Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty on HDD isn’t ideal, but at least it’s smoother than Starfield

The polished-up 2.0 update for Cyberpunk 2077 is out now, ahead of its Phantom Liberty expansion on September 26th. I’ve been trying out both, partly to see if the 2.0 newly raised hardware requirement of SSD storage is a warning worth heeding.

Hard lines against hard drive installations are new to PC games, but it was only a couple of weeks ago when Starfield showed the dangers of crossing them. Broken audio, regular freeze-ups, load times so long you could measure them with a calendar... an SSD really is the only way to play Starfield, and it sounded like Cyberpunk 2077 would follow suit. "We advise against running the game on an HDD (or on a SD card on Steam Deck) due to lower bandwidth which may cause new content to not stream properly," reads CD Projekt Red’s 2.0 patch notes. That’s us told.

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