How did we get here?
Me as a patient gamer: “I dont understand the problem.”
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
you have a better experience for half the price or less.
And there are no downsides!
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
- It was straight up broken for many console players.
- Some PC players had performance issues.
- For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
- Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn’t - it’s GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I mean it WAS actually a broken mess from what I saw.
Im saying I always buy games on a deep sale well after it has been released so Im not particularly impacted.
Yeah, my point was it wasn’t a broken mess (except on last Gen consoles), but the gaming community blew its flaws out of proportion.
The game you’re playing as a patient gamer is close to the original with some polish.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
I did play it at release. CP77 isn’t very openworld, yet I had very few bugs in Skyrim on 360.
It was such a mess that Sony removed it from the PlayStation store and gave out refunds.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Yes, I explicitly acknowledged that the last Gen console criticism was warranted.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
Lot of missing features and loads of bugs. It just wasn’t what they hyped it up to be
This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
It had seven years of development before it’s initial broken release.
That’s not as long as you’d think anymore, it’s why the bigger studios have massive teams working on multiple games at the same time
It might not be the best move to hype and sell it to such degree that seven years of development time is not enough. Got too ambitious I guess.
its long enough to not have police or cars in races magically teleport behind you every time you look away.
Literally. Gamers be like
“No more crunch culture! Take your time and release when it’s ready!”
also
“Why do games take so long??”
yes yes, its the awful customers fault for wanting a product they’ve been lied to about.
God damn big bad evil customers!
Jesus fucking christ, the amount of corpo white knighting these big games get…
I mean ubisoft had the problem with all their games. Wait a year before buying a ubi game. It will be fixed and half price
This revisionism is quite tiring but I guess that the development companies are counting on it.
The problem with Cyberpunk was not “just bugs” but a 40 minutes video that tells lots of lies and was clearly stated as “fake” to drive up the hype for it.
What you see today was shown as if “ready” 4 years ago. And today we still can’t see the hacking as shown in that video.
On top of that there are all the design decision that are simply terrible but no amount of patches will fix, like the looter shooter approach to loot, levels on enemies, etc etc.
Overall, it’s not a matter of “realistic expectations”. We were lied to and that’s just it.
Agreed on all points.
And sadly its becoming a practice now.
Starfield is the latest example, While not as crashy/ buggy as Cyberpunk was… You can see the lack of finish, the amputated systems, etc etc, that scream that it is a half finished mess, just like Cyberpunk, and was shoved out the door way too early, just like Cyberpunk.
One of the few games I don’t regret buying before release was Baldur’s Gate 3 but that’s an anomaly. Most games I’m happy to wait a year or more when it’s in better shape.
Even with BG3, act 3 of the game is in much better shape than it launched with.
And their history of making “definitive” editions is looming a year or two down the road.
Oddly, as is their gameplay style of act 3 being the buggiest and least directed along with artificial difficulty of grouping the party in a tight clump via cutscene before the hard fights.
Still an utterly fantastic game despite those minor gripes.
Any game that has to release endings in patches means it wasn’t released as a complete product. BG3 is great, but it is so hypocritical that other games get dragged through mud for bad launches, but BG3 is getting nothing but praise despite releasing incomplete and full of bugs. I can forgive some stuff, but this hypocrisy and inconsistentcy in the gaming community bothers me to no end.
It would not be if most would stop buying pre-orders. However I am so far behind on my gaming library that I just use it to my advantage and wait.
With realistic expectations, the game has always been a good experience, imo of course. I did not follow any coverage of the game until after release, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect. I’m not excusing their shortcomings, but I feel like the community leaned hard into the “bad game circlejerk” as soon as it came out. I played once at release and got the worst ending. After edgerunners, I played it through three times, the last of which on very hard and with all the endings earned.
I enjoyed it! The 2.0 update is an interesting shakeup. I’m playing through a 4th time and having a good time
I’m assuming you didn’t have a Playstation.
I do and aside from one serious bug that made me start over I had a good time with it, I think summer 2020. I didn’t finish my first playthrough and am waiting for it to install so I can start #2.
You’re not buying a triple A game anymore. You’re buying the idea of the game they want to sell you, and hoping they deliver.
It’s just an expensive early access.
They just added driving combat, which was in the launch trailer.
For the I don’t know how many times… I was enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. It wasn’t BG3 quality but it was OK.
They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.
That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.
So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.
Okay, but you being able to eek out fun from it doesnt fundamentally change the fact that it was a buggy, broken, amputated mess that was released 2 years too early.
Cyberpunk is the
soulsole reason I don’t preorder games anymore. Hype be damned.No man’s sky for me. Both are amazing games at current stage but with shit releases.
if you where hyped for NMS release it still isn’t the game you where sold and never will be.
Same for cyberpunk
My experience with people who have played Cyberpunk is being told that if I don’t expect it to be the game they advertised it was going to be, that its great.
Which makes no sense to me.
Thank you for being a logical person.
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If I remember correctly, it got hyped as the procedural generation not following the usual formulaic approach, where ‘new’ species are created by just propping tusk C onto body shape F etc…
It’s basically a meme at this point to link to this, but Crowbcat got you covered
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It’s a great time waster, but as far as interesting and engaging gameplay? I’m pretty sure minesweeper still has it beat in that department.
You are 100% correct.
soul reason
*sole
Ha, yes. Thanks for the correction.
Hype is literally the only thing you miss out on by not playing games on release. If you get used to existing 3 years behind the release schedule, your gaming experience is vastly improved.
The Australia tax is why I don’t buy games at all, much less pre-pay for the ones I might want.
Increasing complexity, tighter deadlines, demand for highwr profit margins, decrease in education quality. Theres a lot of reasons and not all of them are necessarily bad. Its good that we can simulate what we can. I think the profit motive is just starting to show its ruinous powers as shareholders demand more and more.
Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.
This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.
I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕
Yup, I re-downloaded and started a new campaign this week, and I’m a little disappointed. All the prompts are controller prompts, I can’t rebind several of the actions, I can’t crouch or dodge, the game crashed 5 times in 2 hours last night, the FPS takes a dip sometimes between ‘scenes’ in the story, DLSS kept resetting when I was benchmarking, etc.
On the plus, the game still looks amazing, the story is still S-tier in my opinion, Judy is still Judy (I simp for Judy like it’s going out of style and you can’t stop me), the driving combat is a good addition, and the cop fights are good. I don’t regret downloading it right now, but I will be putting it down for a couple of weeks, and hopefully they’ll fix some of the nagging bugs
Don’t forget to pre-order their latest DLC!
After they lied that their first major DLC will be free. I’m happy to wait till Phantom Liberty is 50% off or more. Not going to forget it’s launch. Review embargoes. Last gen performance. B roll footage forced into reviews to hide all the bugs.
The tweet you linked to is just a gif of the kool aid man they tweeted. Did they alter the tweet?? Wtf
Twitter doesn’t show the tweet they replied to.
@CyberpunkGame Will the game have Free dlc like your big brother @witchergame?
They released a bonus pack for free, so I’m not sure why it was complaining. They were never going to release a massive DLC like phantom liberty for free.
The only way the industry will learn is to simply not buy any if the shitty games. Plenty of other games out there that are worth it.
Like games that came out three years before!
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that’s not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn’t be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur’s Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It’s straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
A year for the mod kit? Wow
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
