Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion have a problem with wasting your time. CD Projekt Red’s open-world RPG has a feature where you have to wait an undetermined amount of time for certain quests to activate, and that persists into Phantom Liberty. Even now, after the epic 2.0 update revamped a bunch of the game, it’s still making players wait around doing nothing, praying for the next mission to pop.
I suppose you could argue this is a creative choice meant to encourage you to spend time dipping into side missions instead of just barreling through the main quest. Cool, but then you have to wait large chunks of time before you can get back to the quests you actually want to play. The largely excellent new Phantom Liberty expansion has one of the most egregious examples of this yet, and it sounds like a lot of players are struggling with it.
The final mission in one of Phantom Liberty’s two routes is called “The Killing Moon.” Without getting into the specifics, some messy shit goes down and you have to wait for a phone call from Songbird, the skilled netrunner you meet at the beginning of the expansion. While I was playing Phantom Liberty for review, I noticed that this specific wait was probably the longest I’d experienced in my three years of playing Cyberpunk 2077.
I killed time by using the in-game wait feature, knocking off side-quests, and aimlessly sprinting around the map in hopes that she’d finally hit my line. Eventually, I got the quest to proc but it took days, maybe weeks of in-game time. I discussed this moment with other reviewers who experienced the same trouble, but we couldn’t pin down any real throughline as to what finally got Songbird to make the call. It seemed arbitrary.
Now, the expansion is out, and I was watching video producer and writer Sam Greer stream the expansion on her Twitch channel. It took her around 40 minutes to get the quest to activate. This prompted me and other viewers to try and find answers as to what the hold-up was, and it turns out that a lot of people are running into this issue. There are a handful of Reddit threads about “The Killing Moon” and the painful wait to get back into the action.
Some Redditors have suggested that you need to complete the quest “Run This Town,” which you get via a phone call from Mr. Hands, before events will progress, but Greer was able to finally continue “The Killing Moon” without completing that other quest.
Kotaku has reached out to CD Projekt Red about the issue and will update the story should we hear back. But if you’re running into this problem, know you’re not alone, and the quest is likely not bugged. There’s conflicting information on how to actually get it moving again, though.
For more on Phantom Liberty, check out Kotaku’s review.