Cyberpunk 2077 2.5 lets console players mod Night City

Cyberpunk 2077 is almost six years old, and it keeps getting the kind of attention most games get in their first year. The newest round is the free Edgerunners 2 Update, version 2.5, which went out Thursday on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Mac. CD Projekt Red's official update page says it is free to anyone who owns the base game, you do not need Phantom Liberty, and you do not have to start a new save. Switch 2 and the Mac App Store version come later, with no date yet.

The name is a tie-in with the second season of the anime on Netflix. The part I care about has nothing to do with the show. For the first time, console players can install mods from inside the game.

The mod switch, and the catch

The full patch notes, reprinted by Push Square, describe it as "a first step into cross-platform modding." It runs through mod.io. You open Mods from the main menu, browse a curated selection, subscribe, and restart. Push Square puts the PS5 download at close to 11GB.

The fine print is on CD Projekt Red's mod support FAQ, and it matters more than the headline. On consoles, trophies and achievements are switched off on any modded save. Modded saves get a little cog icon. If you use cross progression between PC and console, you need the same mods on both sides or the save may not load. And mods only show up on console if they carry an "Available on consoles" tag, so your PC load order does not come along for free.

That is a fair set of rules. It is also exactly the kind of thing people find out the hard way at 1 a.m. My advice is boring and correct: before you subscribe to anything, make a fresh manual save, keep your trophy run clean on it, and do your modding on a separate playthrough. The new save menu groups saves by playthrough now, which makes that easy.

Make your mod run a separate playthrough. One subscribe button can take a trophy run off the table for good.

Everything new, and how to get to it

The update scatters its new content across the map, and several pieces are gated behind story progress. I pulled the unlock conditions out of the patch notes into one list, because nobody wants to wander Kabuki looking for something that has not switched on yet.

The Double Trouble perk is the one I expect to change how people play. Cyberpunk's Power pistols were always a little stuck between stealth builds and shotgun builds. Two at once gives them a lane. The Verge writeup also flags the smaller stuff that adds up: grouped saves, DLSS 4.5 on PC, and that FOV slider. Push Square's notes add a Photo Mode frame set taken from the Cyberpunk trading card game, which is the most Dorkify sentence I have typed all week.

Why this is the part that lasts

Side quests get played once. Mod support keeps a game installed. Bringing mods to consoles is what Bethesda did for Skyrim and Fallout 4, and those games never really left people's hard drives. Cyberpunk's version is smaller and curated, and CD Projekt Red says more mods will arrive over time. The ceiling depends on what the modders get allowed to ship. I would not expect the giant PC overhauls on a PS5. I would expect a lot of quality of life tweaks, which honestly is what most console players want anyway.

If you only know Night City from the show, Miles rounded up how critics are splitting on whether Edgerunners 2 beats season one earlier this week. And if you are building up a Switch 2 library while you wait for this update to reach it, I wrote up Shrek 2 Remastered, which lands there November 10. Strange company for Night City, but that is the Switch for you.

How we made this: researched and drafted with AI assistance. Sources are linked in the piece.