Hey chooms, gather 'round. I've got some serious cyber-sorrow to share today. Remember how we all thought Phantom Liberty was the one and only expansion for our beloved, buggy-then-brilliant Cyberpunk 2077? Well, hold onto your Samurai jackets, because new leaks have surfaced that reveal we were this close to getting a whole other adventure—one that would have taken us straight to the freaking Moon! 🚀
That's right! Recently, a series of images hit the social media 'tubes like a data-bomb. We're talking concept art, blueprints, file repositories, and map data that all point to a full-blown, Moon-based expansion that CD Projekt Red had in the works before it got canned. According to Insider Gaming, this wasn't just some idle dream; it was a real project that got shelved. Just thinking about what could have been makes my chrome ache. Imagine, the first expansion to take V outside the neon-drenched hellscape of Night City... and into the silent, corporate-controlled hellscape of space. The sheer scale of that missed opportunity is enough to make a grown merc cry into their synth-beer.
Now, for those of you who haven't dived deep into the lore, you might be thinking, "The Moon? In Cyberpunk? Really?" Oh, nova, really! In Mike Pondsmith's universe, which our game is based on, the Moon—or Luna, as the cool kids call it—is already a colonized corporate frontier. It's got a population of around 58,000 souls (or probably more like corpo-drones and indentured miners) living in two major cities: Tycho and Copernicus. By 2077, these were part of the Highrider Confederation. And of course, where there's money to be made, the big players are there. Both Arasaka and Militech have major mining operations stripping Luna for all it's worth. So the setting wasn't just a random sci-fi idea; it was a fully realized, lore-accurate location just begging to be explored.
This hits even harder when you remember the threads already woven into the game we did get. One of the endings in Phantom Liberty literally involves sending Songbird to the Moon for advanced medical treatment. And let's not forget Cyberpunk: Edgerunners! David and Lucy's beautiful, heartbreaking Braindance date on the lunar surface was one of the most iconic moments of the show. They dreamed of going there for real, but as Lucy tragically knew, a one-way ticket costs a cool 250,000 eddies. For most people in Night City, that's a forever-dream. An expansion could have let us, as V, finally make that trip. The potential for tying all these narrative threads together was absolutely massive.
So why did this stellar DLC get scrapped? We all remember the state of the game at launch in 2020. It was... rough. The bugs, the performance issues—it was a full-blown netwatch crisis. CDPR had to put all hands on deck just to get the base game into a playable, let alone enjoyable, state. That monumental repair job, which eventually led to the incredible 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty, inevitably pushed back or outright canceled other plans. The studio had to make hard choices to save the game's reputation, and sadly, our trip to Luna was one of the casualties. They officially confirmed Phantom Liberty would be the sole expansion, shutting the airlock on any hope for this Moon adventure.
But here's where I, as a die-hard fan, try to find a silver lining in the orbit. 🪐 While we'll never stroll through Tycho City in Cyberpunk 2077, the sequel, Project Orion, is on the horizon. A lot of the devs who worked on the original and its DLCs have moved on to that project. My biggest hope—my copium, if you will—is that they take all these amazing concepts, art, and ideas from the canceled Moon expansion and weave them into the next chapter. The lore is too rich, the fan desire is too strong, and the visual potential is too stunning to let it all go to waste in some forgotten data-shard.
It's a bittersweet feeling, chooms. We got one of the greatest redemption stories in gaming with Cyberpunk 2077's turnaround and an amazing spy-thriller expansion in Dogtown. Yet, knowing there was a whole other world waiting for us, a frontier beyond the Badlands and even beyond Earth, leaves a unique kind of phantom limb pain. It's the ghost of a game we never got to play. So here's to Luna—the expansion that lives on only in concept art and our collective dreams. Maybe, just maybe, we'll see its craters in the next life.
What do you think, samurai? Would you have wanted a Moon DLC more than Dogtown? What kind of missions do you think we would have gotten up there? Corporate sabotage in zero-G? Mining colony rebellions? Let me know down in the comments! And as always, stay preem out there. 👾