The Best Place to Play Cyberpunk 2077 in 2022

Did all those patches finally amount to something good?

PS5 screenshot captured by the author.

If you’d asked me this article’s central question back when Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2020 — I’d have answered “Google Stadia.”

Of course, that’s an absurd notion now. Google announced the end of their streaming platform earlier this week, and in the process killed the most accessible high-performance version of Cyberpunk. CD Projekt’s massive and previously very-broken RPG was one of the biggest highlights of Google’s platform. It actually showed off the tech, and could have been the premier game on the service. A ton of bespoke work went into the Stadia version, and it ran similarly to a capable PC even on launch day.

Hardcore enthusiasts probably yelled “PC!” at their screen of choice before not clicking on this article, but that comes with its own set of challenges. The PC version of Cyberpunk has the most graphical features — but they come at a massive hardware cost. Nvidia was proud to show off how well the game runs on their new $1600 flagship 4090 card launching soon, but $1600 is enough money to fund the purchase of almost 27 copies of the defunct Stadia version of the game, and you still need the rest of the computer and a copy of Windows beyond that.