My biggest complaint with many RPGs is the false sense of urgency they give you, but Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC will severely punish you if you don’t get a move on. If you don’t make it to the cave in time at the start of the DLC campaign, you fail and get a little cutscene with Johnny as a consolation prize.
When you start the DLC campaign, V gets an urgent call to go to a crane to get to the crash site of the president of the NUSA. If you take too long getting there, because you took a wrong turn or stopped to get some food, you just fail the entire DLC.
As discovered by Twitter user SynthPotato’s brother after “driving like an idiot,” an angry Songbird will berate you and blame you for the president’s death. Johnny doesn’t care. In fact, he’s happy to see her go—an anarchist through and through.
If you fail this, it’s on you. Simply get to the objective in time and all will be well. Fail and you’ll, well, fail.
I’m happy this is a feature. It reminds me of the first mission in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Adam Jensen needs to get to a helicopter to deal with a hostage situation, but if you mess around in the offices for too long, the hostages die and it becomes a clean-up operation instead.
Don’t worry too much if this does happen to you in Cyberpunk, though. You can just reload an autosave that should be created at the start of the mission or load to a manual save you made before it. If you can’t do either of those things, however, then you’ll have to start a new playthrough and get a hustle on.
To avoid this issue, don’t begin the DLC until you’re ready to commit to this mission. You can ignore the later ones and complete them at your leisure, but rescuing the president needs to be your top priority once you start.
