Players have been hungry for details about Cyberpunk 2077’s first DLC since the game came out, yet nearly 18 months later, the only official news has been about additional delays. But now the dam of secrecy around the upcoming story expansion finally appears to have broken. A dataminer reportedly leaked hundreds of lines of dialogue from the planned DLC which point to new missions in the game’s Pacificia region and a new major character named Songbird.
The files in question were seemingly accidentally added to the game around the time of its massive 1.5 update in February, but only shared recently on Reddit by user romulus_ut3. The post and files, which appeared to contain a huge swath of the English script for the upcoming DLC missions, were later deleted, but not before spreading online through the Cyberpunk community.
The big highlight (via VGC) is that much of the new story missions (there appear to be seven in total, at least at the time of the leak) seem to take place in Night City’s Pacifica zone, and let players explore previously inaccessible areas like the Sports Dome. The home of refugees in the wake of Haiti’s destruction due to global warming, Pacifica is run by a netrunner gang called the Voodoo Boys which uses its power to eke out a life and religious existence outside the stranglehold of Cyberpunk 2077’s corporations and corrupt government agencies.
It’s drenched in sunlight and oozing with color, and cuts a stark contrast with the darker, more conventional neon-fueled streets of central Night City. To put it plainly, it’s one of the stronger parts of the underlying game, and ripe for more content. At the center of these new missions appears to be a character called Songbird who wasn’t in the base game, as well as a new part of Pacifica called the Combat Zone. Hopefully it’s more inspired than it sounds.
Other notable details from the apparent leak are that it takes place prior to the end of the game and will factor into revised endings depending on how you play. It also sounds like Johnny Silverhand, Keanu Reeves’ character, will play little to no role in it, which isn’t too surprising if you consider the casting challenges and costs of getting new voice work from an A-list talent years after development.
At least one re-upload of the files was taken down via a DMCA copyright strike by a group called Group-IB Digital Risk Protection which helps companies protect against IP leaks, but you can still view a video clip of someone perusing the folder names for the alleged datamined leak on Streamable. CD Projekt Red didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Following Cyberpunk 2077’s tumultuous launch and year-long saga of updates to fix bugs and address its lackluster console versions, the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions finally came out earlier this year. Accompanied by update 1.5, which overhauled aspects of the open world, side-quests, and skill trees, CDPR signaled it was starting to pivot to other projects, including The Witcher 4, which recently went into pre-production.
While the studio confirmed a major DLC expansion will still arrive in 2023, it’s been silent about anything beyond that, including about a second expansion, which while never officially announced felt implied by CD Projekt comments about how Cyberpunk 2077 would have even more DLC than The Witcher 3. At this point I’ll settle for getting anything that’s not another car or Johnny Silverhand outfit.