I saw a reddit comment which explained the gameplay changes, but reddit.com seems to be down with no way to salvage it! Here's a quick overview from the article I got ChatGPT to generate:
Redesigned Inventory and Skills: The skills and inventory systems have undergone a major redesign. Perks are now structured in a way that makes each choice feel impactful, adding new skills or abilities with each upgrade rather than small incremental boosts. For example, certain abilities may allow you to reload while sliding or enhance your combat capabilities in vehicles.
Vehicular Warfare: Vehicles can now be armed for combat. The vehicles come with attached weapons, and the controls for aiming and shooting are intuitive.
Separation of Stats and Cosmetics: Stat boosts like increased armor have been separated from clothing, making the choice of what to wear purely cosmetic. These boosts have been moved to cyberware, which has been significantly overhauled.
Cyberware Consequences: There are now negative consequences for installing excessive amounts of cyberware. However, certain skills can be developed to increase tolerance to these effects. Some of the cyberware options are tributes to characters from the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime.
Streamlined Inventory Screen: The inventory screen now presents information in a less cluttered and more streamlined manner. The revamped skills are sorted to make it clear how they can be built into others.
Relic Perks: These are special perks that can only be earned through exploration in the Phantom Liberty expansion. It's unclear how much of these new features will be available in the base game and how much will be exclusive to the expansion.
Broader Changes: Phantom Liberty represents a large-scale overhaul of the game's core mechanics, which CD Projekt Red has been reoptimizing over the past two years. The studio is planning to deliver significant refinement with this expansion, which is the only one planned for Cyberpunk 2077.
What are you guys most excited/hoping for? Personally praying the UI on PC gets an overhaul to be something more like SkyUI for Skyrim rather than console focused.
Also, I saw another article mention pricing: £25 / $30, which seems like a solid deal! I wonder if the gameplay changes will be paywalled?
I'd assume that changes to existing mechanics like the overhauled skill system and the change that armor is now implemented through cyberware instead of clothes would be available for everyone, while new features like the mentioned relic perks will be DLC-exclusive, but the article mentions that the devs haven't fully decided what's gonna be DLC-exclusive, so we'll have to wait and see.
Also, the price is official, you can preorder the DLC (at least on GOG, I haven't checked other platforms): https://www.gog.com/game/cyberpunk_2077_phantom_liberty
I'm looking forward to the DLC, I really wanna know how it ties into the main game's storyline. In the trailer "Songbird" promises yet another option to save V's life, I wonder if there's gonna be a new ending?