Cyberpunk 2077 delayed to December 10
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No... that's actually exactly what it means. Going gold means the branch is cut, it's in the can, and discs are being printed. Just admit that you exaggerated for press coverage and get over it. No one really cares about another month delay, but lying about going gold is just bizarre.
People who don't give a shit don't crunch after the game has gone gold to make last minute improvements and fix more bugs. People who care do.
Software estimates are hard and superiors don't magically have more insight into when the game will actually be finished. It's all a gamble and sometimes you have to postpone the release or ship a buggy product.
Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.
I don't understand the fixation of catching people in an alleged lie.. What's the difference whether they genuinely underestimated the time required to do something _they've never done before_ (testing on so many platforms) or whether they actually, completely unreasonably, decided to lie to everyone about having gone gold?
Not to mention that if they hadn't actually gone gold, there are tons of outside parties who would probably have realized it pretty quickly (given the production work that happens), and we'd all have found out anyways.
no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not. I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes. how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?
But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.
Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.
- Unlimited data plan: it means you can use it until you hit 10GB, then the speed will be cut to 40kbps. But hey, you can use as much of the 40kbps speed as you want.
- Lifetime updates: we provide updates until we decide the device has reached end of life, which is approximately the same time as we stop selling that specific model of the device. [0]
- Native application: a web app packaged with Electron
- ...
And I mean _always_ because back in 1995 I worked for an ISP and when we introduced our "Unlimited" dial-up plan, I can't tell you the number of people who got mad at us because they couldn't dial in and stay connected 24/7 all month long.
We explained it in our terms of use (and actually had a really clear tl;dr in non-fine print in our ads) that customers could use as much as they could without worry of being charged for overages or getting cut off after a certain number of hours, but it was not a _dedicated_ account that promised 24/7 service.
But certain customers insisted that _their_ interpretation of the word was the one that _we_ should be held to.
One customer even took us to small claims court, and lost.
For the rest, our typical response was to say we were sorry this wasn't the plan they were expecting, and we'd happily refund their most recent month and close their account. That's almost always when they would change their mind and suddenly be ok with the terms. ;-)
Use as much as you can, you won't be charged any more than X dollars per month..
But past a certain point, you will be throttled.. Not cut off, but slowed..
And back in the ISP days, we would actively disconnect high-usage users to free up phone lines during peak times (which was typically 6-10pm on weekdays and 1pm to 10pm on weekends)
Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember a time when ISPs advertised their "user-to-line ratios", meaning we didn't have a phone line for every customer - we maintained a 7:1 ratio which was considered good back then).
So in order to allow the lower-usage customers to get online to check their emails or surf after dinner, we had to make sure that there were lines available.
If you had already used more than (I think - memory is fuzzy here) 150 hours per month, then you were subject to being disconnected during peak hours.
So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...
No. Dropping a dial-up connection when all lines are busy is not the same kind of artificial limitation as throttling/de-prioritizing someone's traffic after X GB even if the network is uncongested, or unconditionally throttling specific types of traffic (eg. all video traffic, to prevent HD streaming).
There are frequently many tweaks one should do to that product that companies will work on after reaching that point.
I forget the exact details but there was a game this current gen that had a 40gb day one patch. I felt so bad for those that bought a disc version just to have to download a massive patch after installing the game.
Seriously why people can't just release 1.0 software that is 1.0 anymore?
Although broadband now is widespread, in many situations people might not have it.
Situations where day-0 patch is bad:
1. Countries or places with poor infrastructure
2. Rural areas
3. People using the software after many years when the server with the patch might be gone.
Also there is the fact many companies abuse patches to add features they shouldn't or remove features (rootkits, DRM, or Paradox habit of removing features in a way to "encourage" people to buy DLC, or PS3 suddenly not supporting Linux anymore, and then there is Epic "hotfix")
The possibility of having patches is good. The habit of patching is bad. Or course adding features and content over time is fine, but releasing software you know it is buggy intending to patch is later is not.
As a game developer you'd need to set the publishing date weeks if not months in advance. Due to the store policies, missing that slot would result in another, potentially very expensive, delay.
Now, marketing is a significant part of the budget and you really want to sync your marketing campaign with the release date. Postponing the release by a few weeks is almost guaranteed to damage the sales drastically, to the point where it could kill your game before people even have a chance to learn about it.
You're late. So what do you do? You release all of your fixes in a huge day-0 patch. It's still better than the alternative.
"Welcome to Cyberpunk 2020! All public statements are bottom-line-boosting propaganda, and if you want the real truth, or our software, so bad, break into our systems and take it."
It seems to mostly have grown into "this is simply our reality now."
Still, I feel sorry for the developers who were seriously in a Catch-22. They are (correctly, IMO) prioritising the right thing by focusing on quality over the short-term negativity from a very vocal group. I wish more companies would take this approach (or, in the case of Apple, rediscover this approach).
Core i7-4790 or Ryzen 3 3200G
GTX 1060 6GB or R9 Fury
12GB RAM
70GB SSD storage
Windows 10 64-bitAssuming that the benchmarks are good, that AMD will undercut NVIDIA (as they tend to do) and that you don't want to do ML, Radeon is probably going to be the one for those who have been waiting.
AMD has historically undercut Nvidia, but at a cost of power consumption, heat output, and feature set. Let's see what they have.
1. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-f...
I probably will buy this game in January, but it bothers me to get a game that if I play 10 years later when the original updating service is no longer active, it may not be playable.
They released so many trailers in the last weeks and even days. This must be so expensive purely from a marketing perspective.
Also none of the reasons are news. Corona has been here for a long time now, and other teams deal with it, too. And I'm sure the release platforms have also been set in stone for a long time.
Also just Yesterday they posted this on twitter: https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1320829781936640013
They also delivered Witcher 2, which - many years later - is still full of bugs and not playable on some HW.
So in fact this isn't something they've done before, so it's not _that_ surprising that they underestimated..
More importantly, it adds data points to the story of CD Projekt Red getting press for bragging about no ‘mandatory’ crunch time and subsequently adopting a brutal mandatory crunch at the home stretch.
It was my understanding that they asked people to work an extra 8 hours per week (the maximum under Polish law, for no more than 150 hours per year) and paid extra for it (again, as required by law). While this is definitely not ideal and crunch is, IMHO, due to project mismanagement, especially after promising they wouldn't, but I wouldn't exactly call this "brutal", especially considering that covid has messed up many people's plans.
Now, if non-polish contractors got a worse deal, I don't know...
Of couse, there are a few exceptions to this rule, like HNs favorite; Factorio, and Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect, Rimworld are a few other examples. But most Early Access games released are in reality excuses for releasing something unfinished early, and only do small changes after that.
the mvp model works well for games like this that aren't really story based. I'm always happy to start a new map in factorio to see what got added in the latest version. I'm not gonna go back and replay a 40+ hour rpg just to see what it's like with a few less bugs or a couple new cutscenes.
The fact that the devs improved it significantly afterward for years is unusual, especially since that game in particular does not rely on microtransactions which would benefit from a strong base game.
this is pretty much the only release I'm looking forward to this year, and I very much appreciate that they are pushing it back until they feel it is finished.
Only the "maximum viable product", the best possible version of the game within budget and technical limitations, is relevant.