I think most of the negative sentiment against Cyberpunk 2077 comes from three sources:
1) Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
2) It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone. Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
3) There are some bugs and quirks, depending on your platform and luck. I haven't had any major issues, though I know for some it's just unplayable at the moment. This will likely get much better after patches hit.
On a personal note, I like the game a lot. Yes it has its quirks, and I generally feel it's a less refined/polished game compared to what Witcher 3 was, but still it's an extremely fun, really well-made game. Combat is great, world is enticing, story-telling swings between good enough and great. For one reason or another whenever I launch the game another 5 hours passes without me noticing. FPS camera and general art direction also helps with suspension of disbelief, and the game is as immersive as it gets.
It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.
Part of the problem for example is the story swings between "good" and "great" only if you are on a particular path.
The corpo path for example is a bad one:
1. in the intro you litearlly do nothing, you only hear an NPC explain a mission to you, and right after that mission is cancelled and you are thrown in the game proper, you literally do nothing except hear people talking about stuff that later is completely irrelevant in the rest of the game.
2. The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring, whenever you click on the corpo option the character personality, talking style and the volume of the recording of his voice actor changes.
3. Some parts of 2, ditto for nomads, for example if you are playing as nomad, and do a certain nomad sidequest, they say "you don't understand our issues, you are not a nomad", because obviously they assume you are on the streetkid path.
4. It is easy to get lost in the story because of bugs, for example many people got quests totally derailed because they skipped triggers of the scripts or something else broke entirely, and also many people got confused because critical information on dialogue was missed because the constant phoen calls about gigs and delamain cars can play on top and hide the critical dialogue.
So even though one specific path of the game, seemly has good story, even then people can feel like the story is crap because the game sabotages itself.
The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts because half-finished subsystems weigh down what can be a very solid game when it focuses on its fundamentals.
OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline.
If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences.
Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base.
Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.
> If they had cut off the driving completely for instance
This is one of my biggest gripes with the game. You literally have self driving cars built into the lore (and the story - Delamain) AND flying cars (Trauma Team, police officers), why the hell does anyone care about owning a car or driving it? We have cybernetic eyes and our cars drive/fly themselves and we still need to put up LED traffic lights?
Sure it makes sure in the outskirts to pick up a 4x4 offroader and do some cool desert driving for side missions. But in Night City? It should be modeled after pedestrians, and it is in some cases, but the road layout clearly looks like it was modeled for a city in 2012 and not 2077.
Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the story (watching let's plays no less, I don't have the specs to run the game myself). I think it's a great game despite the bugs and performance issues that will unfortunately haunt CDPR for a great deal of time. But some of the plot holes are just so deep, it hurts to think about because of how much better the story would be.
For example, I know the breaching minigame where you have to click through the matrix to complete the sequence of hex codes is unrealistic and not how you would hack a real computer. Obviously, I'm not going to gripe about that, it's a minigame inside of a video game and it's meant for entertainment, not realism. But, come on, you introduce us to cybernetic eye implants and we still have to use a 27" monitor to check our email? Why would you ever use a monitor again?
Because people want to drive cars in games. I for one would be very bored if I had to take an automated system like public transport or self driving cars.
It depends on the type of the game. Deus Ex, Vampire the Masquerade, (many) Fallout games and countless others have no or little driving and I don't think it would really elevate those games.
Would Vampire the Masquerade be a better game if you could just drive between setpieces in a fully rendered city instead of having a loading screen? Probably, but it would also increase the development workload by an order of magnitude for what would effectively be a gimmick that wouldn't really add a lot to the game.
And even outside of RPGs, there are countless adventure and FPS games without vehicles. Doom doesn't have cars, neither does Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil.
Of course if you're thinking of something like "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious, but if you build the game with this constraint in mind it shouldn't be much of an issue. Then you can focus on other aspects of the game.
Cyberpunk is clearly not at its best when you're in a vehicle, and there's no telling what else they could've implemented and finished if they had cut it entirely and focused on other aspects of the game instead.
> "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious
The reason why it's tedious is because the map is built around cars. You can't go very far without encountering a road. This makes it fairly hostile to be a pedestrian since you're relegated to walking on sidewalks (or in front of traffic if you're daring).
A city built around pedestrians could have a much different environment, like open green spaces, cobblestone paths, proactive NPCs engaging in little dialogues with shopkeepers, people trying to sell you stuff on the streets, etc. A real "night out on the city" vibe that I don't think any city-style game has tried going for yet.
The Yakuza games are just like that. There aren't any cars, it's just a city for walking around. Unlike CP2077, the NPCs are actually believable in that you can talk to them, go into stores and interact with them, they respond naturally when fighting is going on, etc.
I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got.
edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.
It's not about ending, but the branching story isn't actually branching at all. You make a decision and, regardless of what you chose, end up in the same place. The amount of decisions that actually stick, or actually change your progression through the game, are very low. "Do x or y" where both X and Y cannot be undone and seem like heavy decisions, ultimately do not change the outcome of any future story items. Side with Ben or side with Jill, doesn't matter, they both treat you the same afterwards and it never mattered at all which you picked.
Even with just one ending, a game can do branching well for all the sub-story endings that most games have.
Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet.
"The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story.
Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful.
As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.
Not comparable, your choices actually "matter" as you play the game, until the end where it's revealed nothing you did mattered.
In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner.
For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc.
The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.
I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.
Assuming all choices are between two options, you could make this claim about any game with (five endings and...) more than three choices for the player to make. if one of the choices has three options, two choices will do the job of selecting between 5 endings.
What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.
You fell into a local maxima or made an assumption that got you tunneled visioned.
You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter.
You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m.
Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics.
You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings.
Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo.
Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y.
That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose.
But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.
The system you describe does not have the property that every choice makes a difference to the ending. Most of them still don't. An internal counter going up, without changing the ending you get, is not making a difference to the ending.
Fallout: New Vegas had a handful of endings, but is nearly universally praised for making player choices affect how you play. It's not about what endings you get so much as your actions influencing what options remain open to you as you play.
I posted this somewhere else, the game has a ton of interesting concepts but they ran out of time a long time ago and half assed everything.
Cut the content in third and make it 3x deeper and it would have been a great game (bugs and all). Well perhaps not on last generation consoles, I have not tried it there.
I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.
I'm fairly certain they cut out a big chunk of the "lifepaths" to make the deadline. They don't really make sense as a mechanic at this point. You choose your previous life as one of the main choices but then all the paths merge together after 15 minutes? Just doesn't make sense from a game design or story perspective as a intentional choice.
There was certainly a lot cut, but already back in August interviews said that lifepaths wouldn't lead to completely different stories, but rather add a bit of a different flavor to the same over-arching story [0]:
> Your choice of lifepath will influence parts of your journey throughout Cyberpunk 2077, and each one will have an entirely different introduction to the same overarching story.
Tho it's a bit telling how one of the introduction quests is used as an example for how the lifepath choice makes a difference past the introduction.
In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference; During a Gig at Kabuki market I could ask another Nomad there about the location of a person I was looking for.
Dunno how that quest would have played out otherwise without that.
> In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference
A Corpo can get the drone easier by talking to the other corpo and seeing through their bullshit. There are also a few dialogue options based on higher stats, but I'm not sure how much they affect actual gameplay.
Paradoxically, we call "cut content" what was recorded but not wired into the game. Abandonded ideas are not cut content, same as content that is cleaned up from the release thoroughly and leave no trace of it.
Concerning the life paths, it's just a fancy rumor that something was cut there. True, the origin stories for life paths in CP2077 could be perhaps as long as in Dragon Age: Origins, but keeping them short and tight is also fine.
Why have them at all? Broadly speaking, they may nudge the player into a specific ending. A lot of players vocal on forums would dismiss anything but completing all endings just for the sake of it, but if we are discussing this seriously as a role-playing game, what goes into the decision which ending to pursue matters.
The lifepath system was a key feature in the TTRPG, obvious handled a lot differently in the TTRPG than video game where they have merged the Roles with the Lifepath.
I think people are disappointed as they were expecting DA:O levels of paths but got 15-20 mins and a few chat options (that don't add up to anything).
> The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.
I hadn't heard this maxim before, and I haven't played Cyberpunk, but this actually strikes me as something a lot of games do to a fault.
The original Mirror's Edge (a personal favorite) is a good example. That game's story has many obvious issues, from stilted characters to cutscenes that look like cheap flash animations, but I think it all could have worked a lot better if you spent the first few chapters as a normal Runner doing standard deliveries, before things started going to hell.
This would ground you in the world and provide a sense of what it's like to be a Runner, so you'd care about preserving their way of life later on. Games as a medium are uniquely good at this sort of thing, from the early days of Final Fantasy.
Compared to Witcher 3, they DID do this with 2077. 2077's main storyline is roughly 20 hours long, while the Witcher's is about 50 hours. CDPR is kind of known for their longer story driven stuff, and its my understanding they took that feedback in this game and made the primary quest shorter while expanding the optional quest branching.
Gamers unfortunately often make an argument equating number of hours to value for money. Padded open world games are the natural result. You trade a nice, tight narrative for an experience spread thin over more hours.
Had the same reaction to corpo path. I think it would actually be interesting to tell a story about that culture from the inside, rather than immediately retreating to the well-trodden anti-corp perspective. For a supposedly ambitious game, it seems entirely uninterested in challenging or evolving the rather tired cyberpunk tropes.
I'm still on my first playthrough (and enjoying it) and am super disappointed to hear the other lifepaths are basically 15-20 minute prologues. I too was really hoping for my corpo playthrough to be playing it from the inside, lots of corporate espionage, dealing with situations with the full force of a megacorp behind me etc...
People's expectations about the life paths were really overblown, they took marketing bullshit and took it as gospel. Then their own imaginations took over.
No game _ever_ has been like this. You just can't get three completely different fully immersive all-spoken-dialog games for the price of one - unless the main plot is like 10 hours max.
Even the Fallout games have a few bigger decisions (FO3 had the choice of nuking either town), but the rest of the stat-based chat options are mostly for flavour. Maybe a few side quests have different endings or dead ends because of your stats, but the main plot is still essentially the same.
Fantasy RPGs tend to do a pretty good job of this. The macro path your character follows is consistent, but there are choices and class-specific stories that create a sense of character.
I think the question comes down to the ‘role playing’ portion. I have no problem with single character games, and am not a 2077 hater, but would love to see more ambition around narrative.
Ah no, that they made clear eons ago - V has broken off with her/his past and is just a merc now. But, they stated that different life paths would give you wildly different experiences. That they would change how others react to you. And one would assume that this would need separate voiceovers. What we get instead is "I used to ride with the Bakkers" "I would never have guessed".
Honestly your description is an absolute 100% game wrecker as far as I am concerned. At least Mass Effect 3 tricked you into thinking your choices mattered until the very end, whereas this crap ruins the facade at the very start.
Basically, if you care about NPCs and dialogue being believable, then you have to be the street kid. Pretty lame
Any game with full voice acting is going to have certain limitations. Corpo V still grew up with Jackie, and it's pretty common for people from poorer backgrounds to have separate corporate and casual personas.
Also known as code switching. Many people do this all the time in the real world. I know black folk who have two distinct accents depending on the context and audience. Same with many southerners that I know. The drawl becomes a lot less pronounced in "professional" settings. That being said, V didn't grow up with Jackie. They met on a run. Corpo V might have grown up on the street as well, but then it's not really a different backstory.
Corpo V never did runs with Jackie before the game. In the Heros sidequest Mama Wells references that they lived under the same roof, though in retrospect that could be referencing the time skip at the beginning.
> The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring
Ooh! This was it! I knew there was something bugging me about some of the dialogue options.
First you can be calmly speaking about something, picking the lower dialogue options for more info. Then you pick the top one (progress the plot) and V is suddenly angry AF and shouts the question.
Dunno if this is an omission because of lack of time or just bad audio direction.
Only if you have never played a DX game before. It is a much lesser experience than any DX game, so that is a real sour point for players expecting, or at least familiar with, that.
And the bugs are not a sideshow. I played 2 hours on PC and returned it. When I had mission markers coming and going completely unrelated to any quests I had started I said "enough". If the game is made playable, then I'll buy it again and likely enjoy it as a cut-down DX Fable-like in a pretty setting.
Edit: the trip point for me will be when the game actually provides a non-lethal path through the game. Currently there is no polish or thought given to this aspect of UX. There are quickhacks and non-letha weapons, yet the game throws you into mandatory shootouts (namely the first scripted car chase) before you have access to non-lethal methods of neutralizing enemies. Maybe there is one small path of points dispersal that could lead to non-lethal options, but if there is it is obfuscated. They never signal to the player how to perform non-lethal combat. It feels like the options are placeholders and the game is meant to be murderous. This is a far cry from a DX game that gives a fair option to go non-lethal, full stealth as a challenge. The DX games were actually playtested.
Fallout 4 is a great comparison point. It had the bones of something great but the soul was gone. No factions, no interesting NPCs or side quests, no lore. Just a big empty sandbox to shoot stuff in.
This seems better than that at least in that the soul is a lot better. And it has cool lore and factions and NPCs. But where Fallout 4 had fun shooting and RPG mechanics this seems to have pretty poor shooting. Poor driving. Unbalanced RPG mechanics.
And it will be an absolutely fantastic game. No Man’s Sky turned the ship around. Can CDPR do it? I’m hopeful. Maybe if they get rid of the people who pushed for this premature release they’ll have a shot...
This was the exact line I used to describe it to a friend.
I think Deus Ex signals the same thing, we were expecting a deep story driven game, instead it's a pretty shallow RPG and not a very well done action game, so what's left?
I mean the original Deus Ex is two decades old, so it's definitely undergone some of the "Seinfeld effect", but I feel generally even a game that old managed to achieve better depth.
Dialog and augmentations actually changed how missions played out in meaningful ways, meanwhile 2077 seemingly has dialog choices to give the illusion of choice (and it's a shoddy illusion since your character always ends up talking their way to the "titular" choice if you didn't make it yourself).
New Vegas has an actually deep story and interplay between several factions. You have great freedom and influence in world events. The characters have strong personality and motivations of their own.
Fallout 4 to my understanding is more or less devoid of such.
New Vegas was a standalone game with expansions of its own. Fallout 4 came after it. A lot of people consider New Vegas to be the only good one to come after the first 2, but I can't commentate on that, as I stopped playing the fallout series after New Vegas and attempting to play Fallout 3.
Absolutely. I was always a huge fan of the originals and other old-school RPGs like Baldurs Gate, and this is one of the few that actually scratches that itch. The game is highly interconnected and every choice has a realized impact.
I wouldn't say New Vegas was the only good one, I thought FO 3 and 4 were fun in their own way. But New Vegas was the only great one, and a benchmark when it comes to 3D CRPGs.
The endless mission markers and incoming phone calls you CAN'T ignore (seriously, the fixers will just blab at you forever even if you don't press T) is what really put me off. I got ten hours in and said forget it
I loved the original Deus Ex and think Cyberpunk does a good job of carrying the torch. While it is clear both games have different priorities in terms of writing and activities but they both have a similar heart. I think Cyberpunk puts a lot more points into atmosphere and worldbuilding than DX ever did, personally.
And nonlethal options are presented to you as part of the tutorial. I agree that lethal/nonlethal doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but if you do stealth and melee combat from the start you have a path for nonlethal that will get you all the way through the first major mission. From there it's relatively easy to acquire PAX mods that turn any gun nonlethal.
>Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
I think we're living in different worlds or something. This game is exactly like a GTA game, and nothing like Deus Ex.
It's an open world game (Deus Ex games are strictly linear with open level design, not narrative, something Warren Spector was extremely adamant about). It's got the atmosphere of a futuristic GTA Miami Vice rather than the industrial atmosphere of a Deus Ex, and worldbuilding wise there's little about the game that touches on heavier issues, whereas politics goes through all Deus Ex games quite heavily.
Well, it tries to do this but is miles from being as open or as flexible as GTA games which came out ten years ago and to compare it to RDR2 is a joke. In Red Dead, all NPCs react to you being there and have almost believable reactions to you, whereas in Cyberpunk people walk straight into you or through you.
Even Skyrim NPCs (2011 game) sound a lot more immersive, the main characters are usually quest aware. Skyrim game started as bugfest too, and it still is one of the most popular games, thanks to modding.
Probably cause the experiences differ wildly between people. I'm over 20 hours in, had one relevant bug (couldn't use my weapons anymore, which I found a workaround for), love the story (mainly the side quests so far, since I haven't done much of the main story by now), the world and having a blast with the game.
Oh, the AI is really killing me, especially in Silverhand scenes. You can pretty much aim at an empty space and wait for a head to appear there, because it's obvious they will move there before shooting you :(
Dozens of hours here on Stadia. Only one bug, loading the last checkpoint would instantly crash. My workaround was just to load a minute-earlier auto save.
Based on a few anecdotes, it seems like Stadia is the most reliable version of the game right now. But if people are concerned that digital storefronts mean you're renting games at full price, then Stadia is even worse -- you're renting a game at full price and hoping the hardware sticks around so you can play it in a few years.
I'm close to 60 hours on the Stadia version now, haven't run into any gamebreaking issues. I have had some hilarious ones though, like when NPCs drive me around they miss a turn and plow pedestrians. I'm able to skip the driving sequences so it hasn't been a big deal.
Most of the time these are part of the open-world genre leading to lots of fun, like weird ragdoll physics. Tho they can be kind of a deal-breaker when they happen during scenes that are supposed to have an emotional impact.
Like when a character you are supposed to care for is about to die, and their gun suddenly flies inside their head to get stuck there, while the drama keeps playing out regardless of how absurd it look.
I had to literally lol at that, but it really took me out of the moment/the mood the scene was actually going for.
It's obviously an "Early Access" game at this stage but it was sold for the full price. Pretty disappointing as I usually avoid Early Access to not ruin the experience for me. I want to test out my new GPU so I've been playing it on and off for a bit.
I went ahead and returned my PS4 copy for this exact reason. Also tried on Steam (linux), but couldn't get it started beyond the intro screen and I don't care to debug further.
I only dive into a couple games a year (RDR2 last year), so I'm not going to waste my time until it's stable. I just want to buy the game, take a few days off of work, and immerse myself. If I want to debug things or deal with glitches, I can just go back to work.
> We were looking forward to a great game and were mislead.
Did anyone think it would come out polished? The repeated delays were already hinting that the CDPR was in trouble and couldn't cope with the workload. When they finally committed to a deadline to release in December, it seemed more out of desperation to appease the impatient public than an indication that they were nearly done with finishing the game.
So they released it in, as you said, its buggy alpha state. At least I trust CDPR to do right by its players and see the game to completion.
Then don't preoder. Making such a fuss about wanting the game right now, then making a fuss that the game is rushed and incomplete, that just makes people sound like a petulant child.
There is no reason to pre-order a digital product, so I agree - never pre-order.
Still, since they are taking pre-orders, and since they had an announced date at the time they sold those pre-orders, delaying by more than half a year your part of a contract is not normally acceptable conduct. It's understandable and not at all abnormal that people who did pre-order were asking for their money's worth.
Pre-order, I used to do that all the time. After awhile I got tired of having to go back and get a refund when the game/movie would not come out for at least 1-2 years after the pre-order. Now I just wait, and usually wait for a sale. By the time the price falls the big crazy bugs are usually worked out. The only time it made sense to pre-order is if there was some sort of merch to go with and even then it better be some nice swag. Now I have a box full of useless junk that no one really cares about (even me) and a set of games I forgot about a long time ago.
I think December was more about Christmas sales than appeasement. They didn't want to miss the holiday season and have to wait months more for people to pay off their debts.
The problem is you only get to make a an impression once (as Sovietwomble on Twitch often points out)
They have to fix the game, in 3 months they have to discount the game already, and if they are really unlucky the game is forgotten this time next year.
If they had nailed it, they would be sitting on literal gold, also for their next launch.
I think there are a few reactions that are reading differently to different people.
1) This game is not up to par. It's not as advertised, and for some of the most standardized systems (consoles), it doesn't even work. That's really bad on CDPR. False advertising is unacceptable to some.
2) This surprised nobody. Acting surprised is like being surprised you big mac doesn't look like the marketing materials. That's on the people pre-ordering and buying day of. If I bought it today, having seen all the reception, that's on me. Some people are extending "that's on you" that to pre-orderers.
3) It seems to work as well as any other AAA launch day game for players with certain setups. Some people see their footage or have that experience and think others are just being unrealistic expecting the big mac from the ad.
Personally, I feel like it's a friend complaining about getting scammed on craigslist after ignoring everyone telling them to do due diligence to make sure it's what you expect. Like, that really sucks and fuck scammers, but this was easily preventable, so I'm going to roll my eyes a little.
Cyberpunk has bugs and omissions that are a lot more severe than a typical AAA game launch, and certainly more than a typical CDPR game launch. Witcher 2 was rough, but never this rough, and Witcher 3 was a large improvement.
I played Watch Dogs Legion the other day. They don't even come close to comparing in terms of quality. Legion has functional AI and maybe a glitch every 2-3 hours (but I've had zero of them be game breaking, they're mostly geometry of physics related). Cyberpunk has weird things happening around every corner, sometimes quest breaking, sometimes visually hilarious, always showing the lack of polish.
I'm at some silly number of hours (12? 15?) on PC, and haven't even finished the prologue "mission" for Dexter, since I've been doing side missions and exploring.
I've noticed many faults of the game (crappy driving AI, cowering citizen AI instead of running away, etc), and I agree that this is much more similar to Deus Ex (e.g., mankind divided) or the witcher than GTA.
However, I haven't seen any game breaking bugs. I once saw my weapon glitch and be invisible .... until I changed weapons. I'm sure they exist, but I am having so much fun playing the game (even with potato graphics from a 4 year old card). I have hardly touched the plot, as I haven't even gotten to the events that were completely spoiled by the game's trailers, but I still feel like I'm exploring a living city.
> I'm at some silly number of hours (12? 15?) on PC, and haven't even finished the prologue "mission" for Dexter, since I've been doing side missions and exploring.
I made this mistake with Witcher 3 and got bored. Didn't even see Yennefer or Ciri on my first two attempts, spent most my time looking for a grandma's lost frying pan and shit.
But for CP2077 I remembered that this is a CDPR game. Go on and dive into the main plot, that opens up a ton of new stuff and super-interesting characters.
I’m about 30 hours into the Xbox One X release and it’s a tough love.
The game is unbelievably awesome when it works.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work/play well.
I have crashes every 30-45min. Glitches are so commonplace it’s clearly beta quality at best.
I’ve gotten to the point where I know to have the best chance to actually play a mission I need to get to the right location (use waypoints since driving crashes the game), find the NPC for the mission, open dialogue and start a mission, ensure the mission has started (usually when the monologue starts from the NPC), close the game, reopen the game, and start playing the mission. After a mission, expect a crash.
It got old really fast having the game crash during a mission and being forced to play the same mission over and over even if it did help me find better loot.
Over 20 hours in on Xbox One X, three crashes. One of them post 1.04 patch, all happened while driving around town.
Was missing Judy's dialog during the ripperdoc mission, other stuff is mostly just graphical glitches, nothing game breaking.
But as a fan of the "stealth archer" the stealth system is annoying, silenced weapons aren't actually silenced. Any shot will alert EVERYONE and they'll never calm down again, they'll even mysteriously know the gender of my character even if they never saw a glimpse of me :D
This is especially jarring for the few missions which are supposed to be "recon only" or "stealth only", where clearly getting noticed should be a mission failure. You sneak around for a long time and then you get noticed. No way to go back to stealth, so it's just a long sigh and out comes the shotgun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah thats the thing, when it works it's pretty great. But that all quickly goes away once the game gets stuck in a weird state. Like I wasn't able to run or use my scanner at one point. I thought it was some effect or something.
Those glitches happen to me as well. The first big glitch I thought was me was not being able to switch camera view while driving. Obnoxious bug for me. It’s not possible to drive in this game while looking from inside of the car without lots of NPC death...
On the other hand I'm 20 hours in with a 3080 and all graphics maxed out. The only bugs I've seen are a couple floating guns and one of the fixers had a weird bug where their cell phone on the table was moving with their hand movements.
I was going to wait for it to come down in price a bit before I snagged it as I get motion sickness easily so 60 bucks is a bit of a gamble. Also watching the slipping dates gave a big clue to everyone 'this is not done'. In a year or so after the modders have had their fun with it, it should be interesting.
I just hope CDPR did not bet the farm on this thing. If so GoG will go with it.
This is why the video game consumers are cancerous. They constantly preorder, buy into all of the hype hook/line/sinker, get mad at delays, and yet still get mad when the game is released half-finished/didn't meet the unreachable expectations. This cycle has happened with virtually every troubled AAA game release in the past decade.
Game companies can't win dealing with amnesiac/bipolar consumers.
Some of the blame goes to the consumer though. The community here is really playing up the drama in a childish way. Many games have had far worse launches, and got panned in reviews (both critic and user), and haven't seen this kind of outrage.
The gaming community sucks, full stop. I'm part of several reddit communities for various games and in a majority of the cases those subreddits are a swamp, full of anger and bitterness. The more competitive a game is, or the more the game tries to monetize itself, the uglier the scene. It really is bad.
Years ago I worked close to one of Rockstar's studios. Sometimes I'd overhear RS employees talking over lunch, and more than once that chatting was them complaining about the toxicity they have to deal with.
Most of that is actually the fault of the studios. Few companies are investing in managing their communities and communicating with them, setting standards and so on. Those that do actually see results.
A great case study is Final Fantasy 14 VS World of Warcraft. 2 pretty similar MMOs, vastly different communities. If you dig a little, it's immediately visible that the difference is not coming from game design, but from explicit community management and standards of conduct. The FF14 mods police the community with an iron fist, and are very explicit about what kind of behavior is toxic and off-limits - and the results are visible whether you play the game or look at the reddit.
Most companies though just don't want to invest in that, even to the minimum extent of setting clear guidelines and enforcing them when violations reported.
100% disagree. None of the blame is on the consumers. The studio pitches a game. People get excited. People buy it. None of that is the consumers' fault. It's false advertising, period.
If consumers didn't preorder and waited for games to come out and get reviewed fairly before buying, then this strategy wouldn't work.
False advertising only works because consumers are buying games based on promises made in advertisements instead of based on the quality of the game that is actually released.
Those angry consumers have a responsibility to not be complete and utter babies in their response though. And, as a secondary responsibility, not to expect so much.
Sure CDP hyped the game up. But they're fools for believing it. How often do things ever live up to the hype, especially in business?
Hmm, maybe this backlash is naive kids learning how to be jaded.
I agree with your general point and never pre-order anymore for those reasons.
However: people are getting refunds. In countries with consumer protection laws, it looks like there is little downside to buying in to the hype, if you can get your money back. This may eventually teach companies to rein it in a little.
Ultimately, though, the blame does lie with the consumer. Companies seek profit, that's inevitable. The decisions of consumers is what makes it profitable to release unfinished games, and sell hype instead of a product.
People always reference No Man's Sky and praise the state it eventually made it to, but even that updated state was not the game that was promised and hyped pre-release.
Some of the "missing features" were eventually implemented, but MANY were not. Instead, they pivoted into implementing different things that were not part of that initial hype cycle, and implemented enough of them that they hoped people would forget about what the game was originally claimed to be.
And apparently it worked, because people always talk about how No Man's Sky got "fixed" without acknowledging that huge, major chunks of that initial promise were never in fact developed.
For all of the amazing work that Hello Games has put into No Man's Sky, one change for me that I didn't like is that now you are basically thrown into instances where you are meeting other players.
The space stations are now major hubs and the Atlas even more.
Part of the experience was to feel like you are out in the middle of nowhere. All alone. And it was like that up until the last few releases where they updated the player spawn locations.
Now it seems like when you jump in, you are likely going to end up meeting other players.
However NMS is an open-world exploration game. I worry that with Cyberpunk 2077 being fairly linear / story based, they won't make the same investments that Hello Games did re: adding tons of new features.
Can they pull it off though? NMS is an exploration game in procedurally generated world. CP2077 is all about the story. They'd need to put a crazy amount of new content in a DLC to get people to play it.
There are seemingly infinite number of issues the game is having, I can't imagine calling it well-made. Here's a single compilation from the game's subreddit, where there are hundreds more examples:
I am nearly at the end on Stadia and other than the occasional floating NPC I haven't experienced bugs. So experiences seem to vary quite a bit, they're far from universal.
Strangely, I think Stadia is one of the more stable platforms for the game. I'm in a similar position, dumb AI when driving, the odd multiple dialog lines being smashed together, but overall its not too bad. 28 hours in and I've been mostly distracted by side quests.
The OP’s point is that it is highly anecdotal. I have dozens of hours and I only ran into a single bug that forced me to reload. Everything else I have seen have been cosmetic issues.
> The OP’s point is that it is highly anecdotal. I have dozens of hours and I only ran into a single bug that forced me to reload. Everything else I have seen have been cosmetic issues.
Cosmetic issues in a game that is supposed to be a 3D immersive world are really bad issues. We shouldn't be writing them off as minor.
We should expect better for $59.99 after years of development. We should not normalize the expectation that new games will be half-baked. New games should be finished, and they should work properly on all of the platforms they claim to support.
If you want to play unfinished games, there is Steam Early Access. All other games are supposed to be finished when they are sold. And if they don't work on the PS4 they should not be sold for the PS4!
It matters because while most of the blame is on CDPR some should go to players pre-ordering without realizing that getting such a massive game to run well on a 7 year old PC is not realistic. PC gamers would not expect this to run on such an old system for sure.
If it's not realistic, then CDPR should not be releasing a broken version of the game for those consoles. They're happy to take the money of a fully priced game which comes with a set of expectations of what that game will look like. This game has been in development for years, there's been loads of promotional material for it, and it's frankly anti-consumer to say that the customers are idiots for expecting something they purchase to be a functional piece of software.
I think the issue is rather that it's nothing like Deus Ex which has immersion. Getting augmentations were meaningful choices which alter ways you can approach explorations (such as picking up heavy items blocking vents). Stumbling upon critical information from hacked computers not only fills background info for you but makes your character more knowledgeable, and lets you use that information in dialogs to alter the direction of quests. Important story altering decisions aren't presented as important decisions, they're just side effects of regular gameplay. A hack centric or stealth centric or dialog centric character build are all viable.
In this sense, Deus Ex has "content". And exploration and gameplay are immersively impactful. A more apt comparison might be with Tomb Raider.
> Getting augmentations were meaningful choices which alter ways you can approach explorations (such as picking up heavy items blocking vents).
It's mostly through stats rather than augmentations, but Cyberpunk has a ton of this. There are doors you can/can't open, characters you can intimidate, obstacles you can get over, things you can hack... there are a lot of ways your build changes how you can approach the missions.
Deus Ex made the smart choice of not being a completely open world. They had a limited number of environments, where they could design to have different routes for the player.
Attempting the same freedom in an open world is just bonkers.
I'm enjoying the game too and I was defending it in a thread the other day. but now that I've gotten past the intro arc, I'm noticing a lot more issues. mostly just little stuff like NPCs warping around in the background, a suitcase levitating in place when it should be in jackie's hand, objects clipping through walls that can't be picked up. doesn't break the game, but it does take away from the immersion.
I did encounter one more serious issue. there's an early main story mission where you have to get a key off the body of a guard you just killed. unfortunately, I killed the guy while he was standing in an elevator. his body fell through the floor and (presumably) out of the map. at least the game managed to showed me a waypoint to his body, 1 km below my feet. this just seems like bad judgement by the devs. if you have to have moveable ragdolls, please don't put items on them that I need to advance the game. stuff like this will inevitably happen.
anyways, I'm still enjoying the game but I'm debating whether to shelve it for a month or two while they patch more bugs.
Hah, I had the same exact issue with the guard in the elevator, except he just went through the wall a few feet and ended up being equally unreachable. It really broke me out of what was otherwise turning out to be a good action scene.
I’ve been playing a huge amount of God of War (2018), really just an absurd number of hours, I’ve completed almost all the side quests, and the number of distracting bugs, glitchy character animations, etc. is zero. (It’s the closest to a perfect video game I’ve ever side, really quite an accomplishment.) This contrasting example causes me to very much notice the almost minute-to-minute minor graphical glitches in CP2077 and be very frustrated by the more frustrating ~hourly bugs.
Maybe if I wasn’t playing GoW concurrently concurrently it wouldn’t bother me so much, but really, CP2077 is not up to the standards of what Good Games are supposed to be like in 2020.
Interesting. When I played God of War one of the things that really stood out to me too was how solid everything about the game felt. I can't recall many games where something like that was noticeably better than everything else.
"It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons."
I disagree this adds up to minor reasons. If you bought the game for PS4 based on the advertisements getting a buggy mess isn't minor.
I swear some of the stuff looks like a Dreamcast game. People are seeing textures not load. The lighting looks terrible.
Base PS4 and Xbox One owners are getting a game that looks genuinely bad for a last-gen game -- and it is coming out at the end of that generation's lifespan. You would expect this to be one of the best looking games from that generation.
This stuff is fixable, and maybe the game will look and run decent in six months, but I could see a lot of console buyers being shocked by the state of the game right now.
I don't think the advertising suggested it at all. There was nothing in the way they showcased the game to console players to make them think they were just getting a port.
I didn't bother to buy it because I hardly ever buy games day 1 (RDR2 being the only exception), but the frustrating thing to me is the pre-release reviews all praised the game and while some casually talked about graphical hiccups and bugs, they really didn't dive deep into the issues and instead just gave it 9s and 10s seemingly across the board.
I get part of that is because reviewers didn't have access to console versions of the game, but honestly that should have been a huge red flag and put front and center on every single review. The blame falls almost entirely on the developers for this clusterfuck, but reviewers are holding some of the blame as well.
That being said I'm optimistic that with patches over the coming months it'll get to a point where I'm comfortable buying eventually.
Keep in mind console versions were not released to reviewers either at all or not until like the day before release. They only got the PC version which, compared to PS4 and XBox One is not nearly the same order of bad.
Interestingly I think this may have been on certain spheres. For me, I only heard about the dangers of this game to people who are photosensitive or have seizures triggered by flashing lights, and also complaining that Cyberpunk 2077 reviewers without glowing reviews were facing harassment.[0]
However, I'm not a gamer, I'm a science fiction writer who follows a lot of disability advocacy, so my spheres may be very different.
Unfortunately you're right. "Gamers" are a fucking wierd bunch, they'll send death threats to reviewers who dare not to give "their" game glowing reviews. The one you mention had "gamers" literally replying with GIFs and videos which could trigger a seizure.
I use gamers in quotes because it's obviously not every gamer who does abhorrent stuff like this but it is certainly an issue within the "gamer" community.
The game was released on Thursday, the epilepsy-inducing flashing (during braindance activation) was fixed on Sunday.
It was nowhere near the 80s/90s japanese cartoon flashing, basically two white lights flashed in alternating patterns for 5 seconds on opposite sides of the screen. In the fixed version, the light is static.
Deus Ex, at least the recent games, is not so linear that it runs on rails. Cyberpunk actually locks you into missions.
That mission early on in the game, where you are stuck in a car shooting at other cars, would never be part of a Deus Ex game. Deus Ex always gives players multiple ways to finish a mission, and rewards exploration. Cyberpunk puts you on rails and literally tells you what to do.
In DX Mankind Divided you were able to leave certain areas and come back, and achieve objectives in any order you wanted. Almost all of the buildings in the Prague zone were open to entry, and contained realistic NPCs and furniture -- e.g. all of the apartments in an apartment building, all of the shops, train stations, bars, etc. It felt a lot more like a real world than Cyberpunk.
Even Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was more open than Cyberpunk, and that came out at least 16 years ago. It was also pretty broken on release, but even so it felt like more of a real world.
This game was def not in prod for only 4 years. And it's a different team that started working on it. A regular game takes 3 years~~ so imagine a game of that size.
>Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
I'm flabbergasted by this comment. CP2077 is way more of a cyberpunk-themed GTA5 than I expected or wanted. Admittedly I avoided reading pretty much anything about the game before release to avoid the insane and impossible to live up to hype, but I can hardly wrap my head around the idea that there were people who wanted it to be more like a Rockstar game.
One of the recurring complaints is with the open-worldiness of CP2077 not being very developed: Police that instantly appear behind you, pedestrians that walk through cars, etc. These are the types of things that mean the world is less a system to interact with than a glorified maze to navigate.
There are really two things that happened, but they have the same underlying cause: The premises of the game weren't spelled out coherently. That allowed the production to get out of hand, and the hype to grow to unmanagable expectations and buyers to feel betrayed when it wasn't what they imagined.
Even the broad title "Cyberpunk" is suggestive of impossible scope, in the way that Microsoft has "Word" and "Office" - it would, at first glance, be claiming to cover all possible aspects of the cyberpunk experience. But it's actually an old TTRPG license, and so right off the bat the game is hamstrung in catering to 21st century consumer expectations by also having to incorporate the nostalgic mechanics and lore of a 20th century design.
Being a crusty veteran of CP2020; The only real thing tying the game to the TTRPG is the story and general lore (the entire main story is a continuation of the TTRPG lore).
Mechanically they are vastly different, with 2077 abandoning 99% of the mechanics and systems of the TTRPG to fit in as a modern video game. Nothing to be hanstrung by there.
Mechanically it's an open world looter shooter with tacked on crafting mechanics with a cyberpunk theme, literally par for the course for any modern game like this.
CD Projekt failed at many things in this project, but the things it failed on were mostly moonshots. Nobody except Rockstar and Insomniac does AAA open-wolrd and story-rich game that was expected from CD Projekt, and these studios have enormous head-start. Some engineering projects are not solved by money, they only get solved and polished by institutional experience.
And in some areas, Cyberpunk was actually trying to do something that nobody in the whole industry has done before. Open-world with such a sense city, with such a density of characters and unique assets, all of which have to work both with high-speed car movement and very close, first-person camera (as opposed with third-person camera, which is used in other open world games). And the art theme and style which is defined by dynamic lightning and reflection!
Yes, they but more than they could chew. But you gotta admire the ambition here, and how much did they get right. I play on PC and just upgraded video card to 3070 for this game, and it truly feels like a generational leap. Rough, unpolished, lacking in many areas, but a leap nevertheless.
Fast vehicles? Did you actually play the game? At some point they realized their engine is terrible at streaming assets, so they made all vehicles very, very slow. Yes, it says “160 mph” in the speedometer, but it takes much longer to reach your destination than it should at that speed.
The point is that these vehicles are significantly faster than going on foot. When you create an asset pipeline for an open world game, you depend on two things: the camera and character movement speed. Character angle and distance determines how well will assets look to the player, and how detailed they should be. Character speed determines how fast you need to load different assets in the background. As far as I know, all games that have both first-person camera and vehicle movement, like Far Cry, have much simpler art style and a less dense world.
(Disclaimer: although I have worked in game development for almost 14 years, I have never worked on a AAA project, so I really don't know how qualified am I to talk about).
Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person. They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs. This game is just incapable. Objects sometimes don’t get streamed in. Sometimes it takes 20 seconds for them to transition from low LOD mode to high LOD model. Sometimes the high LOD model loads but the textures remain of the low LOD model. And that’s even when walking on the street, with an SSD. Driving exacerbates the issue further.
> Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person.
This is technically true, but these are not cameras that players primarily use, and these are not cameras that art assets and their quality, texture resolutions and LODs are primarily optimised for and benchmarked by.
> They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs.
Yes. This, I completely agree with. But they are built by a studio that has built and QAed these systems for 20 years (or longer, if you include 2d GTA games). And in game worlds that are significantly less visually complex than Cyberpunk.
Don't misunderstand me. RDR 2 and GTA 5 are fantastic, stunning games. I loved these worlds. But from strictly technical standpoint, Night City has drastically more completely different assets next to each other.
I don't necessarily agree. 2077 fails at streaming at the macro level, not just the micro. Entire basic structures fail to load sometimes. And if modding has thought us, at least on PC, the Rockstar streaming engine is capable of streaming many more assets than initially designed (or optimized) for. W3 was OK at streaming, but obviously not at this scale. So, in my opinion, what is going on is that they stressed that system to the breaking point, and instead of rewriting it, or at least optimizing it, they called it "good enough". In my book, streaming open worlds is a solved solution in modern times. Certainly in the days of GTA3 and Driver, it was a novel concept and there was a lot more leeway for LOD issues and streaming problems. Consoles and PCs also had much less memory and slow spinning disks. But we are not at those times anymore, so I don't see any reason why we should give them slack just because they dreamed big bug failed completely at the technical level. It all boils to the overall issue, which is why they released it at all, if it's so completely broken, and so completely cut of promised content. Just delay it until it is done; it's not like the Witcher cash cow didn't provide enough cash.
aside from maybe the vehicles (which don't seem to go all that fast), it's not clear to me what they are attempting that's so much more ambitious than witcher 3. novigrad was also very dense with lots of NPCs, a little rough on the GPU, but it worked just fine. that was five years ago.
Unfortunately quite a few respectable reviewers are calling the story/gameplay "hollow" or "unsatisfying". That doesn't sound like "minor & avoidable" reason.
Another strong criticism is towards the game's AI- police, NPC etc. That also doesn't sound minor.
> Unfortunately quite a few respectable reviewers are calling the story/gameplay "hollow" or "unsatisfying"
Do you mind linking to the reviews? I'd like to read their criticisms. I've seen a lot of criticism of the story because it's a personal character driven story and not a high minded philosophical story. But that doesn't seem like as good criticism imo.
I'm playing on PC. I'm playing at 1600p with a 3090 and a 10900k, so I think it's valid to say I'm playing the "best version" of the game technically speaking.
The bugs are not why I requested (but was denied)_a refund, the writing is just truly terrible.
-
In the entire game there are about 6 dialog choices that matter. Every single other piece of dialog will result in little to no change in the course of a conversation.
It's incredibly jarring because it means often times you choose option A, and the character pays lip service to option A and immediately starts spouting option B!
And from a higher level, the writing is some of the most lazy I've ever encountered.
Nothing is left to the imagination. The writers didn't seem to have any concept of "show don't tell". The whole first act is constantly giving away it's finale in the most insulting way. It almost makes you not want to finish it when you add in how little effort was put into making you care about how it ends...
The next act is just a terrible mess that I'm sad to see Keanu Reeves got involved in. You can tell he never got into this character because the entire time it feels like he's reading a book while doing the voices for it...
There's so little internal consistency in the story. I don't want to start spoiling things, but it's like the cast is just constantly being shuttled onto stage to do a jig and shuffled off.
I'm am 99% sure most players will get the same ending because there's only one character any effort is put into fleshing out, and coincidentally, the "life choice" that they match is also the most fleshed out one... it wreaks of the idea this was a game with one titular timeline with a bunch of half-assed alternatives tacked on at the end.
And I really do mean the end, because of those 6 or so choices that matter in the game, almost all of them happen in the last 20 minutes of the game. The pacing is just so painfully bad, I couldn't believe it as it was happening.
This is not a good RPG, this is not a good action game, it's not a good anything.
It feels like CDPR worked on fun ideas for 7 years then tried to distill this disjointed mess into a game in the last 1 or 2.
If you were denied the refund on Steam, you should know that you can resubmit refund requests to have a different employee (probably) review it. If your requests are all getting denied in about the same amount of time, it's automated and you should open a support ticket where you request a refund rather than using the refund flow.
I have gotten bad or not-as-advertised games refunded this way after being denied, despite being over the 2h mark.
I'll keep this in mind for next time, my "petty revenge" was sharing my Steam library with a friend who was about to buy it. Denied them a sale and saved said friend having to pay money for the spectacle
I'm also playing through Witcher 3 for the first time and it's baffling how the one thing that made that mostly mediocre game one of my favorites is not that great in Cyberpunk.
> It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.
Personally, the major red flag is that CDPR seems to have intentionally obscured the state of the game on consoles. Why else was PC gameplay allowed in pre-release media, but not console gameplay? As much as I hate the practice of shipping broken games, at least you can give that somewhat of a pass because everyone else does it. But intentionally misleading your very fans is another thing altogether.
I tend to shy away from opinion only review type comments on HN but I have to say...
> It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
I expected this. It's nothing like this at all.
The writing is atrocious. I do hope "Ghost Off!" becomes a mainstream piece of slang though.
The voice lines are horribly inconsistent in quality (there are lines where it's clear the actor stumbled but the line wasn't redone)
The enemies are brain dead (not just the teleporting cops, all of them)
The NPCs are hollow.
Almost none of the dialog decisions matter. In fact, most of the time the didn't actually add a separate branch for your choice, it needs to loop back into whatever you didn't choose... so your character says something completely different than what you chose
The story is generic and does not at all live up to the promise the setting had.
The customization is a joke. I saw that coming when all we had weeks from release was "genitals and custom nails"
The controls are surprisingly clunky for a modern game
The skill tree is embarrassingly overdone and clearly meant to artificially lengthen the "content" of the game...
The UI is terrible enough to be impressive. Because there's just so much of it there's just so much that could have easily been condensed, and instead they took the brute force approach. I almost feel bad for the programmers who worked on this, but they should have pushed back.
I could go on and on. I actually despise the fact that the bugs have taken center stage, because as someone who hasn't had many, and who's performance has been great, my hang ups go much much deeper than that.
This game will probably never fix the core shortcomings it has because they're not bugs, they're intentional defects and cuts that show a complete lack of focus during development.
> so your character says something completely different than what you chose
Oh gosh. This grinds my gears so bad. Wherever this trend started (and I've seen it in many games -- I think RDR2 and Witcher 3 most recently for me), it should really stop. Do developers think it's some sort of positive surprise when you get to see how they paraphrased (at best) the menu option into dialogue? Or is it just laziness/sloppiness around keeping the menus and dialogue in sync?
If I was to develop a game, I'd make it an invariant in the game engine that the wording on the menu option is what your character will say next, full stop.
It's terrible. There are times where it starts to feel like a bait and switch
For example, without spoilers:
There's a point where you're speaking to a friendly character, and a mutual contact is possibly hurt.
Your options are essentially to blame your friend for what happened or to remind them that your mutual friend might be hurt (the idea being you can't afford to give up now)
By choosing to remind your friend of this mutual contact... you berate your friend! Eventually... blaming them for what happened!
I mean it's so painfully transparent that you can literally hear the switch up in intonation where your "fake choice" meets up with the real choice the game wants to go with.
It might not have started with LA Noire, but that's the first game I remember playing where your seemingly moderate dialogue choices made your character out to be a total psycho.
It was comically bad, watching your character lose his shit on a grieving widow when you doubted something she said. The wording of the question or choice had absolutely nothing in connection to the tirade of abuse the guy would spew out.
On a similar note, I was playing Horizon: Zero Dawn a few days ago, and while it's 95% pretty brilliant, there's a super stand out example of this that really annoyed me.
The protagonist is a kick arse chick that literally hunts down and takes out bandits (by their hundreds) on sight.
Yet for one side mission, it turns out the quest giver (a nobody, not useful further in the game) is setting her up to be robbed and murdered.
She takes out the people trying to murder her, then catches up to the quest giver for some payback. He pleads with her not to kill him, and suggest maybe she could just "cut off an arm" or something instead.
The dialog choice I chose was "It's going to be more than an arm"...
... so the protagonist then proceeds to tell him off with a warning and send him on his merry way.
What The Fuck?
She should have ended the dude, badly. Like literally any of the hundreds of random bandits she'd already taken out up to that point. :/
It's a common refrain for people who are enjoying the game to say anyone who isn't is trying to kill their fun... I'd actually agree with that if I hadn't just listed several detailed points. It's not like I'm just saying "the game is crap!"
Ironically what I've noticed is people who are enjoying it go to great lengths to invalidate anyone who isn't...
I'm tempted to just leave a snarky "case in point!"... but really, anything specific would you like me to elaborate on?
This is all technically opinion, but I'll do my best to elaborate on factual instances of any and all complaints I made above; because I do really believe that anyone who's under the impression this is "just some bugs" and about to spend hard earned money on the game deserves to know what they're in for.
Yes, and that's why TFA links to playstation.com, where you can get a refund for your PS4 purchase. This isn't about the game in general, this is about the awful PS4 version.
It's really unfortunate, but I think ultimately history will probably be kind to this game as a PC game, especially if it passes that fundamental "is it fun" test. History marches on and in 3-5 years there will be a much greater proportion of PCs out there suitably equipped for it.
I'm thorouly enjoying the game but CP2077 really feels like an MVP rather than a full game mechanically.
The story is great, the side missions are great, the map is great, the art direction is spot on but the world feels empty, the looter shooter/crafting aspect feels half implemented, the whole clothing system is a mess and you can see where they have cut content (non story braindances being purchaseable but unusable for example).
Now I know Rockstar has decades of experience making open world games but these videos really drive home how lacking CP2077 is in the little things that really make a world feel alive:
I'm 60 hours in, and have been enjoying it alot playing on my Macbook through GeForce NOW. There's lots of areas where it feels unfinished and fails (AI, emergent gamplay, details, real choice), but I think it is a fantastic game.
I think the problems boil down to rushing the release for xmas and poor expectation management. The idea that people will be able to play something as well on a SEVEN YEAR old console as well as recent hardware is absolutely ridiculous, and PS4/XB1 users really need to get their head around that. However, CDPR didn't manage that expectation and one could argue that they mislead people for sales.
Whether this was a good business decision (loss of money for damage of trust and refunds vs money gained by releasing it early and misleading) we have yet to find out.
How does it look with geforce now? I'll admit I'm actually totally confused as to how that even works, but it seems like a really cool way of being able to play games on my macbook without spending $1500
on a new graphics card for my gaming PC!
I played through 40 hours of Cyberpunk and I'm about out of content worth doing. Geforce Now is great, but it has a caveat that make it dicey: ≤1080p only, and the window it creates cannot be resized. You're stuck with stretched 1080 if you're on a larger monitor (though it at least preserves aspect ratio when stretching).
Graphics are excellent, I was running on Ultra RTX (remember, 1080p) in most of the city and getting 50 fps, and latency was around 20-30ms. For how most games play, it wasn't really noticeable. $5 a month is a great deal, though I do wonder how Stadia stacks up. I certainly could have used the better resolution.
It also works on iPad/iPhone and Android decently, if you want to play anywhere. I didn't have any issues trying my iPad, though it appears you're stuck with controller input on that.
> I'll admit I'm actually totally confused as to how that even works
I subbed for a few months and have never played CP2077 but here's the high level overview:
You buy games on Steam/Epic/Ubisoft game store as normal.
In the GeForce Now client, you pick the game you want to play (and on which storefront). When you "launch" it, NVidia spins up a VM, configuring it to launch the storefront you selected with your game, and connects a remote stream to your local client. You sign into Steam/Epic/Ubisoft (usually only needed the first time per storefront), and you "install" the game and play it.
It works pretty well. If you don't have cutting edge hardware and don't mind a few ms of latency, it's a pretty good deal.
Only caveat is that I would not use it to play shooters that require quick reflexes.
I mean if you own the game it’s £5 to try it but it’s decently playable on ultra settings. Resolution is capped to 1080p though. Input lag is not hugely noticeable but I wouldn’t be playing a competitively on it.
>Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5.
Interesting, since CDPR doesn't seem to make these kinds of games are all (Witcher is nothing like these concepts). Without playing any CDPR game before, I was expecting cyberpunk-themed Witcher with more advanced emergent events and gameplay.
This is what was promised by CDP. None of that has been delivered. It’s a shallow, juvenile experience, with very little depth, bad story, repetitive and useless side missions, non-consequential choices, brain dead AI, barren city with zero point in exploration, terrible inventory system, bad shooting mechanics, bad skill system, ridiculously retarded driving and racing mechanics—just to name a few things. And it’s ridiculously unoptimized and buggy.
Going to be pretty blunt with you here: holding them to a nebulous promise from 8 years ago, when the game wasn't even out of pre-production, is childish. The actual promise of the game has been updated and communicated over time. If you closed your eyes and ears to all the marketing material up till now and blindly focused on what amounts to a powerpoint slide from 2012, you deserve whatever disappointment you got.
Those promises were continuously repeated and even ballooned even more and more. At some point, they even removed the "RPG" description of the game, in favor of "open world action", which makes it even more ridiculous, because it fails at everything that that entails.
I feel like there's going to be a lot of personal opinions going on here. I personally think they delivered on all the points, and I'm very happy with it - 20 hours in the worst bug I've seen was my character T-Posing through the roof of my car. But the storytelling is just fantastic, love it.
And....barren city? Are we even playing the same game?
I don’t mean empty of objects. I mean barren in the sense that it fee lifeless, due to nonexistent AI. It’s just pointless exploring. Even GTA3 had better crowd AI, better police AI, etc.
>>I mean barren in the sense that it fee lifeless, due to nonexistent AI
I just don't understand that point. Many times so far I've just been walking around and admiring the place, it feels like the most realistic city I've ever been in in a video game. There's just so much stuff happening everywhere, I could probably forget the story and walk around and admire it all.
So you mean "realistic" in the sense that it looks nice, which is fine, but it doesn't mean "realistic" in the sense of feeling real, ie the NPCs actually react to your actions, cops don't spawn behind you, etc.
You are right, but what people are complaining about is that they can't interact with that world. You can't poke at it. If we had short loops of the game scenes displayed in a museum we would praise it, but people want videogames mostly to play and interact with things.
I'm just trying to think how much you could interact with the world in Witcher 3, which is obviously considered a masterpiece by many, and nearly all of its villages and houses were just set pieces. Villagers never actually changed their behaviours in reaction to anything, and played the same audio clip over and over again if you stood close to them.
I just don't know how much interactivity is required for it to be...good? What part of the AI is missing?
NPC's were much better placed in the Witcher 3 because you had way less NPCs, they were on more distinctive locations and they gave good side quests more often. So, each one was more meaningful. Sure, they weren't much more interactive. But the Witcher is mostly about going around clearing up the dangers of each place. Monsters were the focus, and they were far more distinctive than Cyberpunk NPC's shooting at you. So, it's not like the Witcher 3 was far more interactive or anything, but NPCs had their place and gave the world life. Cyberpunk doesn't manage to strike that balance. And you can't strike that balance by writing more for each NPC in such a densely populated world, so you need to cover for it with better AI, responses to events, emerging events, randomness... cover with more diverse content... or innovate. GTA V, to mention an example (although I'm not particularly interested in GTA games), has better NPC AI, better responses to events and decent diversity. In Cyberpunk, as a watcher it might look really beautiful, but as a participant it doesn't have as much life. I still think the writing is great and many side quests are great and there's a lot of great content, but hopefully this helps you see a bit better what people feel is off in the game (besides the bugs, of course). Like, don't compare by looking at single factors one by one, look at the world as a whole.
Stop a car in the middle of the street. There is no honking, no reaction. Turn the camera 180 degrees, then another 180 degrees. All the vehicles from the road have disappeared.
> And....barren city? Are we even playing the same game?
there's a slider to adjust how many random NPCs spawn, so maybe not?
in any case, it's hard to argue that they delivered "a varied selection of different character classes". there are no character classes, just five attributes with related perks.
>> there are no character classes, just five attributes with related perks.
Well, that's just not true, it's just that your "class" depends heavily on your playstyle. In the same sense Skyrim didn't have classes, but your "build" depended on how you played the game. You can play almost entirely stealthily, put all of your points into intelligence and stealth with some hacking added in. You can play as a brute with tonnes of raw strength, punch everything with gorilla arms. Or maybe you want a typical soldier character, with proficiency in ranged weapons. Or a samurai-like character who uses katanas, or maybe mantis blades. All of these playstyles have their distinct perks and yes, you can absolutely role play as any of them.
Yes, you don't pick "wizzard/thief/rogue" at the beginning. But that doesn't mean there aren't classes.
it's fair to say the game enables many different play styles, but it doesn't have classes, unless you think a class is nothing more than some starting attribute bonuses and whatever grab-bag of skills you choose. I expect a class system to affect game mechanics in a deeper way (eg, in KOTOR you get different allowances for attributes, feats, and skills depending on your class).
FWIW, I actually prefer the progression system in cyberpunk. rigid class systems make more sense in party-based rpgs. I just don't think it's accurate to say the game has a class system; it's more like it intentionally has the absence of classes.
Studios fall into the habit of making the same game with a different skin.
Witcher 3, despite being a great game, had a lot of the problems Cyberpunk is getting blasted for. Boring, repetitive combat, "loot everything" inventory management - lots of useless garbage available to collect, very unsatisfying and boring MMO-like crafting system.
But the difference is - W3 could always fall back on its incredible setting, story, music, and memorable characters that we met in previous games. And the main quest + DLC stories were quite good as well.
#1 is not at all objective. I would say a world that revolves around deception, fraud, sex work, black market body modification is definitely in the realm of "Mature RPG".
#2 was mostly a lie
#3 Meh. You level up, you customize your character based on perks and skills. You get items that you can customize. This one seems fine.
#4 Is fair I think. Stealth + hacking + fighting + talking. You can build your character to be your exact playstyle. You can do several playthroughs and have totally different styles.
#5 I think is fair, although I might not call it "gigantic". There are a bunch of weapon types, a lot of upgrades, and then a whole world of body modification and quickhack tools to play around with.
Having nudity and dildos hardly makes a world “mature”. More like a juvenile frat boy’s version of mature. If you want mature storytelling, look at the Red Dead series.
If your perception of this game's story is "nudity and dildos", you just haven't played the game at all.
There are story missions dealing with sex workers and their validity as humans. There are story missions addressing rape and misconduct towards sex workers. There are story missions dealing with human trafficking. There are story missions dealing with corporate espionage. The list goes on. None of these things are "juvenile", I would say, nor can they be watered down to "nudity and dildos." This game is not Saints Row, it is not cartoony or silly.
You can dislike the story, but you should not mischaracterize the subject matter to downplay certain parts of its validity. The story is absolutely "mature". There is no question.
I have played GTA 5 on PS3, PC and Xbox One. I haven’t experienced any such issues on the slightest, nor remember any widespread reports. GTA4 has optimization issues, which were never solved, but not GTA5.
Note: They haven't released the next-gen console versions yet. PS5 version isn't out yet. That comes out in 2021. You can only buy the PS4 version, which happens to also play in PS5. Any suggestion of dismissing the previous-gen as not important is a non-starter.
> It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.
What? You said yourself Xbox and PS4 users are seeing an "inferior experience." PS literally stopped selling the game in their store. What about that is relatively minor?
By relatively minor I meant a large portion of these issues live in the category of "technical hiccups and such" and not in the core of what the game itself is.
A slow and buggy game can become a faster and stable game over time with patches and polish, a game that is boring, dull or put simply, a bad idea won't become much better. You can't polish a turd and make something better out of it. Take VtM: Bloodlines as an example. People stack patches on top of patches from random websites only to be able to play this game in a somewhat acceptable state, and yet it's a well-known darling of gaming circles.
By impact this is indeed nowhere near minor. I'm just saying most of this could be avoided, and the core of the game, regardless of its issues today, is appealing.
FWIW I came into the game expecting basically nothing. I'm not a gamer, don't read gaming news and don't get hyped. I just knew that this was an RPG made by CD Projekt Red.
And I think largely thanks to not expecting anything, I was quite pleasantly surprised. It was my first game with RTX which was cool to see and as you said, it's basically a new Deux Ex game, a series which I love.
The main storyline was a bit short and unfulfilling but the gameplay itself has been quite satisfying.
I haven't played Cyberpunk but the Witcher 3 wasn't amazing at release either. The Witcher 3 required several patches IIRC and that was also the case for the first two witcher games.
Am I the only one who remembers trying to do anything within 50 yards of a candle?
Sure, it's not bad as is, but it's bad as compared to what it was supposed to be. "Supposed" being defined by 3DPR themselves.
The comparison to Deus Ex is not off. It's got turn-of-the-milleneum AI, zero exploration benefit, and so on. That's not a bad thing, except, of course, it wasn't going to be that way.
Deus Ex, especially the first, actively rewards you with experience, items, and new missions if you explore. I can think of three unique areas / paths you can explore in the 2nd mission (Hell's Kitchen) just off the top of my head. And there's no question mark indicators on your map that anythings there - you have to seek it out.
It's not an "open world" but its level design is much more intricately layered than any part of CP2077, including the main mission set pieces. You can even kill important NPCs and it will change the storyline
Not in the "open world" sense. I think a lot of people were expecting a more open world, but in this case, there just wasn't much to do in that world (from what I can tell).
To be fair, you can grind a bunch in Act 1 Watson but you can't leave the vicinity of the district. The bridges and exits are blocked off GTA3 style and if you try to head to the badlands the game literally flashes a warning and tells you to turn around before just plopping you back in the city
The vast majority of the truly negative rhetoric comes from #2 on your list, along with the fact that CDPR clearly knew about the performance issues and hid them. They only gave out advance copies of the PC version to reviewers, and forbade reviewers from using their own captured footage (and I assume that the provided footage from CDPR came from an expensive computer). This wasn't a coincidence. The issues with performance on base spec PS4 and XBones could not be discovered until after launch, and was clearly motivated by the fact that not all of the console customers would pursue a refund because of the inconvenience. Similarly, reviewers might have mentioned that PC required a fairly modern/powerful system but couldn't show their own footage to illustrate it, and they always had the excuse of "we'll assume that performance will improve with a patch and some more driver optimization." It appears that some bonuses were tied to getting a good review score, which also led to the dishonest behavior. Otherwise they might have released console versions to reviewers and taken the hit on the review score, but at least buyers could have known about the performance issues in advance. Then buyers wouldn't be complaining as much.
CDPR had even hinted at the problem before when they delayed the launch, citing difficulty with getting a game that performed well on two generations of consoles and PC. But then they never mentioned it again. They never said in any further updates that they had managed to make the game run well on every system. They just went silent about the issue and rushed the game out before Christmas.
The other issues (gameplay different than expectations and the bugs) are frustrating, but were never really the problem. The bugs can be fixed in patches and most people are willing to swallow the fact that a game is different than what they expected as long as it's still a good game.
Fixing the engine so that the game runs well on consoles will take more time than normal bug fixes, and the reputation hit that CDPR has taken will take more than just fixing the game. They've shown that they are willing to sacrifice community goodwill in search of short term profit, which means that it is now a company ran by business types and not people that care about putting out a good product. I don't blame a company for caring about profit, but I can blame them for all the shortsighted bullshit that they pulled. I wish more business schools taught people to care about the core product and let the profit take care of itself, rather than the current approach of caring about management incentives, ignoring the product, and running companies into the ground.
You compared it to GTA V which came out at a (roughly) similar time in the XBox 360's life cycle. It ran incredibly well on those consoles. But I think we are at a different stage.
I didn't follow any of the hype at all so I had no expectations to build up beyond the excitement of enjoying a sci-fi RPG (a bit tired of the usual fantasy setting).
The fact that it feels like an homage to Deus Ex, or even a spiritual successor, is more than anything I could have wanted. A GTA/RDR style simulator would have bored me to death.
So, I'm quite content with what we got and I can imagine it'll only improve with the typical GOTY edition, as with CDPR's Witcher games.
1) As a Deus Ex fan, I'm also okay with that but it feels liks it was marketed as something closer to GTA.
2) I see this as a serious reason to be pissed off, and CDPR really shouldn't have released it on consoles in this state.
3) Although I'm interested, I stick to my habit of waiting for a little while before I buy the game. Maybe with the mess they got into I'll get it for a bit cheaper too!
The real negative sentiment surrounds how the launch was handled. They blocked people from making console reviews before the launch, so no one had any real understanding of the state of the PS4 or XB1 versions of the game. That makes the whole thing feel like a lazy cash grab from a greedy developer
Point 2 makes me think of the (reasonably) realistic expectations that game makers have with regard to the prospective release of next gen consoles. Guessing when the next gen consoles will be launched and creating a game time line around that feels intriguing in itself.
> 2) It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone. Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
You need to factor in that the PS4 hardware is really outdated at this point in time, too.
That's irrelevant because it's being sold on that console. There is an explicit understanding that if it's sold for a console, it's going to work at a certified quality level.
Is there an objective certificate authority that get give a game such "quality level"?
There are gamers that play on xbox/ps and are happy with it (they are even in this thread, look it up).
So some expect miracles from a dated hardware (with HDD, which is unbelievable on a PC since almost a decade) - one can work magic with it (I mean Carmack-magician), but you need more time (like years) - is there a point in doing that if just around a corner is nextgen and a PC version works fine?
There are people that are happy with such version if you are not don't buy it but don't take the fun away from others that have lower expectations.
The game crashing consoles regularly is most certainly out of spec of any certification process. People have been reporting crashes as frequently as every half hour to every two hours.
This opens up liability to Sony, who have a high risk of many sales being converted to refunds, which both hurts their brand and is not great financially.
People can still buy the game in physical forms, but that at least absolves Sony from the sales side of things.
One suggestion elsewhere has been on Xbox where it may make sense to move the game to early access instead.
And again, regardless, the console version runs terribly right now. It should not be for sale on console hardware that can't support it, if the case is that the game requires better hardware. There's a reason minimum required specs exist on PC versions for example.
I'm interested to see how a new PS4/XB1 runs it vs an old PS4/XB1, I have a first day XB1 and it started bogging down on games a few years ago, so I got new one. The reason I bring this up is that I have some friends with PS4/XB1 consoles that say it's playable with a few bugs...nothing like the videos of potato quality graphics. I can only figure the difference between the two could just be the age of the console/dust build up, etc. I'm not sure.
I 100% have assumed this was going to be an RDR/GTA5 style open world game that I could just ignore the story of and go around exploring.
The games I've liked have been skyrim, and GTA5 (I hated RDR), and in both of those I didn't really pay any attention to the story (except as a way of getting money to buy more gear). It was just more about driving/riding around and looking at stuff for me.
Deus Ex puts the player in an extremely small, dense area where they have tons of options. The game reacts to the way the player approaches each situation, sometimes dramatically warping the story depending on what they do.
CP2077 is a GTA clone, too. It's in the uncanny valley, though: cops don't chase you, they just spawn behind you. Even in closed rooms! It's not part of the sci-fi lore as if this was a Minority Report or something, it's just a very naive implementation.
The parts of the game that resemble Deus Ex are arguably better, but I could poke hole in that, too.
note that "extremely small" is only in comparison to modern open world games or MMOs. All 3 deus ex games (ignoring the shooter I never played) felt bigger than e.g. Skyrim to me which is large but feels empty
Yeah, Deus Ex is mostly around a smaller area and a lot more depth. Every mission and most locations have multiple ways of being tackled (because of the focus on stealth, hacking or pew pew as true options for everything)
>1) Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
Funny, I didn't want to buy it before, but now that you say this, I might actually buy this thing. I never found RDR/GTA style games very fun other than 15 minutes of mayhem at your friend's house. Whereas the Deus Ex games are a masterpiece.
Other players, myself included, feel that it's a piss-poor Deus Ex too.
If bugs and performance were the only issue, I'd just have left the game until I got my next-gen console. I asked for a refund because it's a bad game in many other ways too.
YMMV, of course. I hear the story is good and the graphics are definitely pretty. But I'd definitely not describe the game as a 'good' Deus Ex style game.
Based on your description I want it even more now.
I did get a Deus Ex vibe from this game from the first moment I heard about it. I've been desperate to get back into gaming, and was looking forward to an Xbox to play 4 games, this being one of them.
Hopefully by April (when I expect to be able to buy a new Xbox Series X), the patches will have made the game playable.
> It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone.
Well, or if you're the type of person who can be happy playing Doom or The Witcher 3 on Switch. Which I assume is a substantial number of people—they keep porting those types of games to the Switch, which means someone has to be buying them.
Watching the Digital Foundry analysis, the main thing I'm wondering is if they should have allowed the dynamic resolution to scale down further at the low-end—for instance, let it go to 540p on the base PS4 and/or to 720p on the PS4 Pro. This, again, seems to have been the key to getting games like The Witcher 3 on Switch.
Doom on Switch was an exercise in removing detail and graphical tricks (I noticed that Doom Eternal had self shadows while the Switch port of Doom Eternal did not) in such a manner as to minimize the visual impact. The game looks GREAT and it's hard to distinguish the differences from the PC/console release without looking closely.
Cyberpunk looks like steaming ass on eighth-gen consoles. They obviously didn't put the work in to making sure the downgrade didn't hurt the visuals too much that Panic Button put in to Doom on Switch.
Agreed. Even with the incredible detail in the world I can't but wonder what Bluepoint, Panic Button, or other successful could've done to make it work on previous-generation consoles.
I played Witcher 3 on Switch and it was ok. I’d prefer a better device but I was recovering from a surgery and it was great having the Witcher 3 on a handheld.
I bought Witcher 3 on PS4 and Switch but I exclusively play on the latter device. Sure, it looks like someone smeared vaseline on my screen, especially in hand-held mode. but it's still surprisingly pretty in its art direction and the story-telling is unaffected by the graphics.
Well, the Witcher 3 on Switch drops to 540p at the low-end.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 can actually go down to 368p. I remember some people were upset about that, but it didn't seem to cause an uproar, and certainly kept the framerate steady.
Cyberpunk uses fundamentally different graphics pipelines that rely heavily on temporal information. On 720p you can already see artifacts such as fizzling, smearing and blur due to aliasing of the TAA implementation, as well as other post processing like volumetric lights that also require high resolution scenes to work properly. That is why a 540p is more detrimental to this game than those other.
There probably aren't too many stones left unturned, and the Switch community despite issues at least could understand the gambit. It was called the impossible port.
The Cyberpunk 2077 team basically ran out of time on their release and, if I understand it, blindsided PS4 owners who otherwise had no reason to think it would be hitting 10fps in a gunfight.
So it seems there were very different classes of expectations going on between the two scenarios.
I haven't tried this particular game yet (CyberPunk 2077).
But as someone who games on exclusively on Linux, I'm surprised to learn about the outrage. Personally, I'm used to having to debug, alter, or otherwise hack games in order to play them. I'm also more tolerant of bugs and glitches. I've found that I gravitate more towards Early-Access titles on Steam than big "AAA" titles.
I realize most console gamers aren't necessarily technical people, but when did gaming become so entitled? Is the mainstream PC gaming market this spoiled also? I've heard mostly good things about CyberPunk from fellow PC gamers.
If you run CP2077 on Linux, as someone who runs any software on a platform where it's not officially supported at all, you would be indeed not entitled to a smooth experience and at least some tinkering would be warranted.
Other people are merely customers. For a customer a game not working as intended is no different than an electric shaver not working as intended. You don't need an understanding, or a modicum of interest in inner workings of electric shavers, you expect them to work.
Insult to injury, people also tend to be more emotionally invested in games than electric shavers, just like any other entertainment medium. Hence they won't just toss one out and get the other, without generating some buzz about it first. I don't see how this is more "spoiled" or "entitled" than customer reviews on Amazon on electric shavers. It's nothing crazy if you feel entitled to things you're actually entitled to, which in this case, an entitlement to a working product gained by paying for it.
What specifically is entitled about expecting a properly-working game on the platform said game is released on, especially the consoles where not having to waste time and effort to "debug, alter, or otherwise hack games" is one of their selling points?
On console, you cannot make these changes. Or any changes. It's impossible. The deal is, in exchange for it not being a computing device, it plays games. You buy a console game, and it works. Cyberpunk 2077 broke this contract.
This is incredible, and must be devastating for the development team, especially after all that crunching.
As someone who's worked on a (digital-only) title for Xbox One, I'm surprised this game got through the certification process in the first place. From our experience the platform holders are pretty involved, and we regularly gave MS updates on everything from monetization, to UX and controls, to extensive reviews for updates, which caused headaches when the client lagged behind our other platforms.
Unfortunately for the developers, the fact of the matter is that there are tens of millions of base PS4s and Xbox Ones out there, and gamers got a bait and switch during this launch. As terrible as it is for them to get the rug pulled under them, Sony risks a lot more by not issuing refunds for incredibly broken products. A lot of the appeal of console gaming is the relative plug-and-play factor that comes with it, and the software regularly costs more to boot — via higher pricing, lack of sales, or both.
Actually I see it as positive, because it proves that crunching isn't worth it, if this what happens coming out of burned developers.
The industry keeps bleeding to many people that could have made huge contributions, but decided to invest into industries where crushing isn't part of the culture.
For example, I rather do GUIs and 3D stuff for boring enteprise projects than spending endless nights and weekends fixing bugs on engine code.
Yup, left AAA a long time ago. Way more money, work-life balance, and job opportunities available when you leave the game industry. It exploits developers who are initially passionate about the field, and then leaves them in a state where it's very difficult to leave (because it's very specific skills that don't easily transfer to other industries)
Yeah, I'm so curious about what they were doing for the last 2 years. It seems like the artists have been working on the game for 5+ years: the world is huge and full of interesting and detailed environments. The graphics are amazing (on PC). But it's like the gameplay and open-world systems were written in the last year or two, and it shows.
Yepppp I am way more interested in games than web dev but here I get paid well and have a loose and comfortable schedule / environment. It's a no-brainer.
> As someone who's worked on a (digital-only) title for Xbox One, I'm surprised this game got through the certification process in the first place.
Something I have learned from watching this saga is that those rules seem not to apply to "AAA" developers (this appears to have been fairly wide industry knowledge, but I was not aware of it).
It may also be a relatively new development, but because of how hot games are coming in, it sounds like Sony and MS are now willing to assume that day one patches will fix the issues if the studio says that they will. Not just for CDPR.
Patches have to go through certification as well. Day one patches aren’t literally pushed out hot on day one. They’ll have gone through testing and cert.
What I read, and apparently it was discussed on the CDPR emergency board meeting, is that Sony and MS trusted CDPR to correct the issues and have the game in a good state prior to launch. Seems they failed at that pretty badly.
I hope this leads to Sony and Microsoft performing Apple-style reviews on all future games from now on. Completely audit every game and every patch before it can be sold on the platform.
I don't think that's tenable. Could you imagine trying to test a 40 hour game?
Sony and MS's teams aren't QA. Neither are Apple's. Apple's team looks for the standard stuff like are they using IAPs properly? Is there anything deceiving happening here? etc.
By the sounds of things Sony and MS's review teams did find that Cypberpunk 2077 was NOT in a good spot. But they took CDPR's word that they would fix it before launch (the typical day 1 patch situation). And that bombed hard.
I think your expectation on what happens is not in line with reality unfortunately.
Allegedly, the game was rejected 6 times before it was finally approved. Even then, it was approved on the condition that the big bugs will be fixed by December 10.
Apparently, they weren't.
They listed the original delay as due to current gen consoles, it's likely one of the two _did_ veto their previous launch plans on one of the consoles and they decided to delay the whole launch. The question is if it was even worse on consoles 6 weeks ago, or if they just cajoled the platform holder in question into letting them launch anyway.
While I do have immense sympathy for the devs, it does bother me that none of them blew the whistle. Many, if not most, should've known that this game was nothing like what was promised, and practically unplayable on PS4 or XBONE. Yet they said nothing.
There were actually rumours a while back saying that Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed because it ran poorly on the last generation consoles.
>Niespielak speaks about the situation on a popular Polish podcast, which has since been translated into English. He basically says that CD Projekt Red was running into real trouble when it came to getting Cyberpunk 2077 to perform on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One -- the latter especially. It's unclear whether Niespielak is referring to just the base systems or the Pro and X as well.
CD Projekt Red even responded to the rumours, basically saying that there wasn't really a particular reason for the delay. Guess that may have been true, considering how many bugs the game still had when it released.
>"No hidden agendas, just working on making the game better."
That part may have not really been that truthful considering what we now know about the console versions and how they went out of their way to not show us any footage before release.
Sure, in theory. In practice they would have let you go for performance reasons, which are only supported by this game being pulled from the store.
Of course you can fight it, but while you do you still have to pay your bills and pay a lawyer, all with no income and no guarantee that it will ever make a difference, let alone when it would be resolved.
EDIT: And all that presumed that the whistleblower protections would actually apply in this case. If it were something clearly illegal you’d have a better case, but really here all you’ve got is possibly fraud and a pretty mild version at that. Proving fraud is tough...
That's basically all of the game industry - from testers to PR to HR to art.
When I onboarded at a global AAA game dev place in Japan, I got a separate sheet detailing my rights as a whistleblower - it's lucky to have these, but I doubt anyone would risk their standing/future in the industry because of something like this, especially during a pandemic.
Even in places where that is true, that typically only applies to employees "blowing the whistle" on illegal behavior, like violations of labor codes or hazardous conditions. It's not a blanket immunity for anyone with something negative to say about their employer.
I'm not sure if this is being sarcastic or not. Doesn't America have some of the weakest employee protection in the developed world (because, ironically, freedom)?
Interesting that probabilities of a mishap like this has at best marginally reduced but the threshold for triggering corrective actions seems to be becoming much higher over past couple decades or so
They did, just not publicly. That's why there were so many delays, the developers or managers kept saying "hey we're not going to make this release date, we need more time".
-- What was the purpose of the crunch / rushing this out the door ?
-- What was to be gained from it? Holiday sales? Delivering a product not delayed again? Management bonuses? Did the developers get bonuses for delivering "on time"?
-- At what cost did the crunch / delivering the product cause the team of developers? Now they need to keep working; fix the bugs; get this back in the store(s) and try to make everyone happy?
We go through our share of crunches. Bugs always get through and we have to fix them of course, but nothing as bad as some of the stuff I've read about this.
Management never realizes burnout is a real thing. I feel for these developers. It's double sided. Keep delaying the game / product and people get pissed off it's delayed. Ship it, and now they're pissed off its buggy. So now, everyone (programmers) are burned out; management is probably fuming over being removed from the store(s) and everyone needs to smile and get back to it, probably as a worse crunch than before. What a shitty way to spend the holidays.
It's like getting made at a company building your house that your water pipes leak but you rushed them to get it done because of some arbitrary move in date. Take the time; do it right; do a good job. Cut corners and rush stuff and deal with the consequences.
The short answer is that they gambled and they lost.
The long answer is that releasing a high budget, triple-A title across multiple platforms isn't done in isolation. They were busy coordinating advertising campaigns, partnership deals, distribution, marketing, and other time-sensitive external processes.
Many of those external contracts were likely time sensitive, perhaps with financial penalties for missing the ship date. For example, did you know that big box retail stores don't put up giant advertisements or end caps for new products for free? They actually charge vendors to occupy prime space on the retail floor and put up product advertisements within their stores. In this case, stores like Best Buy even had Cyberpunk 2077 ads plastered on the outside of the store windows with a specific release date, which they missed once already. Each time a release window comes and goes without a product to sell, the company loses huge amounts of money to these contractual obligations.
Also, building these games is expensive. If they secured external financing to pay the huge development teams, that money comes with conditions about when they must start paying it back. No product = no way to pay, unless you go out and secure emergency loans to pay off your other financing, which is about as expensive as you would imagine.
These things aren't planned last minute. The launch date window was likely determined over a year ago, with huge amounts of money and work going into those specific dates.
Really, this is a failure of project and product management. The teams should have realized that they weren't on track to reach the launch dates and narrowed their scope early on. It looks like they overestimated how much they could accomplish and assumed they could fit it all in to the allotted time, which was obviously not the case.
> The short answer is that they gambled and they lost.
I think that answers my question, which was:
Has anyone said why they didnt delay just the ps4/xbone versions? I assume some kind of contracts, but would have been cheaper to break the contract than to release a broken game. Probably would have been cheaper to delay all versions(smaller stock hit + salaries) if reports of losses are true.
---
So did they see their game (that was so broken that friendly outlets went out of their way to say "DO NOT BUY") and think "we can take this gamble"?
Ding ding ding. Missing christmas would be a huge deal.
That said, I think there's a tendency for conversations around this to ignore the finances and suggest that financial concerns shouldn't have any impact on the game's release. There's no doubt that CDPR got the balance on this wrong, but the need to find a balance is just reality.
More than just holiday sales -- this point in the console generation is typically the fattest point of the sales curve. The next generation consoles are generating a ton of interest, and the previous generation is at its largest install base. Delaying a year means you miss out on the hype cycle of the new consoles while the last-gen consoles quickly fade in mindshare -- only "legacy" versions of annualized sports franchises sell on that older hardware.
This was probably it. To get it right on all platforms they would have to spend several more months of development. The video game market has a certain size, if you exceed the budget too much you will never be able to make it back. Maybe this too was what caused them to release the last-gen console ports: they were starting to freak out, afraid the project would bankrupt them.
I mean.. they can say that all they want, but they're a game studio that releases one game at a time. This game was "supposed" to release 8 months ago. Financially speaking, it just doesn't make sense that they have any room here.
I'm playing this game on Google's Stadia and must say I'm impressed and having a blast. Besides some minor bugs this game streams flawless in 4k to my Mac (which technically isn't even a supported platform for the game, but is for Stadia). I bought the game during last weeks promotion with a free Chromecast Ultra and controller, so I would have at least had some hardware for cheap should the game itself suck, but the game is fun as well. I also no longer have any doubt that streamed gaming has a future and am actually looking forward to 5G coverage so I can play on mobile.
I'm also playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia and I've been quite positively surprised by it. However, I'm not really sold on Stadia generally yet. There's definitely some input lag and I can feel my mouse movements being "spongy". I'm also having a hard time driving, but I don't know if that's the input lag or just the game. Also, even if the game is running at the best possible graphical options (which Cyberpunk 2077 isn't), you're still just getting a compressed video stream, so dark gameplay doesn't look good (https://0x0.st/iFRT.png).
No regrets though, since I paid 50€ for it and I'm getting a free Chromecast Ultra and a free Stadia controller.
You can use Chrome extensions to modify Stadia, I used Stadia+[0]. You can force 4k that way even though it's not supported.
I don't have any noticable input lag but I'm on 70/30mbit fiber with 3-4ms ping to stadia.com. Sometimes the stream quality drops for a sec, but no noticeable frames or audio dropped.
I agree with the darkness being to bright, couldn't fix it with the gamme correction either. I have a feeling the 4k does a little better job in that regard. But overal it's not bothering me to much.
I'm really lucky we got fiber connected a few weeks ago, I'm in the Netherlands so broadband is pretty decent overall, but in rural area's connection options lag behind. I tried the game Control streaming demo on a Switch on my previous connection (15/1Mbit DSL with 30/30Mbit 4G backup, avg 30-50ms ping) and though it did work, but it was far from how I experience Cyberpunk now. I wouldn't have bought into streaming gaming with that connection.
In the US, poor internet is mainly due to political reasons. We have a duopoly when it comes to telecoms and ISPs. I’m still disappointed that Google gave up on a nationwide Google Fiber rollout.
W're heading to a duopoly here as well, but stuff used to be pretty regulated. So w'll have to see where w're heading, but I think regulators/politics will pick up the pace in a few years again. Also it's not as big over here, you can compare our entire country to a American big city metropolitan area. Rural here is maybe 2-5km from the nearest city.
No, but I thought it would be a good reference. I just ran a game and pinged the instance that was streaming (120.37.116.136), funny enough it ping was worse (8ms) than the ping to stadia.com (3ms). Also the IP is no longer pingable once you stop streaming the game. MTR shows something like 20 nodes inbetween me and the instance compared to 6 with stadia.com.
Same here, playing on Stadia (4k). I tried it on 3 devices:
- windows 10 PC over Ethernet - no lag
- MBP 16 over WiFi - lag
- pixel slate over WiFi - lag
The lag is not too bad, but still noticeable. I only play on the PC now. I have no idea how to fix WiFi lag.
This. At work, on a Windows PC with a wired connection, the experience is seamless. At home, on macOS over WiFi, it's only playable (without hiccups, I mean) during the night when people are asleep, but it's still not as smooth. I've played through the entire game, as well as RDR2 and the Metro series using Stadia. I have a high-end gaming desktop and would still not want to install these games. Makes the work/play distinction clearer and my machine cleaner.
I've played a little on my TV with the CCU over Wifi but not enough to determine lag, my Mac is hooked to gigabit straight to my router.
They do recommend 5Ghz for Wifi and being as close to the AP as possible. I can image if your AP is behind a wall or in a closet or different floor you get noticable delays as signals come in via reflections rather than directly.
Same case for me, I never do preorders but the offer of Chromecast + controller was good enough, the game runs amazing, I don't have to bother with updates, space on my device, all games can be played in any screen I have without having to worry about hardware requirements.
Honestly the only case where I don't see this having adoption is for competitive gaming.
Runs great on Stadia compared to PC (in my experience playing on both platforms). Google needs to make something of this. I even tried running it from Chrome on my old MacBookPro 2015 and was thrilled it worked and was a great experience.
I suppose you played on Stadia from a friend's account right? Otherwise you would had to have to buy the game twice, once in GOG/Steam/Epic and another in Stadia. For that reason if I were to consider cloud gaming I would prefer something like Geforce Now or Shadow rather than Stadia or Luna.
I suppose I need to explain myself. Alas I purchased the game on PC/Steam, Stadia and PS4. And yes I play on all of those, depending on what OS I am booted into and running and which part of my house I feel like playing.
Interesting... it sounds like an odd choice though, because you wouldn't be able to progress the same story in all 3 platforms, as you can't sync between them, right?
Also, I really think that Steam is the superior platform at the moment in terms of features compared to Epic and GOG, but in this case I think it would be better to buy it in GOG since not only all of the money goes directly to CD Project Red instead of 30% for Steam, but also there's some goodies if you buy it in GOG...
Anyway, I think if you bought the game 3 times you more than make up for that 30%.
I do hugely recommend playing it on GeForce now instead. It works like a dream, you can max out all the settings, and you don't get locked into an ecosystem that Google will inevitably abandon in the next couple years. I've been playing Cyberpunk using it and have no complaints, very little if any lag on my 100Mbps BT line.
Every time I tried GeForce Now it put me in a long queue before letting me in. Never happened with Stadia and the whole "take up your controller and play" experience feels more polished on Stadia.
Hopefully we'll get ray tracing and maxed out settings with the next Stadia hardware upgrade.
There's something futuristic about playing the game at 1080p/4K on a 32" external display connected to a 13" MacBook Air with an M1 CPU. It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.
I'm still keeping a PS2 and some old games for when I want to enjoy a local gaming experience that is completely my own, rather than a service. But for Cyberpunk 2077, treating it as a service works well for me.
> It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.
I often use screen sharing to work on my laptop from my desktop. Both machines are connected to the same switch with gigabit ethernet, but it performs worse and has more noticable input lag than the Stadia games I'm playing over the internet. It must have something to do with the video encoding I guess, Google doing things in hardware and my laptop trying it's best in software.
With my ThinkPad I had lots of problem with Stadia. My connection is perfect. But it seems because I don't have hardware acceleration for Chrome it doesn't work.
I was unable to figure out how to make hardware acceleration work on my T490.
I also bought the game on XBox, but I returned it to the shop.
It’s not a unplayable, but there’s definitely noticeable latency / lag compared to playing something locally. The resolution is also lowered compared to a decent midrange PC. Obviously, this depends on your internet connection and what you’re streaming to
In my experience some games are just very laggy, where others appear "optimized" for Stadia network. I can't put my finger on it, but my comparisons come from playing the same title on PC/Steam. Cyberpunk seems to have none to very little lag. And that's playing with the chrome cast device on my wireless, Chromium on Linux via ethernet and Chrome on macOS. All platforms work great with Cyberpunk, but Destiny 2 is another story.
None at all. I've had a few action sequences in the story now and they all went smooth. Sometime quality notably drops, but not pace/framerate. The one time I had an issue with frames dropping was because a local computer downloading files and causing bandwith spikes. But I think with some Qos on the router that should be fixed. Average bandwith usage of the game is between 10-20Mbit.
So I just played Celeste, a platforming game which I have both native and on Stadia (it's free with the Pro subscription) and I don't notice any difference in playing either version in terms of input lag.
Ultimately I think the rushed launch will turn out to have been a correct decision, or at least not as horrible as it seems. The holiday season, especially during a pandemic when millions are stuck at home, is simply a financial opportunity too good to pass up. Launching in a few months would have lost those sales, while delaying the game (again) until holiday season 2021 would have destroyed a lot of hype and anticipation. From what I’ve seen, the game is still doing well in terms of sales.
Tough situation, but considering the options, an understandable move. It’s a classic example of being forced to choose between two bad decisions because you failed to make an adequate plan in the first place.
The gaming industry today is very different from what it was even ten years ago. It used to be that games made a healthy chunk of their income in the first month of launch. Back then it made total sense to rush a crappy game out before the holiday season.
However, today, the best selling games do so at steady rates over the span of years. The first month or so of sales may only represent 10-20% of total sales over five years. The Witcher 3 looks like it sold around 1.5 million preorders, but almost 30 million units in total.
All the bad publicity around this game is going to reduce gross sales of CP2077 and ensure that the public is leery of pre-ordering a CDPR in the future.
I mean that’s kind of my point: you and your friends are more familiar with games. Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty mainstream and probably one of the most advertised and hyped games of all time. Most people buying it will not be “gamers”.
Anecdotally, I don't personally remember the launch of The Witcher III, but I read a comment that indicated it was also initially buggy.
I picked up the GOTY Edition some 3 years later during a frequent sale, played it, and enjoyed it. It's still a frequent top-seller on Steam according to SteamDB, and it's a 5-year old game.
Unless CDPR drops the ball in a major way, I'd expect Cyberpunk 2077 to have a similarly long-tail of popularity, meaning most people who will eventually play Cyberpunk 2077 have yet to do so. There are also a lot of video game players who don't follow video game news.
As a counter-example, all of my friends who are playing/talking about the game spent the first several days after its release playing the game in all of their offtime (including some taking the day of release off) and haven't really talked about the reviews at all. We have occasionally talked about funny bugs or thing we wish were a little different (wish it would zoom out the minimap while driving, for example), but most discussion has been positive
It was only in the Playstation store for a week, and they're offering refunds for those who could buy it, so I doubt they made enough money off that particular platform to justify burning all the goodwill.
And the lawyering hasn't even started - Sony is probably angling for some kind of damages since this was supposed to be a major holiday release.
It's difficult to view this as a rushed launch when the game was originally scheduled to release in April, and has received multiple delays, supposedly to fix the last remaining bugs.
Multiple delays mean that not only couldn't they set enough time initially, they were repeatedly incapable of setting enough time when extending the timeline, or unwilling to do so. Which makes it quite easy to view as rushed.
CDPR's whole ethos is to release games without DRM, since they saw better sales without it for the witcher series. They reason that if they have a good product, people will pay for it. But if the product isn't good, is that still true? I think theres gonna be a good amount of piracy that will eat into PC sales for cyberpunk, since a lot of people will think "why the hell would I pay $60 for a buggy game that I might not even like?"
I think this is going to be the take that ends up in the, "truths that people don't want to accept" bin, because it means quality isn't the end-all that gamers want it to be.
If the choices are a) Delay again and risk losing the company or b) release a buggy game and use the revenue to repair the damage done to the company's reputation, I think the right move is b.
It pays to be a patient gamer. I'm sure the $5 steam sale version of Cyberpunk 2077 5 years from now will be much better than the $60 release day version.
The landscape around sales seems to be changing.
Specifically Square Enix and From Software are putting their games on sale extremely late or only lightly discounted.
Final Fantasy 7 and 8 (21+ years old) are still 13€, Sekiro (1.5 Years old) is 40€.
I waited 3 years for Dark Souls 3 (mainly because I didn't care enough) to be on sale for ~20€.
I remember I got Dark Souls 1 for 3€.
Just some anecdata.
I think publishers are aware that their games are valueable longer longer, and they don't need those $5 buyers really.
Perhaps this only applies to very popular games.
TLDR: I wouldn't bet on this being on sale for $5 ever
I threw out the $5 figure because I recently purchased Doom (2016) for $5 at a sale, which is a AAA title that sold for a premium on release day. I wouldn't have bought it if it weren't so cheap because I'm not usually into gory shooters.
What those two companies have in common is that they have made remakes or remasterings of their old titles. They may be worried that lowering the price may effect the perceived value of those releases. A Demon Souls remake being sold at full price might seem shockingly expensive if the origional was selling for $5.
Just play at your own pace. Once you get past adolescence, life will happen and you'll fall behind recent releases. Launch bugs will cease to matter.
Hey speaking of, I just found this cool new game called Borderlands - it's a shame that the intro music is so classical, because the setting seems like a cool sort of dystopian punk sci-fi. I wonder if that'll catch on, because it sort of reminds me of some books that I read a few years ago...
The problem were the expectations. CDPR built such high expectations from the game that it was ridiculous. And they were in high-estee, W3 was amazing so people thought that such a gamer-centric company will keep their word.
Of course everyone with half a brain knew that a lot of these were infeasible in such a depth as they advertised but on the other hand, the game was in dev for 8 years, so why not?
Then the game came out and people (like me) waiting for it for 7 years got half-baked game that had so many things obviously cut really late that is painfully obvious. Features sitting there, teasing something you were promised but don't get.
Adding this to the debacle of last gen consoles issues, and ridiculous AI, zero replayability and you get a lot of angry gamers. And I believe rightfully so.
Yeah I really hate these over-emotional responses.
That being said, I played the game on PS4, and it's jaw-droppingly bad. Not even because of graphics, it's just straight up broken. The mechanics themselves fundamentally do not work. So it's not about high expectations, they just need to either (a) spend more time working on the game, or (b) say no to last gen consoles.
Probably not because they weren't supporting old consoles. imo any open world game with complexity, that isn't Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, is going to be a mess for the 1st two years. It was like this with the Fallout Series as well. I have no clue how Rockstar has done successful releases consecutively
To be fair, Red Dead has it's fair share of bugs as well, especially on release. I agree with you in that I don't think I've ever played a large open world game that didn't have a lot of bugs and I'm not an overly observant gamer. Skyrim was the same way. It's just none of them ruin the experience in a way that Cyberpunk for consoles has. I've been playing it on PC and love it but can understand why people are upset regarding the experience on consoles.
This makes it sound like they're trying to shoehorn the game on a NES.
In reality, it was the current generation of consoles for the entirety of the development cycle. If it weren't for the multiple delays, the game would have had several months on the Xbox One/PS4 before the Series S/X and PS5 would have even been released.
PS4 and Xbox One are several years old. When you account for the yearly or faster hardware refresh cycles for PCs and other devices like iPads, PS4 and Xbox One are both ancient and at the end of their hardware life cycle. This is exacerbated by Cyberpunk devs being primarily PC developers. ie. It's hard developing a complex open world game. It's harder doing it on old gen consoles.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but to date, I can only think of Rockstar as the only ones who have done this successfully from the start
The expectations have nothing to do with this. It’s 100% due to the issues on the last gen consoles, and specifically the PS4 in this case. Horrible graphics and performance, tons of bugs, and way too many actual crashes.
No, the problem is CDPR building all the expectations with lies. I'm not going to link to reddit but there is a thread on the cyberpunk sub listing all the lies Cyberpunk said before release. Nobody forced CDPR to lie about the content of the game, especially all the unique NPC scripting stuff that doesn't exist. It's not just the bugs and the performance. CDPR sold something that wasn't in the game at release.
It must have been an horror for the developers pressured by management to do the impossible, only to be met with contempt by both the management and the gamers in the end because management can always blame developers "for not doing enough" even though every dev must have crunched for 2 years straight.
Also these dev sweatshops usually have high turnover, so they are incapable of retaining experienced developers because they don't value that, only rookies they can squeeze to the bone then throw away when they are burned out. The state of that game is the result of all that culture.
Maybe that was the case for some people, but personally I hadn't been paying any attention to the game. I like to go in with minimal knowledge. Helps keep story elements a surprise and I'm not let down about things getting cut.
I only ended up buying the game so soon after release because CD Projekt Red is well known in the PC gaming space and because I saw a bunch of friends playing it (which I guess means I got swept up in the tail end of the hype?)
Cyberpunk made me remember why I normally wait to buy games. I played it for under 2 hours before requesting a refund. It only performed decently on a GTX 1080 when set to look like a 10+ year old game and the mouse input was atrocious. Felt like there was both input lag and acceleration. Also the dialogue selection controls were pretty stupid. Q/E to navigate up and down? Why not W/S? Or even better, direct selection with number keys. (I know it sounds minor, but if I'm going to be making many dialogue choices during the game, it should be ergonomic)
How much of that was active dev time. I guess they spent half that time just in the concept stage. I also have to question why you would try to develop your own engine for such a project. Had they used Unreal they can at least point to Epic for all of these porting issues.
Considering steam can never run out of copies, I don't see the need to ever buy a game particularly a bigger game, ASAP.
I'll give it a year or so, the game will still be available to purchase it won't be in a much better state.
I keep reading the worst about cyberpunk on hn but when my soulmate played it (on pc) they really enjoyed it and only stumbled upon very few bugs. As for seizures apparently it had a warning at the start about them.
4-5 hours through on a ps4 and it crashed twice, with one or two graphics glitches. Im really enjoying it and think it looks amazing, but then again I walk around slowly so maybe missing the rendering issues.
Obviously though there are some issues effecting some players far more than others, could have got lucky.
I'm playing it on an Xbox Series X and have only run into a couple bugs that weren't game-breaking.
What surprises me is how lackluster the visuals are compared to last-gen games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima. I'm playing both on a PS4 Pro and Cyberpunk doesn't hold a candle to either of them graphically.
I just finished playing The Witcher 3 on Xbox and feel Cyberpunk is far far below the visual quality of The Witcher. Partly because the HDR is so washed out, but there simply isn't nearly as much detail to it.
It seems to me that PS4 version has to be significantly worse than Xbox version because otherwise I don't see where the issue comes from.
I play it on Xbox one S and don't experience any kind of game breaking bugs. On the other hand at least on XB one S the first loading screen is completely messed up which makes one question how that could possibly pass Microsoft's QA.
This is not true. I played it at launch and there were no warnings and contained the seizure inducing Brain Dance sequence. It was fixed about 3 days into me owning it.
The press coverage for Cyberpunk seems to be far worth than what you usually see for games similarly bugged at release, especially for a game with good review on PC.
Then again, it's a Polish game from a studio with no American office and apparently with little regard for the current trend in American culture (cue The Guardian review). I didn't
really expect less.
It's frankly absurd that people are trying to pin this on the media. In the past two weeks, CD Project Red:
- Told gamers the game "runs surprisingly well on consoles", which is very euphemistic to say the least
- Didn't give reviewers any review codes for the consoles, meaning console players could only find out about the game's horrid performance on consoles on launch date
- Didn't allow reviewers to post their own footage for the first review embargo, meaning the first wave of reviews only had B-Roll ad footage from CDPR
- After they were caught with their pants down wrt console performance, told customers they could get a refund without consulting the platform, so Sony was stuck holding up a deal they didn't know about
CDPR used every scummy tactic in the book, and yet still got glowing reviews from the press: the game has an 87 on Metacritic right now, and it had a 90 for a few days after launch. Most reviewers praised the game and expected the bugs to be patched. In fact, in my experience the media has been far more positive about the game than actual players! And this is after they failed to deliver on several core promises. It is honestly hilarious that fans of the game are trying to pin the well deserved negative reaction from the general audience on the media.
(And I do have to point out the incredibly funny move of trying to pin this as a "culture war" thing. Yeah, people hate the game because of "SJWs", not because CDPR literally lied to their customers multiple times. Great deflection tactic.)
Cyberpunk 2077 had a budget of over $300M the flack it's getting is because CDPR is no longer some small time studio that is known for good attitude towards DRM and a very long term support for it's titles.
When your game development costs outclass that of GTA 5 and probably in the ballpark of RDR2 and you release this mess after delaying the game by a WHOLE YEAR you'll get flack because you deserve it not because you are Polish.
That's not what the flack in various reviews is about. Read some of them on metacritic. The GP is right, those who rated it low often didn't do it because of the bugs, but because of "this near-future dystopia shows people having to make desperate decisions to survive." .. yeah, thanks. Who would've thought.
> The GP is right, those who rated it low often didn't do it because of the bugs, but because of "this near-future dystopia shows people having to make desperate decisions to survive." .. yeah, thanks
Can you point to such reviews? Of course, random people on reddit or your family don't count, since GGP mentioned media.
No on takes The Guardian seriously... the sex and violence isn't what people are complaining about, TW3 had plenty of that and there plenty of kooks that complained that middle ages central Europe didn't had enough diversity despite the fact that it's a fantasy setting with a bunch of other races...
I wonder how much of that criticism is due to them not being an American company with chummy friends to those reviewers. The amount of negativity for some aspects is very wierd, especially when you compare it to the other years blockbuster: Call of Duty Cold War.
CoD features an all white male cast, there's no whiff of female or LGBTQ representation. It's also horrifyingly xenophobic and repaints the history in a grossly nationalistic manner. Those were all issues that were brought up in connection to Cyberpunk even though that game is significantly less horrible in every aspect.
And yet somehow that wasn't a problem for CoD at all when dishing out ratings.
Given the behaviour outlined in the post, I'm not sure if that is the population they were trying to cater to - and if it was, it doesn't look like they tried very hard.
Reviewers aren't stupid enough to piss off the CoD crowd.
I enjoy CoD games, but all those issues you mentioned are selling point for the game. Look at what happened to The Last of Us 2, then multiply that by 1000 because CoD players are much more militant in their beliefs that the "PC police" are taking the fun out of everything.
> it's a Polish game from a studio with no American office and apparently with little regard for the current trend in American culture (cue The Guardian review)
The Guardian righty criticized Cyberpunk for misogyny and xenophobia. The idea that these concerns are just some quirk of Anglo-American culture which is alien to Poles is an idiotic, offensive, condescending assertion which manages to be equally wrong about both America and Poland.
Honestly, the criticisms about misogyny and xenophobia that I've read (and I've read a lot of them) are extremely low-effort and bland. The story of the game and it's environment is strikingly negative about what is happening and doesn't for even one moment dip into approval. Of course, this is easy to miss if you just spend 30m looking around and all you see is a corporate hellscape.
Both The Guardian reviewer and yourself, must've not played the game through. The Guardian mentions misogyny in context to female sex workers (in the game "dolls"), but the reality is that there's an equal amount of male "dolls" within the main storyline (at Clouds) and throughout the game.
And if there is any misogyny displayed within the game, it's from scumbag characters. Emphasizing that the attitude/perspective is rooted in scumbag thinking.
I read the comment you just flipped out over as suggesting that the developers weren't tuned into to the current performative hypersensitivity and outrage that is fashionable among members of the American Left and those who pander for their clicks — not that Poles as a people are somehow more misogynistic or xenophobic than Americans.
You are just full of shit. Kaczynski wouldn’t have described LGBT rights as a “threat to Poland” if it weren’t for all the brave Polish activists who do in fact care about these things. 30% of Poles support same-sex marriage.
The idea that the governing party of Poland speaks for all Poles is just fascist bullshit.
if only 30% of poles support same-sex marriage, doesn't that support the position that poland is not as concerned with LGBT issues as the west? in america, which is hardly seen as a bastion of social justice, that number is more like 60%.
it seems like a reasonable proxy to me. most people who care about LGBT rights also care about misogyny and xenophobia, or at least claim to. this is what they call "intersectionalism".
LGBT is an ideology, not "a rights package", so it's perfectly normal no reject it. All shamed eastern EU countries have working anti discrimination laws years in place. Even gay people hate LGBT, look at Jozsef Szajer example.
You have no women in your society concerned with misogyny? I know for a fact that isn't true as I work closely with several Polish women (residing in Poland). Perhaps they are not representative of others, but I doubt very much Poland is free from misogyny and that women don't care either way. The idea that 90% of the world doesn't care about something that affects 50% of the population is a reach.
And the idea that nobody cares about xenophobia also seems unlikely. It's a less diverse country, sure, but the debate around migrants in Poland have been public and at times quite emotive. Maybe it's all smoke no fire, but it when Jaroslaw Kaczynski helped the PiS rise to power while denigrating migrants throughout, you can't help but be doubtful that xenophobia isn't meaningful to some of those smaller pockets of non-native Poles in your country.
EDIT: I do not know if these concerns are merited within the context of the game itself. I have not played Cyberpunk 2077. I only take issue with your belief that misogyny and xenophobia are of no concern to people in central or eastern Europe. It sounds like an opinion of someone without such cares personally, not someone who can attest that such cares are unwarranted.
I cannot reference your exact comment because it is now flagged, but I believe you said people in Poland don't care about that these issues are only concerns to a very small but influential niche of Westerners. I do not believe I misrepresented what you wrote, though I may have misrepresented what you meant.
But then I read the rest of your comment and I feel comfortable that I didn't misread anything at all. In fact you make that clear at the end:
> And in the meantime people in Poland live everyday lives, not caring about all that stuff.
I know Polish people that do not think like you. I don't take them to represent the entirety of your country, nor do I take your word either. I'm not really going to debate the topics, nor do I care to defend myself against the imagined caricature you've conjured of me. I just think your claims to represent the reality in Poland do not square with the reality I know others live or behavior that is plainly evident from your major political party in power. Of course that party doesn't represent everyone anymore than Trump represents most Americans, but it evidences something real and tangible.
I wasn't trolling, I was reacting indignantly to what I perceived to be a blatant overstep on their part by claiming to speak for Poland. I know they do not, because I personally know and socialize with Polish people and also know - as a direct result of that - a bit of Polish political news.
I am not here for any "SJW" debate as everyone else seems to keen to get into, nor do I care to litigate Poland's track record of immigration as I lack either interest or competence to do so. I do not doubt or question that Polish has a different cultural disposition than more Western countries.
Broad strokes are not useful for real discussion (e.g. replace ‘eastern-European’ with ‘blacks’ or ‘Jews’ and you will see how it reads to your audience.)
Why are you being downvoted for telling the truth?
Eastern Europe is extremely xenophobic and misogynistic. Have you seen the far right rallies in Ukraine and other eastern european nations? It doesn't matter that the Nazis murdered them years ago! A significant minority of the population of Ukraine is embracing nazi iconography! Seriously!
Listen to how the hungarian, romanian, polish or virtually any other eastern european nations head of states talk. These are not the friends of social justice warriors.
It’s true that Central and Eastern European governments have lagged behind North America and Western Europe when it comes to sexual freedom and LGBT rights, and that reactionary views are more widespread in those societies. The problem is that the Republicans in America is exactly as misogynistic and anti-abortion as Law and Justice in Poland. It is quite likely that Roe v Wade will be turned over in America in 2021. These things are not static and can change dramatically in a decade. Trying to make this about national attitudes is a mistake that only leads to confusion and misunderstanding.
And with Poland and Hungary especially, the government has become strongly anti-LGBT in response to increased public support for LGBT rights, as part of a general authoritarian far-right ideology. This complicated political development with a homogenous expression of Hungarian/Polish society.
And in the case of CD Projekt Red in particular: for starters, you can’t claim “golly, those humble Poles just have different views than you American folk” when your game is set in America, is clearly about American culture, was heavily marketed towards Americans, and prominently features major American actors. And CD Projekt Red has repeatedly apologized for their transphobic GOG ad campaign. They are not hicks who are unaware of some Ivory Tower concern by elite American liberals. They are in fact fully aware of what they are doing and they made a moral choice.
We care for the real struggle with LBTGQ rights like being murdered. But most of us are annoyed and upset by the woke theater of getting offended that most of the american activists are busy with.
> There are tons of game stores, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM provide a refund policy. Why would you whine about your game ? Just. Get. A. Refund.
Uh, what?
Until this announcement, SIE flat out refused people getting refunds. On Steam, you have to have played for less than 2 hours to qualify for a refund. Returns become extremely limited or downright impossible for opened physical games.
This would be a non-story if Sony (and Steam) didn't have such customer-hostile refund policies. Valve in particular had to be sued in several countries in order to accept refunds... they are class A douchebags.
You're not understanding the market though. You're talking about it like it's a tool. Instead, it's entertainment and hype - a combination people emotionally invest in.
They're not upset the tool can't do the job; they're upset that their emotions are left hanging. It's a movie without a climax. It's Game of Thrones. A refund doesn't touch on the core of why people are upset with Cyberpunk in the same way that a refund wouldn't matter for the people upset with the last season of Game of Thrones.
Marketing for Hype is a dangerous game. CDPR is experiencing the result of emotion based sales when combined with under delivering.
For what's it's worth, I would never invest my emotions in a product (aka: i would never pre-order and follow the hype). That's "How to get disappointed 101".
I do not expect miracles from movies/games/whatever. I let them surprise me (aka: no trailers, no reading reviews, making my own opinion of the material).
If I was expecting to buy only good games, either I would not buy a lot or I would be disappointed a lot.
Like Boghost said, people review games like toasters. They expect feature lists and expect it to work.
Others engage with them as media. Both ends are valid, but often in conflict. A game like this brings that into contrast hard. Even the games developers wanted more time in the oven.
>There are tons of game stores, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM provide a refund policy. Why would you whine about your game ? Just. Get. A. Refund.
If you start the game, even for a second, Sony will refuse a refund on a digital download. CPDR would not allow footage of the game on PS4 to be shared, and called rumours of poor performance "fake rumours". If you boot the game up and within minutes find it an unplayable mess, there was no remediation. (Of course, now Sony has offered blanket refunds for the game; I'm just providing context for the outrage over the anti-consumer behaviour.)
> Après avoir acheté ce type de contenu sur le PlayStation Store, vous avez 14 jours à partir de la date d'achat pour demander un remboursement. Si vous avez commencé le téléchargement ou la diffusion du contenu acheté, vous ne pourrez pas bénéficier d'un remboursement, à moins que le contenu soit défectueux.
> After purchasing [games] from PlayStation Store, you have 14 days from the date of purchase to request a refund. If you have started downloading or streaming the purchased content, you will not be eligible for a refund unless the content is defective.
The PlayStation store will only issue a refund if you haven't started downloading the game or the game is "faulty", which they don't define and may be hard to prove. The Xbox store refund policy is less clear but it is certainly not an guaranteed refund.
PlayStation Store: "you have 14 days from purchase to request a refund. If you have started to download or stream the purchased content you will not be eligible for a refund unless the content is faulty." https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/store/ps-store-ref...
Xbox Store: "All sales of Digital Game Products are considered final, but we understand there may be extenuating circumstances. When you request a refund for these products, and depending on the purchase or content type in determining refund eligibility, we consider a variety of factors like time since date of purchase, time since release, and use of the product." https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/subscriptions-billing/bu...
Edit: Now that they are offering refunds, you are correct. People should stop complaining and just take their refund.
Preorders cannot be refunded after 24 hours have passed on Sony PlayStation Network, due in large part to people canceling preorders when early reviews of games show that they're terrible and/or buggy.
Incredible. And I don't think this is something a year of patches will be able to fix. Also, I hope this is a wake up for the review industry at large who has largely overlooked the glaring issues that extend far past the bugs.
The performance issues might be fixable the gameplay issues won’t be.
The combat is broken and gets really really boring, the AI is buggy as hell and too simple and it almost seems like they used the same AI from TW3 and it doesn’t understands guns.
You can hide behind cover and headshot everyone with the sniper rifle on hard 10-15 levels above you can kill everyone with one shot.
I’ve one shotted a boss with the sniper rifle (the kingpin looking pimp guy) whilst the quest was still rated as “very high danger”.
Other things are also simply mind boggling for example you can get a rocket launcher upgrade instead of grenades that has infinite ammo and no cooldown basically allowing you to spam as much as you want, you can also replace the HE/incendiary warheads with a tranq dart allowing you to basically one shot all human enemies too.
The narrative mechanics are also completely boring and they do not work.
And there is an extremely obvious solution to that that not only works perfectly from a narrative and story progression perspective but also introduces a lot of interesting game mechanics.
Everything you've listed here is patchable. The problems with AI (while definitely present) are extremely overstated. The AI flanks, uses their weapons at ranges you expect (shotguns up close, approaching with walls at the side, etc) and generally appears to work together. They won't write you a treatise on the nature of human suffering, that is true.
The core narrative is broken, I don't want to go into too much spoilers.
I don't know what AI you've encountered but it doesn't do squat it stays there to be picked off with a sniper rifle or a revolver especially if you use the slow time implant it's obnoxiously easy.
> You can hide behind cover and headshot everyone with the sniper rifle on hard 10-15 levels above you can kill everyone with one shot.
to be fair, this is an issue with pretty much every rpg-ish fps. if you're good at aiming, deus ex is also really easy with a sniper rifle or assault rifle with max damage upgrades. hide behind cover, preaim, pop out and one-shot someone, repeat. ditto for mass effect. the only real combat challenge in these games is the hp-sponge sort of enemy, which isn't really fun imo. the difficulty scaling only works under the assumption that the player is pretty bad at aiming.
There are plenty of fixes to this from AI behavior that flushes you out successfully to one that penalizes you being pinned down (cover fire + rush from melee enemies).
The game also has poor incentives to go melee, too many enemies can one shot you at close range with shotguns (as evasion is your main damage avoidance stat) and if you do want to go the melee assassin route you are essentially penalized for it.
For melee to work you need to have the Berserker implant which goes into the same slot as the Operating System which means you lose your quickhack abilities which are both important from a narrative perspective and also needed for stealth play.
The only way I have to sum this game up is one poor design choice after another.
It has all the right pieces or most of them, but it doesn't have the right glue and with all the puns in the world it needs more polish...
Not at all how i felt when i completed the game. It's buggy yes but Bethesda have released every single game they have ever made in way worse a state. I should know since i have completed those too. Strange how bugs in a Polish game with links to anti-DRM is getting so much flak when American games that are way way worse haven't for... well since back when a bad game could get 0 rating and not a 6 as they do now.
The core narrative is broken.
WARNING SPOILERS!!!!
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The whole Johnny schtick is an utter disgrace to RPG design, this isn't an RPG anymore it's a GTA5 wanna-be.
The prolog is great it works flawlessly the combat in it is also good which is suspect is because it's heavily scripted.
How this should've worked out is that the whole story of the chippening and Johnny should've been mechanically integrated into the narrative.
Firstly you are told you have two weeks to live but there are no repercussions to just fucking off and doing side quests for 6 months in game time. There should be a trade off between the power you can gain from doing missions and the damage the chip is doing to your brain.
Secondly the whole concept multiple personalities should've been a game mechanics it's a goldmine for a morality and loyalty system that actually fits perfectly within the nerrative.
You as a player get 3 options, Fight/Control Johnny, become Johnny or become something new this could've been the basis of a morality system that isn't good/evil and you could've essentially had 3 factions that represent your moral compass.
The people who knew V before the chippening, Jackie should not have been killed he should've served as the moral compass for old V, Johnny's old gang like rogue and the new factions/chars you meet in the game after the chippening like Panam and her nomad tribe.
I loved TW3 despite all it's flaws, and I've actually created a lot of mods for TW1 and TW2 I'm not American, my GF is Polish I actually know people who worked at CDPR on previous games so please stop with this whole poor polish schtick it's unbecoming, CDPR has no longer the benefit of being an indie/small studio when they are working on games with a budget of over $300M. Their long term support for their titles is admirable but it doesn't excuse the piss poor state of the game considering that Cyberpunk 2077 had a bigger development budget than freaking GTA IV and probably in the same ballpark as RDR2....
On one hand, I totally agree with you: your suggestions would make for a far more mechanically and morally interesting game, and it's a shame that the promise set out during the first two hours of the game doesn't really pan out in the end.
On the other hand, I still have not felt this immersed in a game world and character stories since... well, since maybe The Witcher 3, and before that Planescape: Torment and Terranigma.
Other games have done specific aspects better (e.g. original Deus Ex in terms of level design; Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of action; RDR2 & GTAV in terms of open-world sandbox; TW3 in terms of sheer story-telling quality.) However, I still find myself role playing my character in a way that I didn't do with any of those games. I have turned off my minimap and most HUDs to increase my immersion. I drive 99% of the time, instead of using the fast-travel system, because driving and listening to the radio is so damn immersive that I want to stay in that world. I actually care about what is happening to the various characters, even if there is little mechanical pay-off for following a particular path. The first-person camera helps create that illusion of being part of that world. There are bugs, yes, but even a t-posing NPC or a floating item is not sufficient to break that immersion.
As far Johnny... my character dislikes him. I oppose him on every turn. However, he still manages to get into my head, and convince me to do things that my character would not have otherwise done. There is no mechanical impact - yet he still changes my/my character's behaviour.
Is this a perfect game? No, far from it, even with all the inevitable bug fixes. However, no other game has created such an immersive experience for me in recent memory, if ever.
For that element alone, I am thankful for not buying into the negativity and giving this a try.
(Playing on Geforce NOW at Ultra/Psycho settings averaging ~40fps. No crashes so far. Input latency is fine - this is an RPG and the combat is on the easy side, so it doesn't really make any difference.)
I've encountered 100's of bugs playing through the game for about 25 hours ranging from annoying like you can't loot certain items because of how they clip with the ground, or you get stuck in scanner mode until your reload the game to completely broken quest lines and heck some perks break the game completely like the looting mods perk from droids once you have it you can't loot droids anymore you see the drop icons but you can't loot them.
I also had conversations get stuck because the UI doesn't load, scripted events bugging out etc.
This game is far more buggy than say Mass Effect Andromeda that was shat on by everyone for how buggy and well lame it was.
As for the RPG elements they are essentially non existent there is absolutely no impact to your choices, and most importantly you have no way of actually dealing with Johnny or anything else the way you want it it all ends up the same. There is absolutely no reputation factor here, street cred might as well be called XP since it's the same thing there should've been actual gameplay mechanic in which the way you deal with situations and missions actually impacts your street cred after a bunch of missions you would get a reputation say bully, maniac, white knight, hassler etc. that would change how characters react to you and the options you get or do not get in future situations.
This wouldn't be hard to actually implement but CDPR seemed to have dropped all RPG elements from the game which is ironically in line with some of the Glassdoor reviews from a couple of years ago: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-CD-PROJEKT...
As for the immersion I personally don't get it, driving just feels terrible (even with mods), there is no easy way to get new vehicles other than buying them, there is no vehicle customization and oh boy don't let me start on gear customization... I'm ok with the entire alt/punk look of the game but seriously some of the gear is just stupid I'm not kidding when I say I'm wearing a bathroom, a spiked braw, a gas mask, a pink bunny hat, diaper and loafers because of stats that to me is a major immersion breaker when your character is forced to look like that because of the sandbox.
The game deserves most of the negative reviews it got for being released as a buggy mess, it doesn't deserve the reviews of OMG they have dildos in shops and prostitutes.
But this game cost a fortune to develop it had a budget of more than $300M that's more than GTA 5, it had constant delays and it still released with so many bugs that other than management saying fuck it we don't care about our reputation there is no other explanation to why it was released at this time.
Even if CDPR wouldn't have actually decided to make an RPG out of it but released it as a polished product there would be no questions that this game would've been received we a lot of praise. The issue is that mechanically it is weak in so many gameplay aspects like crafting and combat, it's buggy as hell and it doesn't have really interesting narrative mechanics to compensate for those flaws.
TW1 was a horrible horrible mess when it was released, in fact without player mods especially those that change the combat it's still a poor experience but the story was great and you actually had to make good decision despite the limitations of both the engine and the studio at the time. TW2 was them basically trying to make a AAA game for the first time and almost nailing it, they had to make a lot of sacrifices to get it to run on consoles which is why it had about as much of a scope area wise as TW1 AKA Swamp and Back Again (with a detour to the fields of lag).
TW3 was, well something else the combat still wasn't that great without balance mods but the overall combat mechanics were deep and that is by a large part thanks to it's setting where you can have more "boss fights" than in a game like CP2077.
The enemies in CP2077 are boring because they are human there is so much you can get by making them into bullet sponges without having the same issues as games like The Division have where you can dump 5 whole box magazines of a light machine gun into someone's face without them dying. Honestly CDPR should've added many more bots and cyborgs into the game and gave them much bigger abilities it would make encounters more interesting while not breaking the immersion of you dumping 600 rounds into someone and only taking 30% of their health bar down.
I can only hope someone at CDPR is still left that appreciates these ideas and has them too and the CDPR will 2-3 years down the line release an enhanced edition of the game, sadly because they've decided to have Keanu play Johnny it will make things harder because adding narrative mechanics would likely require quite a few voice over changes, but maybe they'll be able to deepfake it by then who knows...
FWIW, I tried it on Stadia, NVIDIA, and a reasonably recent gaming PC.
Local (even on minimum settings) > NVIDIA > Stadia and there's a big gap on each of those. The game is already a little spongey / laggy, and an internet connection exacerbates that.
The amazing thing to me is that a game that has been in development for so long runs so badly on consoles that were new when development started.
I bet they spent a lot of time updating the engine and graphics over the past 8 years, and as a result the game barely runs on the hardware they were using when they started writing it.
I don't think they've been developing for the past 8 years. The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, and its DLCs in 2016. I think it's been developed in the last four years.
A lot of performance work often happens in the later stages of production, and said work is not something that has a very predictable payoff per time or money invested.
Considering how prelevant crunching is in the games industry, I wouldn't really draw conclusions. Apparently Red Dead Redemption 2 (among other Rockstar titles) also had massive crunch and it was released to critical acclaim.
Unfortunely those are the ones that keep the crunshing culture alive and push people aside from the industry, feeding on 20-somethings that want to prove themselves.
My sympathy goes to the iGDA members trying to fix this.
The game seems really cool, but is way too rushed. I'm sure that for Dec 2021 it will be very cool to play. The Witcher 3 was full of bugs as well when released, but at least was 90% playable.
In some ways, this reminds me of the No Man's Sky launch. Massive amounts of hate from gamers, bad reviews, bad press, on and on. They overhyped and under-delivered.
Four years later, they've released half a dozen major updates, fixed hordes of bugs and have seriously made the game 10x better than it was at launch. It is now fully the game that was originally promised and more. It's also gone on sale with a major discount several times.
Now that may be an extreme scenario, but if a little shop like Hello Games can do it, I think CDPR at least has a shot. I will be happy to wait.
Bugs are one thing but we live post 2010, so patch culture is the norm. Everyone knows the bugs will be fixed, they just have to wait, hardly anyone will refund for it. They'll play other games for a couple months.
The game on PS4 running at 720p, texture replacement, drop in, you can't fix this like No Man's Sky, and the best thing to do is refund. At a certain point you hit the hardware wall of a graphically intensive game.
Your thoughts are exactly what I've been thinking lately. NMS was the most recent game I was immersed in, before Cyberpunk's release, and thoroughly enjoyed.
The thought that it was buggy as hell on release, and for some time after, seemed far-fetched during play through. There are bugs here and there, but nothing to pay much mind to.
While playing Cyberpunk, there were quite a few bugs on release for PC (crashing, catching enemies in t-pose, randomly dying, and some others), but I'm noticing them less and less. Idk if whether it's them updating or just my mind, but definitely encountering fewer and fewer bugs.
Only personal complaints I have are not related to performance (not a big fan of Johnny Silverhand's character/writing and wasn't a fan of the Panam quests/story, but that's insignificant).
Enjoying it quite a bit now, but could totally see, and look forward to, this being even better with updates. It's just a shame that the devs had to deal with crunch :/
A few of the game's alleged shortcomings I've read about are worse-than-expected AI (with both bystanders and opponents), a lack of truly divergent paths to follow (in dialogue or quests), a non-immersive game world outside the main storyline and poorly designed combat.
All of these could be improved with enough time & budget in future updates, and any one of them would make it a 'more finished' game. At this point I think CDPR will be under major pressure to do more than just fix bugs. A lot of gamers want to see significant changes in the gameplay itself, and I expect it will happen. After all, Hello Games has set expectations pretty high-- and with 1/40th of the employees to boot.
Well, you see, Cyberpunk 2077 is based off of a 1988 tabletop RPG named “Cyberpunk” that took place in 2020.
They wanted to release in 2020 to honor this significance. It has nothing to do with lying to consumers and maximizing profits from a holiday season during a pandemic with new consoles and hot new GPUs. /s
> It has nothing to do with lying to consumers and maximizing profits from ...
CD Project Red is a For-Profit company (like EA, Ubisoft, etc...), please stop defending them when they have clearly lied to old-gen gamers. They are not the paladins of gaming as their great marketing reinforced when waved the success of The Witcher 3 (btw great narrative, but what a shitty combat system). Missing the holiday season for them would have impacted their short-term revenue and deflated the hype-train. Actually, they did something worst, but I'm 100% sure that they will recover: they know how to do games. Their brand is clearly damaged and their message "look we are the saviour of gaming" is lost forever.
Right? Like how could you make this many bad calls to get your game to the point that one of the main platform holders has yanked the game off the store and issue refunds. CDPR rushed it out the door to get that end of fiscal year revenue (unless I'm mistaken) and satisfy impatient investors, only to lose a lot of good will with their fan base, miss out on game of the year awards and recognition, and to be a meme generator for people to poke fun at the game. Yikes, that's a series of unfortunate events and some really bad management. Someone should get the chop over there.
I imagine they're going to be losing a lot of goodwill with the investors as well, after saying that the game runs "surprisingly well" on the PS4 and Xbox One, and how that despite announcing that customers can choose to get a refund, they're not "encouraging gamers to get refunds". And now due to that announcement, Sony has pulled the game entirely from the store since CD Projekt just diverted their angry customers to Sony's customer service reps.
Yeah I was tongue in cheek, I would bet that leadership will not be held to account, as that is by and large an anomaly in today's world. I'm going to buy some of their stock if it drops a little further, same as I did for Boeing.
For all the negativity surrounding this game I have mostly positivity for Google Stadia. I bought the game + free chromecast & controller and Stadia has truly surprised me. It's amazing how low the input lag is on a streamed game.
For this game in particular the bugs and performance issues don't seem present as they are on PS4 and Xbox One.
Anyone know if GOG will process refunds? My cloud-sync has been munted from the get-go. Via Geforce Now the files have gone missing between sessions. Not to mention the numerous bugs I've encountered making certain missions unplayable (unable to advance, AI stuck behind cover etc.)
It should have never been in there in the first place. No matter how many disclaimers you pop up, you shouldn’t be intentionally showing a seizure-inducing pattern of lights.
I've played through this section before and after the patch and I have to say that the original seizure inducing effect looked a lot cooler. I don't mind it being replaced with a milder version, and I would have never noticed if the game released with it from the start, but having seen the original I'd like an option to switch back to it based on just how cool the flashing lights looked.
> you shouldn’t be intentionally showing a seizure-inducing pattern of lights
I think the intention was to show a cool flickering that looks like it'd mess up your brain (which is somewhat the intent of BD in game). The fact that the flickering also caused seizures, is clearly an oversight.
> I'm not sure there's any evidence to suggest it was intentional.
From the original article calling out the problem.
>>>
When "suiting up" for a BD, especially with Judy, V will be given a headset that is meant to onset the instance. The headset fits over both eyes and features a rapid onslaught of white and red blinking LEDs, much like the actual device neurologists use in real life to trigger a seizure when they need to trigger one for diagnosis purposes. ... This is a pattern of lights designed to trigger an epileptic episode and it very much did that in my own personal playthrough.
<<<
Emphasis mine.
> What possible reason could there be for that?
Probably for the same reason devs model decapitations and other deadly effects off real world references: using real world lighting patterns that are known to effect the brain adds a sense of authenticity to the world.
Even if the intent was not malicious, the device and lighting pattern are too spot-on to be mere coincidence.
Oh, I'm aware of the problem, and I agree that it was a terrible oversight. I'm just saying I don't think they actually intended/expected to cause players to suffer epileptic attacks because that would probably result in the biggest lawsuit in history.
I've played ~20 hours on PC, and what I dislike most is the long, downright tiring dialog sequences. It's like, half of the game is just sitting there, watching a movie, where you press "1" or "2" to decide what V says.
I'm so not surprised. I've worked in a mobile game shop before and seen how pushing ends up with devs getting burnt out. They've been pushing now for years, probably since the very beginning. That kind of thing will just grind everyone to a crawl and if it doesn't ever let up then your team will just be crawling forever. You have to let people get into the rhythm of development and the key is setting reasonable expectations of your team based on what you know that rhythm to be. All the hype here, all the pressure to put out a great game, can be detrimental to development without proper leadership filtering/framing it.
Early access is usually great for multiplayer games. For single player, story driven games, early access serves as a way to spoil the game for customers who intend to buy at release.
ye but for sandbox games I feel like its pretty important because the scope of them is far too broad (especially if you add in all the platforms and languages).
Maybe save the main questline as the first major piece of DLC to avoid that problem?
I was planning on holding off on getting this for my Xbox One X until I can get ahold of a Series X, but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to hold out. But now there is no way I am playing this game for six months or whatever it takes to make it a good game on consoles.
On PC it is a pretty decent game, nice missions, very nice graphics and art. Personally I like it better than other open world games that I played. It feels more immersive than most of them, as long as you don't go out of your way to break the immersion. In GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2 it is far more fun to create havoc than to play any of the missions in Cyberpunk 2077 there is basically almost no point doing anything but the missions, but I still feel far more connected and invested in the character than in either of the two other games.
> In GTA and Red Dead Redemption 2 it is far more fun to create havoc than to play any of the missions
While non-storyline gameplay is definitely more fun in Rockstar games, I think the mission and sidequest gameplay is way more fun than CP2077's as well.
It involves a car chase, NPCs jumping in and out of moving vehicles, a boat mast swinging into traffic, shooting while driving, etc. This is all done smoothly, with no animation glitches or jankiness.
So far in my admittedly short ~12h playtime of CP2077 on PC I haven't seen anything equally as engaging, well designed or just plain fun. Most of the missions involve shooting galleries interspersed by cutscenes to showcase action set pieces, and there's a lot of on-rails shooting from the passenger seat, which feels like gameplay from several generations ago, not from a next-gen title.
I don't understand complaints that it shouldn't be compared to GTA given that CDPR themselves describe it as an "open-world action-adventure story", so comparing it to games that set the bar for open-world gameplay is only fair, and in my opinion it falls very, very short on those terms.
Just like it does on its RPG elements. Like others mentioned, it falls short when compared to even the original Deus Ex, let alone the more recent installments. This is probably why CDPR decided to avoid marketing it primarily as an RPG in 2019: https://i.imgur.com/oDldUQQ.png
All in all this was a massive disappointment for me, and I actively avoided trailers and marketing to avoid the hype. Even if all the bugs and performance issues are fixed hopefully a few months from now, the gameplay will still be mediocre at best. The only thing I'm partially still interested in is the story, though from what I've read that seems to be underwhelming as well.
People here argue whether it's a terrible game or not. I think such a division is a sign there's something seriously wrong with a game. I don't remember anything like that when RDR2 came out. Fallout 76 or No Mans Sky on the other hand...
I never said a game developer should lose their job. Someone, or several people in Product and Marketing absolutely should though.
CDPR share price is down an absolutely staggering 40%+, absolutely massive hit to the company valuation, Sony has an egg on their face and has to issue refunds for this unplayable mess, and all for what, because management decided the game had to be released prior to the holiday season rather than a working product because they wanted holiday sales, which they're now losing money on via refunds?
I don't work in game development but in my industry, that is absolutely grounds for putting some heads on the chopping block.
I don't even think we should call for it then. Everyone makes mistakes, and maybe even the best managers couldn't have done better in 2020, as it was. I think almost everyone should be given a break this year.
I'm not sure I agree with that. CDPR intentionally barred reviewers from reviewing or even _showing footage_ of the console versions prior to the release. They knew it was a completely broken console experience but did not want consumers to make an informed decision on their purchase, so reviews were only allowed to use footage from high-end PCs.
This is shady business practice at best, downright unethical/scamming at worst. If CDPR considers themselves to be a respectable studio some heads should roll for this debacle.
Is it chock like in “chock full” or chalk like “chalk it up” (like on a chalk board?) Sorry this isn’t adding to the conversation, but I’m genuinely curious.
This game seems like the perfect candidate to buy late. Just wait a few months, maybe a year, it will probably be discounted at some point and it will include tens or hundreds of patches by then.
Been watching someone play the game, recorded stuff on youtube, and i`m really enjoying it.
Better than movies.
Anyway i`m there for the art and lore, the full experience is not worth spending thousands on a dedicated gaming hardware.
Skilled player is using a high end gaming PC to run the game, there are some bugs but nothing too serious.
- This is the first time ever Sony has pulled a game from Playstation Store. The game has literally caused Sony to review their policies.
- CDProjekt worked on this game for 8 years, with employees crunching for several months in exchange for a share of the company's yearly profits. It's worth mentioning that the latter happened during a global pandemic.
- The game's release was delayed several times, leading to more crunch.
- The game infamously failed to add seizure warnings at launch.
Other huge failures I can think of are Brink back in 2011 and No Man's Sky more recently, but this is orders of magnitude worse.
CDProjekt reported that they've recouped the cost of development in hours after sales started. Financially, it's a smashing success. What's the lesson here?
I'm not convinced having a good reputation in the game industry matters. Either people don't care or they forget the instant they see that hot, new demo.
Publications already indicated that the Stadia version is good, if that is what you are alluding to.
"It may be hard to believe, but the Google Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 may be the best way to play for most players right now. Unless you have a 20 or 30 Series Nvidia GPU or comparable AMD card or you were lucky enough to get a PS5 or Xbox Series X / S, this game will not be performing anywhere close to how it was designed to."
Interesting. This was, essentially, one of the goals of Stadia---consolidating the software and computation centrally should allow the Stadia version to run on whatever hardware is necessary to make it run well.
Interestingly, I've read somewhere here on HN that Stadia (which runs on Linux) version is basically a PS version (= FreeBSD version), stripped from dependency on Sony's libraries (and, from what I've got from the reactions, also with better graphical settings).
You might know more about this than I do. Regardless, it does sound like the Stadia version is running well, which is probably a result of it running on hardware that is actually capable of running it, unlike the previous gen consoles. The current gen consoles are also having better luck running it.
Guess I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm 40+ hours in on PS4 with no major issues except for a hard crash every few hours. Which is SUPER annoying when it happens, but I'm not seeing a ton of glitches otherwise outside of little things like talking corpses.
I find the strong backlash weird considering how customer-friendly CDP generally is and how well regarded Sky rim, a vastly buggier game from a predatory company, is.
Cyberpunk 2077 was released on PC, Stadia, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
It performs quite poorly on the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and basically to get a good console experience, you need a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series, where you'd play the game in backwards-compatible mode (there's no PlayStation 5 / Xbox Series versions yet).
CD Projekt Red never showed any footage shot on the consoles and didn't send out any review codes out for the console versions before release. All of the reviews that came out before the release were for the PC version and even the PC version wasn't allowed to show any recorded footage in their videos (only the publisher-provided B-roll).
The game is also quite buggy and unfinished as well, on every platform. Many were also disappointed by the actual game. There's for example some talk about the AI, which is rather subpar.
Combine the poor performance on the consoles it came out on, the deliberate attempt at hiding the true state of the console versions, the multitude of bugs and glitches and some of the lackluster aspects of the game, and you'll find yourself with a lot of upset people.
As to why Sony is giving refunds, I'm guessing it's because CD Projekt Red made a statement promising big patches for console versions next year. However, in the same statement, they said that people who didn't want to wait could "opt for a refund" and should contact Microsoft and Sony for digital refunds.
However, we later learned that there was not agreement between CDPR and Microsoft/Sony, and they were just talking about the standard store refund policies. In Sony's case, you can't get a refund if you've already downloaded the game. This lead to a lot of people being angry at Sony for not getting the refund they were "promised". On Microsoft's side, people were getting mixed, but slightly better results.
Seems like Sony decided to go with the nuclear option after getting bombarded with refund requests after CDPR's statement about refunds.
They're not pulling it due to seizures, they're pulling it due to CDPR offer refunds, when the Sony policy is explicitly no-refunds if you have already played the game.
>Sony policy is explicitly no-refunds if you have already played the game.
Oh, it's worse than that. Sony policy is no refunds if you've even downloaded the game. I bought the last of us 2 over the summer, and reading more about the story line, I wasn't ready for it. I tried to get a refund, and sony denied it. I hadn't even started the game.
i7-10k 1080Ti 32 Gb RAM latest nVidia drivers. Not a single crash since launch. Been playing many hours a day. I saw a few glitches, but overall extremely stable and bug-free considering the amount of detail on screen. It's too bad they weren't able to optimize for older gear on launch.
It crashed a few times on me but never in missions or while I was doing anything important. Have a 1080 GTX and 32gb RAM it runs very well at 1080p and pretty high graphics settings.
Running P67 chipset with 12gb ram and AMD 5600XT with Intel I7 3K and updated non beta windows. Is at my second playthrough without a single crash or need to reload. Rock solid. Your rig is faulty.
You don't know how he is playing the game... for example one way to crash the game is if you are doing a crafting build, mass manufacture items for sale, and attempt to sell them all at once, the game has a massive memory leak on the inventory screen that seemly is combinatorial too (seemly it reloads the inventory screen whenever you sell a item, and keeps the old inventory memory alongside the reloaded, so the increase is faster than linear), when it runs out of RAM it crashes.
Does anyone remember The Witcher: Enhanced Edition ? This strikes me as similar, potentially. For those that weren't around back in 2008, if memory serves CDPR earned a lot of good faith in the video game community by investing heavily into making an already released game (The Witcher) much, much better, and then releasing it for free to anyone who bought the original.
I know that AMP contains stories about how reviewers were misled, or duped into misleading prospective buyers of the game. Maybe it's true, but I take anything that shows up from AMP with a good pinch of salt.
All I'm trying to say is not to write it off yet. It doesn't seem to be an irrecoverable disaster, not that I have played it or will play it in the next decade, probably.
Obviously CDPR is more directed to the PC Gaming scene, where the game actually excels apart from some bugs.
Most people who critizise this game are in the gaming scene for the trends or just failed to see other RPGs being launched.
RPGs are games very complex, every one launched until now that is considered good also had a rough launch like this one (being hyped AF also didn't helped...).
Also, people shoulnd't expect a next-gen game to run well on prev-gen hardware, specially when we're speaking on the PS4 flat released back at 2013.
This game has numerous issues, even on PC. The menu UX is horrendous, there are numerous ridiculous bugs concerning characters T-posing, clipping through world geometry, animations failing to play or have key objects characters are supposed to interact with floating in random places.
These taken together make the game seem like a sloppy mess, regardless of how much money they appear to have poured into the rendering pipeline.
The fact that the game is such a disaster on current gen consoles should not be excused when a game’s production cycle has predominantly been during those consoles existence. Why are we letting companies off the hook when they advertise a product and fail to deliver, because we perceive that hardware as being unable to handle it? Rockstar has excelled at launching games of a similar complexity across multiple console generations. GTAV ran on hardware 2 generations old so let’s not pretend that this is out of reach for a AAA developer with hundreds of staff. I have little sympathy for a major developer and publisher failing to live up to the hype that they created or courted, and leaned into up until a disastrous release.
I played for 35 hours and I haven't noticed that much issues and some glitches even make me laugh.
Meanwhile in Watch Dogs Legion Microsoft Store went against their policy to give me a refund because the game was basically unplayable. But for some reason I don't see the media doing all this chatter (and Watch Dogs Legion was presented as one of the next gen games...)
I mean, they basically failed on the most basic feature of a game: the saving system. Game plain failed to save, had no save game button or whatsoever costing me 6 hours of gameplay or even more. Imagine getting back to a game and finding out you lost all your progress.
Meanwhile in Cyberpunk 2077 it's the ocasional bug here and there, but nothing game breaking like the crybabies are saying.
I have the experience you are describing except with the opposite game. I have sunk like 80 hours into Watch Dogs Legion and it is entirely bug free there's nothing remotely game-breaking about Watchdogs Legion.
> Microsoft Store against their policy to give me a refund because the game was basically unplayable
They went against their refund policy? What was the reason?
As for the game, I'm personally having fun with the main and side quests. Unfortunately, that's really all there is to the game and it feels like an Outerworlds-like game. If the cost of this game was 50% cheaper, I would definitely not be complaining. Still, it's sad to see that vehicles are all the same (except the ones you own yourself) and losing assets when looking away is always immersion breaking.
Game had a bug in PC and Xbox Series X where it basically failed to save the game progress after 20 minutes. I had 10 operators even a hitman and lost all my progress.
Took Ubisoft a month to solve this bug and the game was advertised as next gen optimized and they couldn't even get this right...
But yeah, people apparently only get mad about Cyberpunk having lower performance on last gen consoles...
Someday people will get angry because their i3 + 1050 GTX can't run games on ultra.
I mean that's the thing, some people say it's playable others say it isnt.
I mean haven't tried it and played on my Xbox Series X and it's fine. I'm not the usual console gamer, I just bought my first console and afaik these consoles aren't just plug and play anymore.
If a game is marketed towards PC and multiple consoles, I expect the game to run equally well on all platforms. This isn't the case. Stop relativizing the issues, please.
> Also, people shoulnd't expect a next-gen game to run well on prev-gen hardware, specially when we're speaking on the PS4 flat released back at 2013.
Everyone is piling on this, but this is _literally not_ the next-gen release. That's supposed to come as a patch that was slated for release next year - what has been released was explicitly framed as a PS4 / XboxOne release that ran on new consoles because of backward compatibility.
>> people shoulnd't expect a next-gen game to run well on prev-gen hardware
I don’t understand this sentiment. The game’s been in development for 8 years and was scheduled to launch before next-gen hardware. They partnered with MS on a custom skin last-gen Xbox. The game plays in comparability mode in next-gen hardware. In no way was this billed as a next-gen game.
They announced that their next project would be based on Cyberpunk 2020 8 years ago. They only actively started development ~4 years ago. But yea, the original release date was way before the PS5 etc. where even announced.
It's so, so much more than that. Even if the game had no bugs, it's nothing like what it was presented to be. And no, not by the 'fanboys' but by CDPR themselves.
I'd probably have bought the game on discount if I knew it was, much like Witcher 3, a mediocre game in most ways other than visuals, and in some ways actually a step down from their previous title.
But I bought this one on preorder because it was presented as not just 'The Witcher 3, but Cyberpunk and wonkier in most ways', but a game that would do an open world well, and so much more.
Normally I don't preorder games, but I gave CDPR the benefit of the doubt. The fact that Sony, of all companies, is actually offering refunds, should make it clear that this game is terrible. It's fine that you enjoy it, but why try to argue it's all 'blown out of proportion' or that 'fanboys expected too much'. Can't you just enjoy the game without needing validation?
I'm interested in preorder culture. Did you preorder to support the development financially, or did you preorder for some kind of bonus or other personal incentive?
This is not a next gen game. The console version is for PS4 and XB1; people playing it on the new consoles are using backwards compatibility. A next gen version is planned but hasn't been released yet.
The game is functionally broken in the consoles it was built and released for; only PC is having an acceptable experience.
What makes it a 'next-gen' game, apart from its seeming inability to run on current gen? Development started before current gen even existed, so it's reasonable to expect that it wasn't initially intended for next-next gen. If development took too long, the publisher should have been honest and dropped support for current gen rather than releasing a broken product and hoping no-one would notice.
> Also, people shoulnd't expect a next-gen game to run well on prev-gen hardware
What a ridiculous excuse. If a developer releases a game for a console, it should run well on that console. If the game is too fancy for the console then it shouldn’t be released. And if the developer insists that the game runs well on a given console, but they never release screenshots and it turns out they were lying, then their behavior is truly deceptive and inexcusable.
This Barnum-esque idea that it’s PS4 owners’ fault for letting CD Projekt Red rip them off is gross. Although it’s pretty funny that the suggestion always comes from people who think they’re defending CD Projekt Red.
1) Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
2) It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone. Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
3) There are some bugs and quirks, depending on your platform and luck. I haven't had any major issues, though I know for some it's just unplayable at the moment. This will likely get much better after patches hit.
On a personal note, I like the game a lot. Yes it has its quirks, and I generally feel it's a less refined/polished game compared to what Witcher 3 was, but still it's an extremely fun, really well-made game. Combat is great, world is enticing, story-telling swings between good enough and great. For one reason or another whenever I launch the game another 5 hours passes without me noticing. FPS camera and general art direction also helps with suspension of disbelief, and the game is as immersive as it gets.
It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.