It seems that everybody seems to hate this game, or rather unfinishedness of it. Meanwhile, I am playing it since 2 weeks on PS4 (not Pro) and totally enjoying every minute it.
Yeah, I like it. I've seen some bugs, like NPCs walking 10 feet above ground, or vehicles clipping into each other. Nothing seriously immersion-breaking though, and definitely nothing game-breaking.
well it depends on your definition of cringeworthy but there's for example a huge difference between new vegas (good, from Obsidian Entertainment) vs. Fallout 3 (well, could be worse actually, from Bethesda). Cyberpunk feels quite mainstreamy in that regard (meaning its writing is not up to par to less mainstreamy RPGs). Well, if we're on the topic: The writing actually is pretty bad. There's a lot of talking without saying shit. I mean how difficult must it be to put some real character into the characters? Meaning some semblance of real backstories and not just blips about how bad everything is without really saying anything. argh.
I may be biased as I picked it up after some time mindlessly grinding through Persona 5, which has an English translation that is perfectly functional but never amazing.
Not bias; it's fairly solid writing. Hardly a landmark or anything, but the characters actually have character, the plotline has sufficient depth to actually pay attention to (though by no means amazing), and perhaps most importantly of all, it doesn't try to stop you from playing the fucking game because it has a narrative to tell -- a feat accomplished very rarely in non-sandbox games..
TBC, it physically stops you from playing, but it's told in small enough bursts with sufficiently fast text rendering/animations that it doesn't feel like a real interruption; where most games will happily sit you through unskippable cutscenes and long monologues because gameplay is largely the means to reach the next narrative checkpoint
Sleeping Dogs, wonderful writing even if the plot wasn't philosophically deep or anything
Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.
But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.
I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...
I agree that the writing for the main quest was underwhelming, but there were a couple side quests that really stood out enough to redeem the writing in my eyes. Specifically, the Peralez and the Sinnerman quest chains felt really memorable, interesting, and engaging. It's a shame the main story wasn't up to the same the level.
The audience of gamers strikes me as perhaps the most immature, needlessly difficult group of art consumers in the world today. Even movies don’t get the same kind of petulant obsession and hostility that games do. I’m not sure if it’s just a consequence of gamers being younger or what, but it’s a major turnoff to me. The fact that CDPR devs got death threats because of game delays just says it all. Can you imagine something similar happening to a filmmaker?
> The audience of gamers strikes me as perhaps the most immature, needlessly difficult group of art consumers in the world today. Even movies don’t get the same kind of petulant obsession and hostility that games do. I’m not sure if it’s just a consequence of gamers being younger or what, but it’s a major turnoff to me.
It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.
Virtually all of the jobs in gaming will be for bigger budget games at large companies. The amount of revenue that COD or CDPR makes is vastly greater than any indie games.
> How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.
Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
> Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.
This doesn't make sense. What are the rules of music? Sure if you want something on the radio it's wise to follow some guidelines, but obviously that's not where the diversity is. You can make a song with no defined key or time signature, it can be hours long or seconds long, it can have no vocals, only vocals, or controversially, no sound at all. You could go on and on. Video games have not pushed the limits in this way.
What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.
That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.
Sony itself removed that game from the playstation store and still has not put it back yet, because it doesn't meet Sony's playstation certification requirements. I don't think 'gamers' are the issue here.
They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...
> They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...
Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.
Active steam users for this game dropped much faster than that of Witcher 3 (which was similarly/less flawed at launch) based on public steam data. So, there's lot of evidence behind the message.
Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.
Well, it was quite obvious becasue of two reasons:
1. W3 players count was in few thousands (maybe 10 thousands) - so it had mostly hard core fans of the franchise
2. W3 main campain is ~51 hours, and CP2077 has campaing for 25 hours.
And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.
Probably because most of the pre-orders had enough time to beat the game.
The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.
With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.
I’ve been playing it through Stadia (wanted to try out Stadia and Cyberpunk at the same time) and I agree people are hating on the game seemingly way out of proportion. It’s definitely buggy, I had to restart at one point because the game refused to allow me to reload in the middle of a fight, but claiming it’s fraud or “unplayable” is hyperbole.
I think people just got way too excited about from having nothing to do during this pandemic and then ended up really disappointed. I empathize with that but I don’t know, it’s a $60 game. That’s like four movies. I’ve enjoyed it more than the last four movies I’ve watched for sure.
I think one could randomly choose a Betheseda or Ubisoft release, and have a similar level of bugs.
I also played it through Stadia, because Google was having really good deals on Stadia. The first month was free (through a Google Music promotion), and buying Cyberpunk for $50 got you a Chromecast Ultra. I have actually been pleasantly surprised by how good the Stadia experience is.
- CDPR games haved worked well on Linux through proton in the past
- Stadia targets are very narrow set of hardware and I would assume Google added a couple of patches to make sure it plays well.
You probably still get the logic bugs that you see in all platforms but from everything I have seen it seems like once the games passes a "performance threshold" the graphics hold up pretty well.
At its core it’s a decent game. The issue is with so many bugs (many of which preventing a player from finishing a story quest) it’s hard to focus on the game when your copy keeps crashing, glitching, frustrating you.
I’m familiar. I think ES franchise is prone to this, so was GTA and RDR2. The issue is gamers expect an entire world of simulation and effect. Ambitious large open world games suffer from this as dev teams don’t have enough QA to test everything and dev’s have to test it themselves. This ends up with a “works good under these circumstances” which circumstances are different when players play it at launch.
It’s a hard problem. Extremely large open world, thousands of scripts and triggers and things to test. I sympathize. Gamers are the hardest genre of users to please.
I understand you. I have not played Cyberpunk but games from the TES family are extremely complex. It would be impossible for them not to have scripting bugs.
Do you have an example of a bug that prevents quest completion? I've been lucky enough to not run into a single one during my 100+ hours so far and I've been trying to do every quest. I worry that these things keep getting said without people actually experiencing them. I have several friends playing on PS4 without the reported crashes. Not saying you haven't, I just don't have any direct knowledge of the issues that have been reported and when it is, it's very hand-wavy.
I viewed such a bug on a Twitch stream. Avoiding spoiler details... The streamer was completing the Delemain (sp) questline and had to roll back to a save just before the decision at the end due to a softlock that happened in the scripted sequence after.
On PS4 I ran into a bug near the end of "The Pickup" mission where Jackie gets stuck inside the All Foods building. The next objective is to talk to him, but once you exit the building you can't re-enter or call him. I had to go back to a previous save a few times. Sometimes the game just crashes and I have to restart the console. There have been some other bugs that I just found funny, like once I was driving and all of a sudden the car was stuck hundreds of feet in the air and I fell and died when I got out. I've been enjoying the game though and the bugs haven't really bothered me too much, but I see how they could.
I only ran into one bug that prevented quest completion. Near the beginning of the game, there is a quest where you and Jackie have to pick up some equipment then fight your way out of the building. On my first attempt, Jackie got stuck in combat because he didn't recognize a dead as enemy as being dead, so he wouldn't leave the building for me to talk to him and finish the quest.
Games like this tend to have bugs that I can't understand. I recently played through an identical mission a friend of mine was having problems completing. In his game, on a different PC, the game crashes every time he initiated the quest. In mine, it worked without a hitch.
There's so many differences between our savefiles and our system configurations that the bug could be a combinatorial explosion of things without access to source code.
This is super common in videogames. When some significant amount of people are experiencing bugs with a game and you're not, you should defer to the judgement of the ones who are having problems.
I've ran into a couple of quest bugs, however most of them are about finishing things in certain order of operations, generally it will unlock the next task anyway, and then you can switch the target from the Journal.
Yeah I'm worried it'll just frustrate me. I got it for Christmas but I'm hoping for a patch before I install. Apparently there's one due in a week or two and another next month.
I played ~80 hours and enjoyed it more than any RPG I've played since the original Mass Effect trilogy. It looked great too, at medium settings on my 4 year old gaming PC.
It does seem like there were some legitimate issues on consoles, but I don't even know how seriously to take that given the insane disproportionality of the criticism that even the PC version has been getting. I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?
Presumably if it does end up in court, the truth will come out and CDPR will be sanctioned appropriately. I don't mean to say the release couldn't have been better, but from where I'm sitting it feels like 75% just another case of insane "gamer entitlement".
> I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?
I'm starting to think that some major players are capitalizing on the situation by bankrolling marketing and negative PR. CDPR stock has fallen dramatically and now they are facing punitive action from governments that on a level I've never heard of for a game studio.
I'm not apologizing for them. They should not have released what they did for the PS4. But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.
I guess we'll see if they get acquired at a deep discount by Ubisoft or something.
> But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X%
I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.
Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.
I wouldn’t argue with much of this on the face of it but I think people forget that this is a single-player RPG, not some game-as-a-service designed to support an endless grind. The fact that people are working through the content (of which 80+ hours is plenty, IMO) and then setting it aside to wait for DLC is perfectly in line with my expectations of how people engage with a game like this. Maybe they invited the comparison with grindy looter-shooters by having looter-shooter-style loot, but at its heart it really isn’t that kind of game.
Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.
I had the same experience. Open world games should have emergent gameplay or fun side content. 2077 doesn't really have either. You can't lead the law on a merry car chase, like GTA. You can't steal into people's homes to find goodies or start a battle with the town folk like Skyrim. You can't play a chill game of Gwent with a nearby NPC. You can't build a neat base like in Fallout 4. You can't go fishing or pelt hunting like in RDR2.
There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.
It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?
Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.
I would agree with you with the caveat of their PS4 (console in generaly really) release. It's one thing to release something buggy and promise to fix it later... but that console release was more akin to a bait-and-switch. It was not playable and any product released that like deserves regulatory action. You can't sell something for $120 that does not work out of the box and take a "we'll fix it later" attitude.
>But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.
Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.
Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.
Not really the issue, also anecdotal. Clearly a large enough base complained for Sony to pull it from their Playstation store, and they've never done that before.
The real issue is what was promised and teased and what was delivered. Honestly might border on false advertising. There are countless videos breaking down what was advertised in their promotional feature walkthrough videos and what was actually delivered (not even withstanding pretty glaring bugs and performance issues).
IMO The fact that they chose not to deliver review copies of the last-gen version until after the PC reviews were already in is the worst part of it. It seems pretty clear that they wanted to buy the game based on the PC reviews, when the last-gen version is clearly inferior.
I have the PS4 version (yes, base not Pro) and it's 900p-720p dynamically switching and 25fps, maybe 30 in better cases. Which is utter trash. It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube. Or listening to music in 64kbsp. On top of that the story doesn't save the game either which is mediocre at best especially compared to what was promised.
Then look at Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2 on the same console.
Same experience for me. It caused so much migraines, eyes pain and nausea that I had to stop playing it. Never had a game capable of switching so fast and erratically in the range 900p-700p and 28-15 fps to actually cause physical symptoms on my body.
I got a refund, bought the xbox version and played on xbox series s and it was actually pretty good even with graphics clearly "old gen"-level compared to the pc version.
I don’t think it is fair to compare it to Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2.
Both games have worlds that are mostly empty, with few buildings here and there. As far as I remember, RDR2 dropped to ~25FPS in Saint Denis on my PS4 just after launch (not sure now), and Saint Denis is tiny comparing to Night City.
I remember walking out of your apartment complex for the first time, and being really amazed at the number of NPCs walking and driving around. It's the first game I've played that actually made me feel like I was in a major city.
This game was not meant to be played on > 10 year old hardware. That's no excuse they shouldn't have released it at all on ps4, but still what did you expect ?
Exactly. The game supposedly looks beautiful, but I haven't seen that due to textures not loading well, general low resolution, and choppy FPS. And then I decide to switch to Red Dead Redemption 2, or a FromSoft game, or Battlefront 2 and see games that maintain decent FPS and graphical fidelity at a good resolution.
All of these games are cross-platform. It's possible. I just think the management of CDPR let everyone's pet feature into the timeline and marketing material without regard for the impact of delivery time.
I started playing it on Linux (Wine+vkd3d-proton), but I paused the playthrough - I'm waiting for some patches for spatial audio to land and also for a newer AMD GPU, they are pretty hard to get now. By that time the game will also accumulate some good amount of patches.
As a Linux gamer, I really don't get this whole drama and I appreciate that CDPR even provided the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance so they even added a whole new Vulkan extension to improve support for it.
I think game companies underestimate how much the game will be explored in detail even in the first week by the community, and mistakenly release incomplete content thinking it will be fixed without notice. I don't know but hopefully they patch and it keeps improving.
IMO the real issue is less that it’s unfinished and more that the product at its best doesn’t seem to live up to its lofty expectations (disclaimer: have not played it and don’t intend to until it goes on sale, just watched others and read a good number of reviews).
From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.
People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.
> watched others and read a good number of reviews
What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
First-hand reviews play an important role in the ecosystem, yes.
When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
I am not coming out swinging - my comment was very much about the reaction to the game and I never tried to pretend otherwise. I said my impression is that it's a B+ game at it's best, which means that its horrible technical failures and unscrupulous marketing are particularly glaring.
It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
Well I've played it and is has routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development. I was most disappointed that crafting is useless because I wanted to roleplay that skill tree. The game is so boring I've been playing Far Cry instead and Far Cry is trash. Coming from a Deus Ex background there is nothing there to Cyberpunk. However most people liked the game so what's the big deal, it works and the audience is mostly happy.
I agree it is a viable combat path. I meant economically, it's a lousy way to make money. That's what my character was turning into a tech weapon build, but I wanted to get rich from making things.
Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.
Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
I should have said trashy, though it is also super buggy and with poor quests/dialogue/etc. It's definitely a guilty pleasure of mine and something about the light RPG elements pull me in to completing the challenges.
I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.
If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."
The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.
The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.
On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."
I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.
I had trouble getting into the characters, especially Jackie. Outer Worlds characters drew me in much more but the gameplay was dry. I'll definitely go back to Cyberpunk when they turn on PS5 ray tracing.
Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.
There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.
Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.
I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.
I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and felt like Panam is up there on the list of top NPCs in gaming. Like, you genuinely feel like you're becoming friends throughout the missions.
I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.
Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.
Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.
It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
A whole lot of those NCPD missions amount to "kill these three-five bad guys." Yeah, they are in interesting spots, but I've cleared several of them in under a minute. Some of the "Assault in progress" can be done in <5 seconds late game.
I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.
Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
OK - I didn't buy into the lofty expectations and I don't think you're understanding my point. My point was that even a platonic ideal of Cyberpunk wouldn't have lived up to expectations - I was surprised by how mediocre the reviews of the plot and quests were - which is a major part of why the blowback about the technical deficiencies has been particularly intense.
> and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game
I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
I didn’t mean aesthetically so much as how vibrant the city feels (and again, I’ve only read about and watched the game). But traffic and pedestrians are far more brainless than even Vice City, the city itself is far less interactive or dynamic, and there’s way less opportunity for exciting emergent gameplay.
> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.
But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.
Yeah I'm with you on this. I installed it to see what all of the fuss was about and have been loving it. I haven't run into a single glitch or problem of any kind.
Easy there. A lot of people are having problems with this game, but not exactly everyone. There's just no way for you to know why you're having bugs and others aren't. That doesn't mean you get to just straight up claim someone else is lying about their experience.
I understand where you're coming from, but I reserve the right the call out an extraordinarily strong claim as questionable.
I stand by what I said. GP may not be lying, in which case I believe they have either only just started the game, or are not paying attention to its many readily reproducible, unavoidable glitches.
Okay, that's fair actually. There are definitely enough bugs in the game that aren't necessarily game-breaking but are absolutely frequent enough to see at least once throughout say, 50 hours of gameplay. I was arguing in bad faith by assuming you were accusing people of lying. My bad.
The specific issue is CDPR promised X and delivered X - 20. Objectively speaking, cyberpunk is a mediocre linear FPS with some light RPG elements. Your life path basically doesn't matter. You basically have little control over the story. The AI is worse than a game from 2005. The game otherwise is incredibly buggy. You are welcome to enjoy it, but most people did not.
Objectively speaking, you're being subjective. Most people actually did enjoy it (SteamDB rating: 77.65%)[1]. Also, a month after release, Cyberpunk 2077 is still the most active single-player game on Steam[2].
I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.
I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.
The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.
The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.
That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.
Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience.
I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.
And to have a counterpoint, I'm playing on PC and have a lot of fun. I've seen so far only one bug (Panams phone somehow freezed in mid air during her talking scene)
I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).
My PC experience was good too. I saw the "T-pose on a motorcycle" bug a couple times and I sequence-broke a mission once, but that's it. If 2077 had been enterprise software, it would be the smoothest and least-buggy enterprise software I had ever used by a mile.
It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.
I played the game on PC too, and for the first half or so of the game I agree, the first half of the game was more "very very unpolished and rough" as opposed to "broken bugs".
However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned.
While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build).
All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.
You are fortunate. I've encountered at least two dozen different bugs that were only resolved with a reload (or in some cases reverting to a previous save). And the crashes, my god. I would wager at least one crash per hour or two of play.
That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.
Yeah, I'm finishing up round 2 of the game and loving it with a few annoying bugs, but nothing that killed my joy. I'm finding it an excellent experience that's sucked me in way harder than any game in a long long time. I really left heart with the Aldecados.
We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice).
DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.
> It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience.
Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues?
On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.
Rockstar is smart in that it they don't hype up their games at all. You won't even know GTA6 is going to be released until the product is 6 months from finishing.
I think this is the crux of the issue - Rockstar seems to be pretty heavy handed in keeping their marketing department in check, it's a thing more developers and publishers need to learn. Early and inaccurate marketing is a liability - quantity does not equal quality and marketing departments generally feel like they're judged based on quantity (and often escape issues with over-hyping in favor of shifting blame onto developers).
> releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.
Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline.
They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.
I'm not sure that's actually true. Having worked in the industry, games do not always get better with more work and time. Some systems are just too complicated to fix fast than bugs get introduced.
> The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.
That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique.
It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.
I'm not suggesting it's unique, but I am suggesting that expecting them all to be delivered fast, high quality, and reasonably priced is a very tall order.
It's a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.
If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.
This isn't on the players. That's very much in the same line as blaming someone driving their car for the Gulf Oil Spill.
This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype.
They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure.
EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.
I think there were some really big marketing mistakes but most of the backlash on CP2077 seems to be over the insane levels of hype. I had pre-ordered this game a long time ago and it was genuinely fun on release, there are some bugged quests and I don't have a card capable of rendering ridiculously good graphics but it's playable and fun.
From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.
I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being "broken", most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it's literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won't refund it.
This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:
Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds.
Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?
Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.
Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.
Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.
That's sort of what I'm alluding to. Personal responsibility doesn't work when you need collective action, so something else needs to step in to fix this. Reminding gamers to not pre-order is pointless.
> Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.
What's curious, and I assume therefore legally-reasoned, is the consistent lack of preparation for blow-back by companies. Some part of CD Projekt Red knew the game was broken on older consoles.
It feels like the only real solution to this is to have legal QA documents, signed off on by QA (as factual) and executive leadership (as read and understood).
If there's a magically missing set of older console tests, someone in leadership goes to jail. If leadership publicly misrepresents the stability of the game despite knowing about substantial defects from QA reports, someone goes to jail.
Who cares about video games, but this is indicative of a broader social problem allowing executives to feign ignorance and create systems that deflect blame downward. Either you're running the company or not. And if you are... then the legal ramifications should ultimately land at your feet.
I waited for the reviews. When they were over 90% I pulled the trigger.
Now I realize I purchased a game that was reviewed on what it will eventually become a la No Man's Sky, not what it was on the day of review.
Sure, the crashing didn't affect me, my configuration was more or less normal I guess. Instead what I got was a hollow game that has a lot of hooks ready for eventual expansion sometime in future patches. That didn't deserve the 91% it had when I first bought the game.
I don't blame fellow gamers. I blame the reviewers.
Reviewers had the access media problem, it was discussed at length on the 1-up podcast. They can't be trusted, especially on AAA titles or they risk being shut out of preview copies on the next releases, which is bad for business. I just wait for user reviews, after a couple of weeks for the hype to die down and people to actually spend some time in it, then I generally look at the worse reviews first. Unless there's a compelling reason to have a game immediately (like its primarily online and all my friends are playing it), its better to be a patient gamer.
Without too much detail due to contracts/NDA/etc, slipping a release date is even worse of a bother for others down-chain also. There are planned times for manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, all that fun stuff for the physical versions of titles. All that would basically need to be re-dated from scratch. You can't slip one week, you have to slip at least a month. More for platforms that don't use standard disc formats which are not made locally. (Which hilariously, CP2077 already did slip a month before release.)
Even for digital games, there's still approval processes where the first parties would have to test the game out. This process involves scheduling people for it; you can't just go to the front of the line as there are other games that have been scheduled for certain slots. (Which hilariously, it was rumored that CP2077 was given the 'don't test, push live ASAP' treatment.)
At lastly, all payments from the platforms and retailers are based on the actual release date. Unless there's a specific contract, games are not paid until months after release. Physical preorders don't pay the developers, they just help with preventing over/under stocking. (And digital preorders are... functionally worthless beyond the psychological value.) The release date starts the payment timer. When hurting for cash, releasing can start that timer.
The processes above can really benefit abusers who decide that "making street-date" is the most important thing above all other concerns.
Stop announcing release dates until its 90% finished or all major bugs are fixed and you're just 3 months away from being ready.
Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.
From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they're a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an "early-beta" like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we're releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you're getting the beta now and we'll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I'm not sure if the game media would care.
There is also the component of building hype via marketing in order to generate pre-orders. With CP2077, they had made back the entire development costs immediately after launch. This means, refunds notwithstanding, that by the time your customers notice the state the game is in, you are already profitable, and have all the time in the world for PR damage control and patches.
I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you'd get patches from print media.
The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".
If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.
From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.
Does pricing, pre-orders, or online play have anything to do with this? It feels weird that a sports game can change a few names and ship a $60 title, but a company like CDPR goes through absolute hell and still ships a dud -- what's the incentive for that?
> From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.
The dynamic is the same in films, where all of the studio's profits come from a few blockbusters (sometimes called 'tentpoles'), and in publishing, where all of the profits come from relatively few bestsellers, and got that matter in venture capital, where all of the returns come from a few unicorns.
BTW, you might be interested to note that in film at least, the "work to the bone" component is largely missing (not that film crews don't work hard, they do), and that the film industry is unionized to the hilt (Screen Writers Guild, Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, etc. etc.), nor is pervasive unionization any sort of barrier to incorporating equity compensation (often in the form of residuals) for key talent.
> If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games"
This doesn't make sense. The game was announced 8 years ago, and it was delayed 8 months. The company said the product was ready and they published a product that was not ready. I've delayed my gratification 8 years for it.
Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations.
CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.
I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.
a lot of CDPR staff left in the wake of TW3 because of crunch and other various factors (presumably, they weren't as well compensated for such a successful title as they presumed they would).
CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.
This seems to be a longstanding trend in game dev houses across the industry worldwide, so the question is whether it was sufficient enough to cripple Cyberpunk development into its current state and whether the churn was worse than industry averages. It's not clear whether spending more money on developers would have been sufficient to make release better given Cyberpunk is the most expensive game in history and with only 30% of the budget spent on development.
It's very clear that spending more money will not retrieve talent lost - just because you're hiring more people doesn't mean the old, internalised expert knowledge from old staff can be replaced.
The graphical details are amazing and the art direction great in cyberpunk (disregarding the bugs and stuff on console). But it's very much a high production value game, but without the singular vision that would've made it an excellent immersive sim game (ala Deux Ex). And this missing singular vision is due to the lost staff that had this element for TW3.
> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.
Same here. I bought it on PC via GOG, and while it was rough and unstable, I happily put about 100hrs of game play into it.
Honestly, they should have released it as under-development on platforms like Steam that support such designations. It's pretty common for studios to release games in an alpha/beta state. At least that way, gamers would know that they are getting a potentially buggy release.
For consoles, they straight up should not have released it until v1.07 at minimum. That's where they really screwed up. The game is in a much less playable state on the PS4, and console gamers in general are used to a much more polished gaming experience.
I don't get how they would draw _so _damn _much attention to a broken game. The marketing team should have talked with development every once in a while...
Look at me! Look at me, I got these awesome new pants and I also shat in them.
> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.
I bought the game a few days ago and, apart from the NVIDIA RTX timed-exclusive, I haven't run into any issues with it. It's already a touch above the usual Witcher release.
It's also worth noting that, at least from my perspective, there was a vocal crowd begging for the game on account of "something to do during the pandemic, assuming bugs warts and all". I'm not sure if this is why they released an objectively non-functional game to previous-gen consoles, but I would be inclined to believe the excuse.
I think CDPR made a lot of serious marketing mistakes but hype building is largely organic - rando game reviewers end up being a large portion of the momentum behind hype trains.
The cyberpunk game subreddit was its own worst enemy: people were winding themselves up with hype that was never ever going to be even remotely filled, people speculating and dreaming about features and stuff that was patently never going to happen, etc.
I could honestly never understand this. There's been massive hype over this game for like a full year before release. But we didn't even know what the gameplay was even like until like a month prior to release because they had shown basically nothing of it aside from a few videos of V looking into mirrors and what not.
People should have learned this lesson after No Man's Sky. If people are merely conjecturing about possible gameplay and features that they don't even know will be in the game, they're going to be dissatisfied with the game.
I don't think the size of CDPR is the reason here. They are public company now. Which means they aren't lying to some potential players, but instead they are lying to the investors.
They made promises about work environment that weren't fulfilled.
They blatantly lied about previous gen consoles performance. PC gamers are used to games not running well, but main appeal is that games usually run within the baseline. CP2077 is unplayable on PS4 and XB1.
CP2077 isn't TW3 level of unfinished. I think CDPR has bitten off more than they can chew.
> I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games
The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC.
It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.
Even stock poor spec PS4 wasnt as bad as media would led you to believe. It runs at 30 fps with occasional drops to 20 fps and seldom/very rare 15fps, MUCH better than past critically acclaimed games like Control which shipped garbage running at literal _10 fps_. Ps4 will also crash on you once every ~5 hours, probably not fixed memory leaks. Still game saves often so its not a problem, more of an annoyance. Other than that its smooth sailing.
I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development).
From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam.
If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?
> Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process?
> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.
Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.
It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools.
Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.
Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.
Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.
tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools
> Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred
I think the absolute worst bug I encountered was because of this, but I don't believe the story pathway that triggers it was uncommon. In fact, that condition apparently has a major effect on the story later.
Basically it was part of a main story quest where you have to wait a day for a character to call you before the quest can continue. But I never got a call. I saw a lot of threads on the issue, and it seems the bug happens if you did some optional dialogue right beforehand. But unlike other optional dialogue in the game, this optional dialogue was really hard to miss. I had to actively run past an NPC to avoid it.
I ended up losing about an hour of gameplay from that bug :/
I agree with you that it was likely because they changed something last minute and never checked it again; a QA failure for sure. And my theory is the COVID situation made QA testing a nightmare. Still ... that bug was brutal. Every "wait for X to call you" quest after made me anxious.
From what I understand, they also promised a bunch of features that were never implemented. Maybe they're still to come, but it sounds like they are months away from fixing all the bugs, let alone implementing better AI and other things players complained about.
I bet it would have been met with less backlash if they delayed only the PS4/Xbox S versions. Players must expect some Day 0 bugs from games this large.
"Don't preorder games" is the new "year of the Linux desktop". I've heard it over and over but have seen no evidence that it's any closer to being a reality.
Absolutely the big studios should stop releasing broken games.
From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.
>If UOKiK finds that CD Projekt Red acting misleadingly ahead of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, and has not done enough to address the game’s issues, the developer could face a 10 per cent fine of its annual income.
I have no idea the merits of this investigation, but it is refreshing to see a potential punishment like this. Fines for bad behavior often end up as simple fees for rich people and businesses. If you want these financial penalties to serve as any type of deterrent, you need to make sure the perpetrators feel the financial repercussions.
Why government intervention is necessary is unclear. At best one has an implicit contract during a pre-order, which was violated due to its bugs. That anyone could seriously believe that any complex software will be "bug free" strikes me as risible. It seems to me that people are making a bet on a pre-order. No regulation is necessary in any event: this can be handled using class action law, and true egregious misrepresentations are kept in check in this way. These kinds of regulations are a jobs program for the officious personality and a way for politicians to seem relevant, but is mostly a form of or invitation to corruption, as the powerful influence the crafting of law to keep the small fry at bay.
Buyer beware, IMO. Wait 'til it's out, reviewed, etc., and then you'll know.
I'm not sure how in the weeds you are with this specific issue, but it isn't just that this game wasn't "bug free". It is unfinished in noticeable ways, it doesn't match some of the expectations set by CDPR, and the company took active steps to ensure customers wouldn't know how poorly the game performed on certain hardware. Once again, I don't know if that rises to a criminal level, but this is much more serious than someone not liking a game they preordered.
You might want to look at what happened to Takata. Their defective airbags killed several people, and the end result was that they were forced to pay about 250% of their annual EBIT. It was so much that the company went under.
Though, I'm fairly certain shareholders and Board members are the first to blame in this mess, by pushing/forcing the company to release an unfinished/unpolished game.
well in Poland CDP is known for crunch... they have reaaly bad opinion. As a pole I wish them well about stock market. As a gamer I wish them the worst after lying about last gen
Good faith question: Is CDPR worse than other games studios, or do they just get more flak because they claimed they were not going to have crunch anymore? I ask because game dev has been famous for crunch for at least the last 15 years.
Generally in Poland Polish companies are the worst employers in terms of using up employees and paying pennies, and also some times hiring on contract which doesn't give employees enough protection (in terms of pension, protection from being fired without severance package etc.)
In the middle is government job (like, policeman, teacher, clerk at the government building) - you get poor pay, but you get normal employment (so, firing = severance package).
And the best of all (in most cases, there are exceptions) is a foreign company that does outsourcing - you get good pay + a normal employment contract.
Most people in the Polish software industry works on B2B contracts, for 30-50% better pay. And we typically don't need employment protection, since there's a line of employers eager to hire us. "Normal employment contracts" are for losers (Ok, they are useful under some very specific circumstances e.g. when you have a newborn baby and need a lot of paid sick leave. Outside of that situation, you're simply leaving money on the table by choosing employment contract).
> Most people in the Polish software industry works on B2B contracts
I'm not sure if it is "most". In every company I worked those were outliers (e.g. max ~10%, and in current company it is only for HR/reception workers), but yeah, it is quite common.
But not all employers allow B2B contracts and if they do, it frequently involves some kind of worse benefits than the usual employee contract.
And different employers have different way of handling vacation (some don't pay for it, some do), so it is another caveat to watch for.
And B2B people are always the first ones to let go (they are hired, because of that "perk"), so you can find another job fast, but not always the one you want (e.g. further from your place).
Generally if your employer allows you to select form of employment it is quite good sign.
If the employer allows only B2B it is usually a way to cut costs for the employer and I would watch out.
As you can see I prefer normal, cosy employment contract, but yeah I have children so that probably influences my view.
I think you might be mixing two different things here: contract type and job type.
Yes, sometimes companies have spikes in demand, for example a project that's delayed and they want to temporarily add some new people. Of course they will use contractors for that, and then those contractors will be let go. But that should be communicated clearly during your job interview, that the role is only temporary.
However, many companies seek people for a long term jobs, and B2B vs employment contract is simply the matter of tax optimization. I know contractors working for the same company for 10+ years. They are definitely not the first to be fired.
I worked at one company, it hired contractors long term (I knew a guy that was there for 5 years) and then company wanted to optimize an go public (IPO).
They let go of almost all contractors on one day.
This happens because most contracts (actually all that I know of) are hired by a intermediary company (think Luxoft etc.) that hires those people. And those people are viewed not as a permanent cost for the company, they are treated (by the stock market or financial institutions) as a short-term cost (like "leasing", not sure if that the same name in English) you can stop buying the service right away.
And if company wants to look "fit", it cuts the "fat" (reduces the costs, but keeps the profits), and employees (both contract and job type) are a cost, the "job type" one have additional cost when firing (severance package) but contractual ones don't. So they are the easiest ones to let go in the process of "cutting the fat".
(And some of those contractors were later rehired as normal employees, after IPO).
The over 40 hours I've put into the game now have given me way more than $60 worth of enjoyment. Yes, I've encountered bugs, but overall I am really enjoying the game and the various quests.
I looked into the coverage in the Polish media and it looks like this headline is blowing it out of proportion.
Yes, we do have an agency here in Poland which, much as in many other first world countries, monitors consumer goods’ quality.
But all UOKiK did is signal that they are going to be looking into the matter. Not exactly an investigation - more of an inquiry. One made from complaints from dissatisfied customers.
If they were to find that the allegations are true, they would be entitled to taking 10%, but that is the maximum punishment and they would probably have to go to court to prove it all.
Other legal sources say this is would be an extreme sentence and that this almost never happens with UOKiK.
It's worth noting that Poland has no strong tradition of class action lawsuits, and consoles like Playstation 5 are not yet available. I mean, I can see one selling for the equivalent of $1208.
I fully expect 2077 to be a fantastic game sometime around winter or spring 2022 which is when I'm planning to get it. I get the desire to play something new but I'm only now finishing Witcher 3 and I really enjoy the polished experience.
The game is missing systems and features that were promised. Can you count missing consequences or police AI as bugs? How about driving physics? No NPC schedules? Gun down a gang night club and the same faction doesn't care in another area. What are security cameras for? How about traffic AI...
i mean, i don't know what you're talking about since i didn't even watch any gameplay videos except the post-launch memes :) that's exactly why I want to give this game 12-18 months to get properly baked, assuming CDPR won't get blown up by courts (personally i don't expect things get that bad).
Seems almost like an unpopular opinion, but I think Cyberpunk 2077 itself is really not that bad.
And on PC, it runs pretty well already.
I think the main issue is the false marketing w.r.t. last-gen consoles. Hyping their product more than they could deliver seems to be the reason they are facing this backlash. But who could condemn them? Others are doing great with this strategy, see e.g. Tesla with their "Autopilot" (last-gen console are some older European roads here).
People get their hopes up too much. I don't mean to "blame the victim" here, but at the same time I read all of the hype machine prior to a release and am not surprised that people are disappointed. Based on the hype and the expectations, nothing but the best game ever made will satisfy the crowd. This is the same for anything that is overhyped. Game of Thrones comes to mind as well. Everyone hated on the last season, but literally no matter what they did, it would be hated on.
People just need to relax, accept that things are imperfect, and enjoy the game once it is patched.
Telling people to relax is pretty much an ad hominem. Just because I'm disappointed and voice my criticism doesn't mean I'm being hysterical. It's art, I have opinions: season 8 was absolutely dreadful and cyberpunk is not as good as CDPR promised. The hype is a red herring.
Buy you don't release half cut movies, unfinished novels, unmastered songs. Technically you can, but not at full price after years of hype.
I think what happened here is that investors pushed the game to be out since it was xmas and the two console platforms were real hungry for a big title.
The irony is that if they just released it on single device then nobody would bat an eye. There has been plenty of just bad, unplayable games in history.
As buggy as the game was on launch, and as badly as this damages CDPR's reputation, I have not heard a single thing that implies they broke any U.S. laws. How this Polish office works, I have no idea, but I guess I'd be surprised if they came to a different conclusion.
So many apologists here. If you liked the game, that's fine. I did too. I'm lucky to play on PC. But there should be consequences for not delivering anything close to what was promised to customers that has paid in advance. Game companies cannot always get a free pass when it comes to customer protection.
Launching on those legacy consoles then was a mistake. As a PC player, I had no issues playing on a 3 year-old machine, it's about as buggy as the average huge RPG game (like Divinity OS, Skyrim, etc.). Then every week or two you get a patch.
Baldur's Gate 3 did better PR by releasing an early release version first, so the impatient can jump on it.
My personal feeling is there is so much effort put into this game, it's sad to see it spun as a dismal failure by a greedy entity. It must be demoralizing for the devs and artists and other staff members that worked on it.
At least on PC, there have been a few minor patches that fixed some of the most pressing issues like broken quest lines or the save file becoming corrupted if it surpassed 8mb (which apparently could happen very easily if you played a lot on the same save). The last was released 19 days ago.
A co-worker of mine that isn't known for playing video games says he's been playing a crap ton of it, on the XBox though. I don't know if the game was supposedly worse off on PS5.
If UOKiK got some reports from customers that something is potentially working against customers, then an investigation is started. This is not an exceptional case of CDPR that's under radar. It happens tons of times: Misleading labels, incorrect ingredients on some food, something is overpriced etc. And this is wonderful, as it is one of organization that can actually force a positive change.
But, 10% is a maximum penalty posted. For the instance [1] shows that in 2018 maximum penalty was 931k PLN (~300k $).
Another case [2] shows that penalty can be easily deceased if subject is cooperating (-50%) and further more decreased if subject takes penalty without court.
At the moment CDPR has done something extraordinary that is: extended refund policy for the title. Forcing that also on PlayStation (and taking ricochet by pulling title from the store). Providing a few hot fixes for very very fresh product and stating future work in next couple of months.
I do understand that players on base PS4 and XBOX are mad. And in my opinion UOKiK can help taking their side. But with such a complicated case, where lots of players do play and enjoy the game (even on these consoles). The 10% penalty is simply impossible. Also I don't know if it's is at all, as there is the refund policy in place.
Where CDPR really screwed up is not targeting last gen consoles as the primary development target. PC gamer folks are going to have to put down their pitchforks for a second, and bear with me.
From the business perspective if you want to make money you must target the lowest, most common, denominator. Game studios that do cross platform launches do the vast majority of their sales on console. It's not even close. Even with TW3, 70% of their sales were on console, and that was considered low by industry standards.
What CDPR has done here by shipping a broken game on last gen is to light a pallet of $100 bills on fire. It's possible they don't survive this as a studio, but it could very well be deserved.
Now Morgan Stanley appeared that they already bought over 5% of CDP stocks and I'm waiting for hostile takeover and gamers to cry again - or maybe not cause they are already blinded by their nice beloved corporations - and say goodbye to another independent studio. Well we'll see. Everyone believed that CDP is big studio yet if you see on CP2077 credits most of graphics / QA work was outsourced, 3-4 people were working on AI and only 1 on R&D software. They managed to make game on their own engine and launch it on 5 platforms at the same time that's impressive to me based on number of developers I saw in credits.
At the end it's always people fault. I don't say it's all ok with CP2077 game but people were so much depressed at the end of 2020 that even if this game worked they would be angry cause everyone demanded different things, probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems - all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas. If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great. I see that most of those who are angry wanted GTA in future and are now pissed that they can't play it like GTA and they're trying to make it GTA using various mods. You can just go and see what mods are most popular - those are mods that mimics GTA game. They're probably even not target group of this game and shouldn't play it but they're like junkies and even if you tell them that they don't have to play this game and they can refund they're be angry about it cause they want to play this game how they like it and they want to play it like GTA. That's insanity.
CDPR also owns GOG, the only major PC storefront where everything is DRM Free, at least for single-player. You can download installers from your web browser and use them without any internet connection at all, or any "client" to speak of. And GOG has been getting more and more AAA titles—Prey, Quantum Break, and Horizon Zero Dawn are all available right now!
They also have all of the Batman Arkham games! Can you imagine if Warner Brothers released DRM-Free versions of the Batman movies? That would be practically unprecedented, and yet it's relatively common for video games, largely because GoG has been pushing for it.
It would really suck if GOG got caught up in the Cyberpunk fiasco.
Really sounds like your being a bit of an apologist. The game is such a mess, both in terms of bugs and the mismanagement of perception. CDPR should have never released the game if they had consumer's interests in mind. Another year or so and the game might have been ready.
I'm saying you can skip it and not buy it and if you bought it you can refund it, it's not a shame to not like something. We're not robots, we're people and each of us have different demands.
Unless you're one of those junkies who want to play it now despite you don't like it. Nobody forces you to not wait a year.
Fortunately we're not living in totalitarian society yet.
But the price is not merely monitary. People buy things because they've invested an amount of confidence in the quality of something, not on a lark or some dispassionate experiment to find out whether something is garbage or not. That part of the price cannot be so easily refunded, and CDPR did as much as they could to get people to invest their non-monetary coin in their product. It's a kind of theft.
People mostly buy things they don't need. That's how corporate capitalism works. Most of things people buy, they drop second day and forget about it. To give a prosaic example - if people use phone for calling they don't have to buy new phone every year.
People are also conformists so they believe new is better. Most of them don't want to wait for this better to arrive, if they wait, they imagine things how this new stuff will look like and create false dreams.
They didn't invested time, they wanted to have things they imagined to be good - nobody imagine bad stuff for themselves. They lived in this imaginary world for long time and created pyramids and flying cars and as always at the end reality hit them hard. The bigger your imaginary world grow the bigger slap you get at the end - that's simply called life.
The real problem is people don't have much freedom these days besides internet and games due to how other things outside looks like. And world looks like this cause of the same people who think they live in the world they imagined not in the real world. The insanity grows bigger and bigger and sometimes blows. When it blows people are angry and fight. After that there is peace cause they go back to their imaginary world full of borders they already created.
I agree with what you are saying in your original comment, to a point.
For consoles such the PS4, the game wasn’t just glitchy, it was unplayable. You couldn’t complete the main storyline if you so desired.
I also agree with you that there were insane expectations - however Vice City had a better AI than this and it was self damage - but they released a game for current gen consoles, charged people for it, and it turned out the game was unplayable. That is a big issue.
It doesn't help though that marketing presented it like a GTA in the future. Story is IMO very weak. So weak story, weak open world... this is rather average game. I don't know how it ended up hyped so much.
Probably cause there is not much possible technology set in future oriented IP around so demand is bigger than media coverage. Decent movies you can count using hands, same with manga / anime. Books are a little better but book authors are mostly the same and not writing anything right now. RPG I know around 3 - maybe. Games are not many. Whole genere is very exploitable cause it's near future but hard to imagine and describe.
Now compare it with series about police / gangsters or war.
> They managed to make game on their own engine and launch it on 5 platforms at the same time that's impressive to me based on number of developers I saw in credits.
Although I appreciate the hard work of the developers and respect them for it as a developer, as a consumer I don't care if they paid 5 developers or 5000. I care about the final result, and the truth is I've never seen a game this broken (even though I played assassin's creed unity).
> probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems
Probably not, do you have any data to backup that statement? 41% of the sales are consoles[2] and the game is basically unplayable for xbox one, xbox one s, PS4 and PS4 slim. So broken that it was even retired from the play station store. So to get that 90% you would need 100% of the PC users happy and over 75% of the consoles users happy, which isn't very realistic if oyu ask me. And even on PC we can't assume 90% are happy, PC player base has shrunk 79% since launch[1] and those are the happiest users. The PC (again, the best one) has about 24.9 negative reviews in metacritic[3].
The story seems solid and I'm enjoying it so far, but saying that you can go through it without problems is simply laughable. I haven't had any crash so far but I needed to restart a few times because the game entered an unplayable state, such as being unable to pick a dialog, draw a weapon, or entering a location. And I've played less than 5 hours.
> all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas
I only opened it last week, the game is still unplayable.
> If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great
It's a videogame, not a novel, even though I appreciate a good story (and so far it seems REALLY good), and even if I think it's one of the most interesting cities of any videogame ever, I also expect proper gameplay. And even dialogs are kinda pointless, many times you have multiple choices that aren't actually choices and you end up in the same spot. The life paths so far seem useless and people who completed the game say they are useless. Which isn't necessarly bad because I also like linear games.
At least on xbox series X input is broken: sometimes after leaving a menu it keeps a previous state of the controller, sometimes some action cannot be performed god knows why, such as changing the camera in a vehicle, when a button can perform multiple actions instead of having a predictable order it seems to do a random thing (pressing B during a dialog sometimes skips ahead, sometimes crouches), etc.
Standing on some surfaces triggers weird behavior such as the character stuttering, the other day I stepped on an inclined surface and the character went projected at insane speed, etc.
Car physics are just bad, it's not a bug, it's simply poorly implemented, just do a slow turn, it's enough to be obvious how broken it is. A car doesn't turn like that. Driving at high speed is simply clumsy, it feels just bad.
NPCs do very stupid things even in missions where they're supposed to be scripted, etc.
No it's not insanity, the game is simply broken. I enjoyed The Witcher 3 a lot, way more than I enjoyed GTA V, and quite frankly I'm very disappointed. I believe it will be a great game if the fix it, but in the meantime I'm holding it for a few months until it's playable.
I don't know how much of that outsourcing is true outsourcing. CDPR has around 800 employees total and they've said they have 350[1]-450[2] people working on the game (estimated to be 500 in Oct 2019[3]). Much of that outsourcing might be CDPR hiring artists as contractors as part of the AAA industry's underpaying hire-fire cycle of development.
Living in Poland it was quite a surprise seeing a Polish company become a major success story in video games. Polish games failing time over time used to be a meme in Poland. That's why Witcher books' author wanted a flat fee instead of royalties. I suppose for people in the West CDPR was an indie darling, an unlikely hit plus relatively exotic setting. In Poland, it's a trailblazer and the definiton of AAA.
I played a little CP2077 and it's a terrible experience.
Things like the Police AI, they just arrive out of nowhere - unlike in GTA series.
Feels like CDP did not really think the game through and now, we're paying - us the consumers - for a product that is subpar to what we were told we'd be getting.
I'm fed up.
Back in the day I would pay $50 and get a game like Tomb Raider 3 - I would play for hours and hours and no patch ever was needed because...ya know you can't patch something that's on a CD-rom as easily as when you're on Steam or some other launcher. Maybe there were some texture glitches but I never felt like I couldn't complete a game because of some missing feature, or major bug in the story/gameplay.
Well now - 23ish years later, games come out and they're full of bugs - when will it stop?
Microsoft or Sony have a golden opportunity to come out as the champion of consumer protection here, by guaranteeing refunds if games don’t meet some quality standards. They could have independent quality reviewers (it works in almost every other industry) and make all contracts with publishers require the refund clauses. Perhaps ms/Sony could even sit on the money for a while after release (a few months?) to ensure companies aren’t defunct after a big release. If the game is a dud, the money is refunded.
Even if publishers fix critical issues, the stores could have a system of fines for games that aren’t good enough initially. If I buy a $60 game and it’s not acceptably playable until after the first 2 weeks - that’s a 50% refund and I also keep the game.
No publisher should get away with pushing a half finished buggy game a few weeks to soon just because the holidays are close. Basically there should be financial incentives in the console stores that always makes it less expensive to slip the release and fix the bugs. L
I’d like what they did to be a formal promise with a proper process. A guarantee from Sony that “with our console you’ll never pay money for a broken game”. I don’t think they have a public “program” for it.
> If UOKiK finds that CD Projekt Red acting misleadingly ahead of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch, and has not done enough to address the game’s issues, the developer could face a 10 per cent fine of its annual income.
Seriously?? 10 percent annual income for just a game that is somewhat broken on some of the platforms? Can we get this kind of fine for other companies (eg Facebook) instead of a slap on the wrist? Did Boeing pay 10 percent of annual income for the 737 max "error"?(of course not.) Bonkers.
Never played the Cyberpunk 2077, but having recently finished Witcher 3 GOTY edition, it seems there are still a substantial number of bugs in it. Some bugs even prevented me from finishing a quest.
Despite this, I still enjoyed the game a lot. I wonder why the reaction is so different this time, as CDPR is not known for their "perfect" gameplay. That said, given their style of releasing, I'd prefer playing it later for patches and free additional content.
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadrig:
- threadripper 1920X 12-core
- 2080ti
- 32gb ecc ram
I can deal with bugs, but the lack of depth constantly breaks immersion, and some of the writing is just really cringeworthy
Which games writing is not cringeworthy please?
That and the weird way that V rarely uses the pronoun "I" or "we"
It's not "I need help"
It's "Need help"
Not "We're going to have time."
"Gonna have a hard time."
Doing it sometimes is one thing, it's a manner of speaking after all, but for anyone who hasn't played it, it's more jarring than it sounds.
I get the sense they were going for a quick talker vibe, but it just doesn't fit at all in so many places where they do it.
It makes it feel like you're listening to the VA do a quick read through of each line before they actually record the line...
I may be biased as I picked it up after some time mindlessly grinding through Persona 5, which has an English translation that is perfectly functional but never amazing.
TBC, it physically stops you from playing, but it's told in small enough bursts with sufficiently fast text rendering/animations that it doesn't feel like a real interruption; where most games will happily sit you through unskippable cutscenes and long monologues because gameplay is largely the means to reach the next narrative checkpoint
Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.
But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.
I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...
I think that the issue isn't so much 'the audience' but the terrible work conditions associated with the gaming industry.
> It really holds the medium back as an art form
How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.
It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.
Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.
What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.
That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.
Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.
Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.
The game-hours-to-calendar-days translation won't be 1:1.
And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.
The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.
With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.
I think people just got way too excited about from having nothing to do during this pandemic and then ended up really disappointed. I empathize with that but I don’t know, it’s a $60 game. That’s like four movies. I’ve enjoyed it more than the last four movies I’ve watched for sure.
I also played it through Stadia, because Google was having really good deals on Stadia. The first month was free (through a Google Music promotion), and buying Cyberpunk for $50 got you a Chromecast Ultra. I have actually been pleasantly surprised by how good the Stadia experience is.
- The PC version is by far the most playable
- CDPR games haved worked well on Linux through proton in the past
- Stadia targets are very narrow set of hardware and I would assume Google added a couple of patches to make sure it plays well.
You probably still get the logic bugs that you see in all platforms but from everything I have seen it seems like once the games passes a "performance threshold" the graphics hold up pretty well.
[0] https://youtu.be/C5pHpQqhmR4?t=160
Look in the comments here.
You should see games from The Elder Scrolls franchise. Even in the latest version of Skyrim there still are game-breaking bugs they have not fixed.
It’s a hard problem. Extremely large open world, thousands of scripts and triggers and things to test. I sympathize. Gamers are the hardest genre of users to please.
If you trigger the exit dialogue before picking up your stuff, the quest line gets stuck.
That's the only actual showstopper I encountered in 60 hours of gameplay.
There's so many differences between our savefiles and our system configurations that the bug could be a combinatorial explosion of things without access to source code.
This is super common in videogames. When some significant amount of people are experiencing bugs with a game and you're not, you should defer to the judgement of the ones who are having problems.
It does seem like there were some legitimate issues on consoles, but I don't even know how seriously to take that given the insane disproportionality of the criticism that even the PC version has been getting. I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?
Presumably if it does end up in court, the truth will come out and CDPR will be sanctioned appropriately. I don't mean to say the release couldn't have been better, but from where I'm sitting it feels like 75% just another case of insane "gamer entitlement".
I'm starting to think that some major players are capitalizing on the situation by bankrolling marketing and negative PR. CDPR stock has fallen dramatically and now they are facing punitive action from governments that on a level I've never heard of for a game studio.
I'm not apologizing for them. They should not have released what they did for the PS4. But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.
I guess we'll see if they get acquired at a deep discount by Ubisoft or something.
I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.
Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.
Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.
There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.
It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?
Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.
Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.
Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.
The real issue is what was promised and teased and what was delivered. Honestly might border on false advertising. There are countless videos breaking down what was advertised in their promotional feature walkthrough videos and what was actually delivered (not even withstanding pretty glaring bugs and performance issues).
Then look at Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2 on the same console.
I got a refund, bought the xbox version and played on xbox series s and it was actually pretty good even with graphics clearly "old gen"-level compared to the pc version.
Both games have worlds that are mostly empty, with few buildings here and there. As far as I remember, RDR2 dropped to ~25FPS in Saint Denis on my PS4 just after launch (not sure now), and Saint Denis is tiny comparing to Night City.
This game was not meant to be played on > 10 year old hardware. That's no excuse they shouldn't have released it at all on ps4, but still what did you expect ?
I don't think it's a stretch to say people expected it to at least look better than it does.
>It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube
surely you mean like watching 720p Youtube :)
All of these games are cross-platform. It's possible. I just think the management of CDPR let everyone's pet feature into the timeline and marketing material without regard for the impact of delivery time.
As a Linux gamer, I really don't get this whole drama and I appreciate that CDPR even provided the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance so they even added a whole new Vulkan extension to improve support for it.
From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.
People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.
> routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development
Come on, man.
> watched others and read a good number of reviews
What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc
Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.
Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.
If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."
The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.
The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.
On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."
I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.
Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.
There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.
Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.
I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.
I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.
Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.
Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.
It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.
Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.
But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.
Then you are either not past the railroad stages of the very early game, or you have not been paying attention. Or both.
I stand by what I said. GP may not be lying, in which case I believe they have either only just started the game, or are not paying attention to its many readily reproducible, unavoidable glitches.
[1] https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/info/
[2] https://steamcharts.com/top
I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.
The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.
That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.
I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.
I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).
It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.
However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned.
While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build).
All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.
That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.
I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released.
Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.
We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice).
DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.
Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues?
On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.
Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline.
They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.
That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique.
It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.
If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.
This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype.
They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure.
EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.
From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.
This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:
Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds.
Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?
Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.
Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.
Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.
That's sort of what I'm alluding to. Personal responsibility doesn't work when you need collective action, so something else needs to step in to fix this. Reminding gamers to not pre-order is pointless.
What's curious, and I assume therefore legally-reasoned, is the consistent lack of preparation for blow-back by companies. Some part of CD Projekt Red knew the game was broken on older consoles.
It feels like the only real solution to this is to have legal QA documents, signed off on by QA (as factual) and executive leadership (as read and understood).
If there's a magically missing set of older console tests, someone in leadership goes to jail. If leadership publicly misrepresents the stability of the game despite knowing about substantial defects from QA reports, someone goes to jail.
Who cares about video games, but this is indicative of a broader social problem allowing executives to feign ignorance and create systems that deflect blame downward. Either you're running the company or not. And if you are... then the legal ramifications should ultimately land at your feet.
Now I realize I purchased a game that was reviewed on what it will eventually become a la No Man's Sky, not what it was on the day of review.
Sure, the crashing didn't affect me, my configuration was more or less normal I guess. Instead what I got was a hollow game that has a lot of hooks ready for eventual expansion sometime in future patches. That didn't deserve the 91% it had when I first bought the game.
I don't blame fellow gamers. I blame the reviewers.
Even for digital games, there's still approval processes where the first parties would have to test the game out. This process involves scheduling people for it; you can't just go to the front of the line as there are other games that have been scheduled for certain slots. (Which hilariously, it was rumored that CP2077 was given the 'don't test, push live ASAP' treatment.)
At lastly, all payments from the platforms and retailers are based on the actual release date. Unless there's a specific contract, games are not paid until months after release. Physical preorders don't pay the developers, they just help with preventing over/under stocking. (And digital preorders are... functionally worthless beyond the psychological value.) The release date starts the payment timer. When hurting for cash, releasing can start that timer.
The processes above can really benefit abusers who decide that "making street-date" is the most important thing above all other concerns.
Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.
From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they're a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an "early-beta" like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we're releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you're getting the beta now and we'll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I'm not sure if the game media would care.
The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".
If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.
Does pricing, pre-orders, or online play have anything to do with this? It feels weird that a sports game can change a few names and ship a $60 title, but a company like CDPR goes through absolute hell and still ships a dud -- what's the incentive for that?
The dynamic is the same in films, where all of the studio's profits come from a few blockbusters (sometimes called 'tentpoles'), and in publishing, where all of the profits come from relatively few bestsellers, and got that matter in venture capital, where all of the returns come from a few unicorns.
BTW, you might be interested to note that in film at least, the "work to the bone" component is largely missing (not that film crews don't work hard, they do), and that the film industry is unionized to the hilt (Screen Writers Guild, Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, etc. etc.), nor is pervasive unionization any sort of barrier to incorporating equity compensation (often in the form of residuals) for key talent.
This doesn't make sense. The game was announced 8 years ago, and it was delayed 8 months. The company said the product was ready and they published a product that was not ready. I've delayed my gratification 8 years for it.
But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates.
The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now.
I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.
CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.
I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.
CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.
The graphical details are amazing and the art direction great in cyberpunk (disregarding the bugs and stuff on console). But it's very much a high production value game, but without the singular vision that would've made it an excellent immersive sim game (ala Deux Ex). And this missing singular vision is due to the lost staff that had this element for TW3.
Same here. I bought it on PC via GOG, and while it was rough and unstable, I happily put about 100hrs of game play into it.
Honestly, they should have released it as under-development on platforms like Steam that support such designations. It's pretty common for studios to release games in an alpha/beta state. At least that way, gamers would know that they are getting a potentially buggy release.
For consoles, they straight up should not have released it until v1.07 at minimum. That's where they really screwed up. The game is in a much less playable state on the PS4, and console gamers in general are used to a much more polished gaming experience.
Look at me! Look at me, I got these awesome new pants and I also shat in them.
I bought the game a few days ago and, apart from the NVIDIA RTX timed-exclusive, I haven't run into any issues with it. It's already a touch above the usual Witcher release.
It's also worth noting that, at least from my perspective, there was a vocal crowd begging for the game on account of "something to do during the pandemic, assuming bugs warts and all". I'm not sure if this is why they released an objectively non-functional game to previous-gen consoles, but I would be inclined to believe the excuse.
People should have learned this lesson after No Man's Sky. If people are merely conjecturing about possible gameplay and features that they don't even know will be in the game, they're going to be dissatisfied with the game.
They made promises about work environment that weren't fulfilled.
They blatantly lied about previous gen consoles performance. PC gamers are used to games not running well, but main appeal is that games usually run within the baseline. CP2077 is unplayable on PS4 and XB1.
CP2077 isn't TW3 level of unfinished. I think CDPR has bitten off more than they can chew.
CYBERPUNK 2077: Lies, Excuses, & Sycophantic Fanboys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mKYZVtjgoY
CYBERPUNK 2077 - Early Reviews & CDPR TOTALLY Misrepresented the GAME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko33FH1IItI
CYBERPUNK 2077: INFLUENCERS & JOURNALISTS Are Also to BLAME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJk5TJx6Hq4
The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC.
It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.
You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.
Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.
From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam.
If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?
> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze...
Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.
Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.
Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.
Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.
tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools
I think the absolute worst bug I encountered was because of this, but I don't believe the story pathway that triggers it was uncommon. In fact, that condition apparently has a major effect on the story later.
Basically it was part of a main story quest where you have to wait a day for a character to call you before the quest can continue. But I never got a call. I saw a lot of threads on the issue, and it seems the bug happens if you did some optional dialogue right beforehand. But unlike other optional dialogue in the game, this optional dialogue was really hard to miss. I had to actively run past an NPC to avoid it.
I ended up losing about an hour of gameplay from that bug :/
I agree with you that it was likely because they changed something last minute and never checked it again; a QA failure for sure. And my theory is the COVID situation made QA testing a nightmare. Still ... that bug was brutal. Every "wait for X to call you" quest after made me anxious.
I bet it would have been met with less backlash if they delayed only the PS4/Xbox S versions. Players must expect some Day 0 bugs from games this large.
From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.
I have no idea the merits of this investigation, but it is refreshing to see a potential punishment like this. Fines for bad behavior often end up as simple fees for rich people and businesses. If you want these financial penalties to serve as any type of deterrent, you need to make sure the perpetrators feel the financial repercussions.
Buyer beware, IMO. Wait 'til it's out, reviewed, etc., and then you'll know.
More companies should be punished this way.
By the same standard, Peter Jackson deceived me and stole 9h of my life with the turd which is "The Hobbit".
Though, I'm fairly certain shareholders and Board members are the first to blame in this mess, by pushing/forcing the company to release an unfinished/unpolished game.
In the middle is government job (like, policeman, teacher, clerk at the government building) - you get poor pay, but you get normal employment (so, firing = severance package).
And the best of all (in most cases, there are exceptions) is a foreign company that does outsourcing - you get good pay + a normal employment contract.
I'm not sure if it is "most". In every company I worked those were outliers (e.g. max ~10%, and in current company it is only for HR/reception workers), but yeah, it is quite common.
But not all employers allow B2B contracts and if they do, it frequently involves some kind of worse benefits than the usual employee contract. And different employers have different way of handling vacation (some don't pay for it, some do), so it is another caveat to watch for.
And B2B people are always the first ones to let go (they are hired, because of that "perk"), so you can find another job fast, but not always the one you want (e.g. further from your place).
Generally if your employer allows you to select form of employment it is quite good sign.
If the employer allows only B2B it is usually a way to cut costs for the employer and I would watch out.
As you can see I prefer normal, cosy employment contract, but yeah I have children so that probably influences my view.
I think you might be mixing two different things here: contract type and job type.
Yes, sometimes companies have spikes in demand, for example a project that's delayed and they want to temporarily add some new people. Of course they will use contractors for that, and then those contractors will be let go. But that should be communicated clearly during your job interview, that the role is only temporary.
However, many companies seek people for a long term jobs, and B2B vs employment contract is simply the matter of tax optimization. I know contractors working for the same company for 10+ years. They are definitely not the first to be fired.
They let go of almost all contractors on one day.
This happens because most contracts (actually all that I know of) are hired by a intermediary company (think Luxoft etc.) that hires those people. And those people are viewed not as a permanent cost for the company, they are treated (by the stock market or financial institutions) as a short-term cost (like "leasing", not sure if that the same name in English) you can stop buying the service right away. And if company wants to look "fit", it cuts the "fat" (reduces the costs, but keeps the profits), and employees (both contract and job type) are a cost, the "job type" one have additional cost when firing (severance package) but contractual ones don't. So they are the easiest ones to let go in the process of "cutting the fat".
(And some of those contractors were later rehired as normal employees, after IPO).
Yes, we do have an agency here in Poland which, much as in many other first world countries, monitors consumer goods’ quality.
But all UOKiK did is signal that they are going to be looking into the matter. Not exactly an investigation - more of an inquiry. One made from complaints from dissatisfied customers.
If they were to find that the allegations are true, they would be entitled to taking 10%, but that is the maximum punishment and they would probably have to go to court to prove it all.
Other legal sources say this is would be an extreme sentence and that this almost never happens with UOKiK.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the main issue is the false marketing w.r.t. last-gen consoles. Hyping their product more than they could deliver seems to be the reason they are facing this backlash. But who could condemn them? Others are doing great with this strategy, see e.g. Tesla with their "Autopilot" (last-gen console are some older European roads here).
People just need to relax, accept that things are imperfect, and enjoy the game once it is patched.
Pretty sure they’re embarrassed by the first version.
I think what happened here is that investors pushed the game to be out since it was xmas and the two console platforms were real hungry for a big title.
Baldur's Gate 3 did better PR by releasing an early release version first, so the impatient can jump on it.
My personal feeling is there is so much effort put into this game, it's sad to see it spun as a dismal failure by a greedy entity. It must be demoralizing for the devs and artists and other staff members that worked on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but other than the day-1 patch hasn't there been only a single (quite minor) patch for this game so far?
You can't actually launch just for the PS4 Pro or the Xbox One X, you have to support all versions of the PS4 or the Xbox One.
Also the game doesn't run natively on the current gen consoles but through an emulation layer for previous console games.
But, 10% is a maximum penalty posted. For the instance [1] shows that in 2018 maximum penalty was 931k PLN (~300k $). Another case [2] shows that penalty can be easily deceased if subject is cooperating (-50%) and further more decreased if subject takes penalty without court.
At the moment CDPR has done something extraordinary that is: extended refund policy for the title. Forcing that also on PlayStation (and taking ricochet by pulling title from the store). Providing a few hot fixes for very very fresh product and stating future work in next couple of months.
I do understand that players on base PS4 and XBOX are mad. And in my opinion UOKiK can help taking their side. But with such a complicated case, where lots of players do play and enjoy the game (even on these consoles). The 10% penalty is simply impossible. Also I don't know if it's is at all, as there is the refund policy in place.
[1] - https://www.uokik.gov.pl/download.php?plik=24030
[2] - https://www.wiadomoscihandlowe.pl/artykul/uokik-pol-miliona-...
TL;DR; UOKiK does that as requested and expected from them, but is very unlikely that 10% penalty will take place.
From the business perspective if you want to make money you must target the lowest, most common, denominator. Game studios that do cross platform launches do the vast majority of their sales on console. It's not even close. Even with TW3, 70% of their sales were on console, and that was considered low by industry standards.
What CDPR has done here by shipping a broken game on last gen is to light a pallet of $100 bills on fire. It's possible they don't survive this as a studio, but it could very well be deserved.
scope creep.
That's the only answer. There are tons of other failures, but scope creep was the biggest.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-12-10-cyberpunk-...
At the end it's always people fault. I don't say it's all ok with CP2077 game but people were so much depressed at the end of 2020 that even if this game worked they would be angry cause everyone demanded different things, probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems - all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas. If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great. I see that most of those who are angry wanted GTA in future and are now pissed that they can't play it like GTA and they're trying to make it GTA using various mods. You can just go and see what mods are most popular - those are mods that mimics GTA game. They're probably even not target group of this game and shouldn't play it but they're like junkies and even if you tell them that they don't have to play this game and they can refund they're be angry about it cause they want to play this game how they like it and they want to play it like GTA. That's insanity.
They also have all of the Batman Arkham games! Can you imagine if Warner Brothers released DRM-Free versions of the Batman movies? That would be practically unprecedented, and yet it's relatively common for video games, largely because GoG has been pushing for it.
It would really suck if GOG got caught up in the Cyberpunk fiasco.
People are also conformists so they believe new is better. Most of them don't want to wait for this better to arrive, if they wait, they imagine things how this new stuff will look like and create false dreams.
They didn't invested time, they wanted to have things they imagined to be good - nobody imagine bad stuff for themselves. They lived in this imaginary world for long time and created pyramids and flying cars and as always at the end reality hit them hard. The bigger your imaginary world grow the bigger slap you get at the end - that's simply called life.
The real problem is people don't have much freedom these days besides internet and games due to how other things outside looks like. And world looks like this cause of the same people who think they live in the world they imagined not in the real world. The insanity grows bigger and bigger and sometimes blows. When it blows people are angry and fight. After that there is peace cause they go back to their imaginary world full of borders they already created.
For consoles such the PS4, the game wasn’t just glitchy, it was unplayable. You couldn’t complete the main storyline if you so desired.
I also agree with you that there were insane expectations - however Vice City had a better AI than this and it was self damage - but they released a game for current gen consoles, charged people for it, and it turned out the game was unplayable. That is a big issue.
Now compare it with series about police / gangsters or war.
Although I appreciate the hard work of the developers and respect them for it as a developer, as a consumer I don't care if they paid 5 developers or 5000. I care about the final result, and the truth is I've never seen a game this broken (even though I played assassin's creed unity).
> probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems
Probably not, do you have any data to backup that statement? 41% of the sales are consoles[2] and the game is basically unplayable for xbox one, xbox one s, PS4 and PS4 slim. So broken that it was even retired from the play station store. So to get that 90% you would need 100% of the PC users happy and over 75% of the consoles users happy, which isn't very realistic if oyu ask me. And even on PC we can't assume 90% are happy, PC player base has shrunk 79% since launch[1] and those are the happiest users. The PC (again, the best one) has about 24.9 negative reviews in metacritic[3].
The story seems solid and I'm enjoying it so far, but saying that you can go through it without problems is simply laughable. I haven't had any crash so far but I needed to restart a few times because the game entered an unplayable state, such as being unable to pick a dialog, draw a weapon, or entering a location. And I've played less than 5 hours.
> all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas
I only opened it last week, the game is still unplayable.
> If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great
It's a videogame, not a novel, even though I appreciate a good story (and so far it seems REALLY good), and even if I think it's one of the most interesting cities of any videogame ever, I also expect proper gameplay. And even dialogs are kinda pointless, many times you have multiple choices that aren't actually choices and you end up in the same spot. The life paths so far seem useless and people who completed the game say they are useless. Which isn't necessarly bad because I also like linear games.
At least on xbox series X input is broken: sometimes after leaving a menu it keeps a previous state of the controller, sometimes some action cannot be performed god knows why, such as changing the camera in a vehicle, when a button can perform multiple actions instead of having a predictable order it seems to do a random thing (pressing B during a dialog sometimes skips ahead, sometimes crouches), etc.
Standing on some surfaces triggers weird behavior such as the character stuttering, the other day I stepped on an inclined surface and the character went projected at insane speed, etc.
Car physics are just bad, it's not a bug, it's simply poorly implemented, just do a slow turn, it's enough to be obvious how broken it is. A car doesn't turn like that. Driving at high speed is simply clumsy, it feels just bad.
NPCs do very stupid things even in missions where they're supposed to be scripted, etc.
No it's not insanity, the game is simply broken. I enjoyed The Witcher 3 a lot, way more than I enjoyed GTA V, and quite frankly I'm very disappointed. I believe it will be a great game if the fix it, but in the meantime I'm holding it for a few months until it's playable.
References: 1- https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/318890-cyberpunk-2077s-pc... 2- https://www.futuregamereleases.com/2020/12/cyberpunk-2077-...
[1]: 350 in July 2018: https://wccftech.com/cyberpunk-2077-development/
[2]: 450 in June 2019: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/17/cyberpunk-2077-preview-and-in...
[3]: 500 in October 2019: https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3621721
Back in the day I would pay $50 and get a game like Tomb Raider 3 - I would play for hours and hours and no patch ever was needed because...ya know you can't patch something that's on a CD-rom as easily as when you're on Steam or some other launcher. Maybe there were some texture glitches but I never felt like I couldn't complete a game because of some missing feature, or major bug in the story/gameplay.
Well now - 23ish years later, games come out and they're full of bugs - when will it stop?
Even if publishers fix critical issues, the stores could have a system of fines for games that aren’t good enough initially. If I buy a $60 game and it’s not acceptably playable until after the first 2 weeks - that’s a 50% refund and I also keep the game.
No publisher should get away with pushing a half finished buggy game a few weeks to soon just because the holidays are close. Basically there should be financial incentives in the console stores that always makes it less expensive to slip the release and fix the bugs. L
I’d buy the console that did this.
I’d like what they did to be a formal promise with a proper process. A guarantee from Sony that “with our console you’ll never pay money for a broken game”. I don’t think they have a public “program” for it.
Seriously?? 10 percent annual income for just a game that is somewhat broken on some of the platforms? Can we get this kind of fine for other companies (eg Facebook) instead of a slap on the wrist? Did Boeing pay 10 percent of annual income for the 737 max "error"?(of course not.) Bonkers.
Despite this, I still enjoyed the game a lot. I wonder why the reaction is so different this time, as CDPR is not known for their "perfect" gameplay. That said, given their style of releasing, I'd prefer playing it later for patches and free additional content.