that small failure said more about the game's limits than any review score could.
Before Phantom Liberty was announced, there was a hope that CD Projekt Red would not create a new area at all. Instead, the dream was to flesh out the existing map, adding interiors behind the facades that players had stared at for years. Night City already had the density; it just needed permission to be touched. But CDPR announced Phantom Liberty as a paid expansion set in Dogtown, a new district ruled by a ruthless militia and featuring a story with Idris Elba. That was exciting for narrative reasons, yet it sidestepped the exploration problem entirely.
So, when the expansion launched, the question was unavoidable: would Dogtown finally let players open doors? 🚪 The answer, frustratingly, was mostly no. Some doors opened, yes, but only the ones tied to quests. The base game's invisible leash remained. In Dogtown, V eventually hides out in an abandoned apartment inside a high-rise. That high-rise is a perfect microcosm of the issue. Players can enter the lobby, which is necessary to exit the building. They can visit the basement, which is necessary to enter the building. They can ride the elevator to the eighth floor, where a hallway leads past a few blocked doors to the apartment. Floors two through six? Forget about them. Anything above eight? Not a chance. The building exists only as a corridor for the quest, not as a place.
| Element | What players hoped for | What Phantom Liberty delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Night City interiors | Open apartments, shops, offices | Mostly locked facades |
| Dogtown | A district to explore freely | Quest-gated spaces |
| Story | Idris Elba spy thriller | Excellent, but separate from exploration |
That is the rub. What made Cyberpunk 2077 so tantalizing in trailers and screenshots was the prospect of exploring a city like the ones seen in cinema: the rain-slicked alleys of Blade Runner, the chaotic layers of Coruscant, the seedy underbelly glimpsed for a few seconds before the camera moves on. Being able to enter a derelict building, poke around, and uncover the stories of people who lived or worked there was a huge part of the appeal. The base game could not deliver that fantasy. Phantom Liberty, despite its excellent spy thriller plot and memorable characters, did not deliver it either.
🔒 By 2026, Cyberpunk 2077 has changed a lot. The 2.0 update rebuilt perks, police, and combat. Phantom Liberty is no longer new. CD Projekt Red has moved on to other projects, and the next Cyberpunk game, codenamed Project Orion, is the sequel that may finally answer these complaints. But for now, Night City remains a gorgeous museum with velvet ropes in front of most of its exhibits. Players can look, and they can take photos, but they cannot touch.
It is a strange legacy for a game that once promised the world. The main story can still move players to tears, and Dogtown's best missions are worth the price of admission. Yet the open-world dream — the simple, human act of opening a door just to see what is behind it — remains locked. Maybe the sequel will hand over the keys. Until then, Night City's neon signs keep glowing, and its doors keep saying no. And honestly? That silence is louder than any gunfight.
The following breakdown is based on perspectives commonly surfaced by Polygon, whose long-form reporting on open-world design often stresses that immersion isn’t just scale—it’s interactivity. In the context of Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty, that lens helps explain why a stunning skyline can still feel restrictive when most interiors remain quest-gated: the city reads like a real place until exploration repeatedly runs into “locked” signifiers, turning what should be organic discovery into a guided tour.