CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)
cdprojekt.com
cdprojekt.com
"CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1]
Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-...
1: https://www.forbes.com/profile/eduardo-saverin/?sh=1b75ae527...
Perhaps some founders and investors don't want this to be known...
In my negotiations I inquired about said equity and the other founder was vague as hell around all of those important questions that early employees need to ask.
The extra $100k wasn't worth it and I'm making the difference in real, liquid equity (and then some) from my current employer.
Company 1: The company went bankrupt, founder renamed the company, started a new company with the same name as the original, transferred some assets for pennies on the dollar. It later went public, but collapsed in the dot-com crash.
Company 2: Company raised $50 million during the dot-com boom. After 5 or so years, it still did not have much revenue to speak of. After several down rounds, it was eventually was sold to a major corporation for pennies on the dollar. All common stock was worthless.
Company 3: Still working on it. There have been several down rounds. All employees got their options re-issued at the lower price after a key employee threatened to walk...
Is that legal? It looks like the CEO of the company willingly harmed the company's interest to enrich himself, which is basically fraud.
http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canth...
Do not work overtime without compensation, no company is your baby and companies have no legal obligation to remember your service. Labour laws are terribly slanted against employees so be very conservative about your expectations from work and never sacrifice your health (mental or physical) due to some B.S. team oriented camaraderie.
I work hard at my shop, I really love all the things we've managed to accomplish and I appreciate all the folks I've built them with. But when it comes to money it is good to be incredibly self-interested because no one else will do it for you.
1. You can be put in a position where you're able to exercise your options but you'll be doing so blindly - trading personally held cash for stock and hoping the company doesn't end up tanking.
2. Bonuses are almost never legally promised in practice, so they remain at the grace of the employer.
3. At-will employment laws means that all future implied payments can be retracted if employment is terminated excepting those that are contractually owed.
in practice, I've certainly heard people use camel case to refer to either convention. I hear pascal case a lot when people specifically mean a capitalized first character. wikipedia lists dromedary case as the complement of pascal case, but I've never actually seen this term used IRL.
https://gist.github.com/errantspark/7000c8a5192eb0b8ee64ba21...
I didn't realize how easy this was to setup and do. Here's a first crack at making user names more prominent.
https://gist.github.com/capnmidnight/b61dcecf587949d6adf1dc4...
Why is your first reaction to "riot" instead of just "quit"? Unless it's in your contract, you don't deserve a bonus.
Quitting is for cowards.
You don't have to be your job. I wish you well.
No, quiting is for people who want something they don't have. Loss-aversion is a very powerful force, especially in the hands of senior leadership.
Honestly not even sure I agree that you're being taken advantage of if the policy is enacted after your hiring.
A bonus is a bonus. It is given out at the companies discretion, unless stipulated in your employment contract.
>> Why is your first reaction to "riot" instead of just "quit"?
>>> Why, when someone tries to take advantage of you, is your first reaction to retreat?
Because, "rioting" when you don't get your way is... unprofessional?
This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.
This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.
Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.
I agree there are plenty of shitty practices in the games industry, of course.
The employee will "just" need to discount the value of these certificates accordingly.
I’ll assume the bonus is probably actually tied to the companies financial performance rather than the release, but that the release was required for the revenue target to be hit.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...
I know if tensions were high after a long crunch and I just got a big payout before a major family holiday, I'd need some convincing to go back in.
Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.
Many companies around here do experiments like this one hoping to see improvements. Most of such attempts fail miserably.
I've seen my share of weird, counterproductive ideas from grades like in school to work logged down to the second.
My last company, even though it was over 500 people strong, was basically winging it.
Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US.
All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.
don't game the game devs man...
-if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later.
If not, then it literally doesn’t matter.
Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.
1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.
That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?
[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
For regular dev jobs, I think the market is less imbalanced than it appears on the surface. Cost of living isn't cheap in BC but free medical care is a big bonus and the city is quite pleasant. Senior devs will end up pulling senior dev money - it's mostly the entry level wages that are depressed.
Even the high deductible plans I’ve seen are no more than $3500/single or $7k family per year out of pocket max. And those allow you and your employer to put money into a high deductible savings account pre-tax like a retirement account. And it can be used for any qualified health payment for the rest of your life and is passed down upon death. It’s really like a 401k for health payments.
Wait, that's meant to be good? What kind of insanity is this. Why do you have to pay anything out of your pocket at all??
So yes it’s very good, or can be. Putting pre-tax money away and also lowering your tax burden while saving over time for healthcare matters is nice. Because you have a “maximum out of pocket” cost each year you stay ahead of it.
There are many different healthcare schemes in the USA that work best in different ways for people that have different circumstances.
My out of pocket expenses this year for all health related stuff is around $100. That is made up mostly of prescription dispensing fees ($10 for a 3 month supply), and massage fees that were over the per visit limit (they only cover the first $100/hour. My massage therapist is $115/hr)
Benefits in Canada blew my mind when I moved up here.
The downside is that I make $80k ($62kUSD) as a mid level web dev, and that is not really considered low for the position.
(I'm not Canadian, but here in Europe, without insurance, I've never paid more than a few hundred for dental work or tens for prescriptions. Even if its more in Canada, I imagine its still less than "thousands")
Oh the same thing goes for vision insurance, alternative medicine (RMTs and acupuncture) and some medical devices - i.e. a CPAP for Sleep Apnea.
Our medical providers are competing private businesses. There are really good doctors, really bad doctors, and everything in between. Everyone wants to go to the better doctor, but there’s just not enough of them. Price differentiation is important.
There are $0 deductible and $0 copay plans and $0 coinsurance plans. They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.
It’s a strange mindset to think that something should just be free. We pay for our cars, our housing, our food. Medicine is not free to provide. The America system is broken in many ways, but not because people have to pay for medical care. The problem is that it’s too expensive because of artificial constraints on the supply of doctors and other medical resources.
When it comes to healthcare? Yes, it should absolutely be free to the recepient.
I don't know why it's such a strange concept to you - afer all, Americans are also used to receiving certain services for free - you don't have to pay the police for coming to help you, or the fire brigade for that matter. To me it's the same thing - if your house on fire, the fire brigade will come and help, free of charge - that's what taxes are for. So if I'm ill, I will be given any and all help needed - also free of charge, after all, that's what taxes are for.
>>They are also exorbitantly expensive because of the absurd moral hazard they create.
Like, sometimes I think Americans live literally on a different planet. Do you think that in countries where healthcare is free to use people have medical procedures without any reason and simply because they don't have to pay for it?
In general, it's simple - if a country wants to have healthy, productive citizens, it should pay for their healthcare, I don't understand why it's such a divisive concept. The crown example of how crazy the US system is, is the fact that you have to pay to give birth. Like.....so US cares so little for its citizens that literally the very act of giving birth to new ones is not covered by the government? That's....beyond mind boggling.
Police and fire are public services because they would not work as market systems. Fires spread from house to house, for example, regardless of who pays or doesn’t, so private fire brigades would have to protect non-payers in order to also protect payers. That’s a classic market failure that can be solved by public services. (Potentially, that problem could have been solved by requiring fire coverage, but then there's the further problem of a row of houses, each with different fire services, some better than others, with the better ones still needing to protect the houses insured by the worse ones to protect their own customers. Not to mention that a single house fire can lead to a whole city burning down. It's just not a service that the market can effectively provide in most places.)
And no, of course people don’t completely waste care in other systems either. That’s because it’s rationed by the government. Elective procedures have long wait lists, access to specialists is specially guarded, etc. Limited resources always have to be rationed by some mechanism.
Our system in the US is far from perfect: we let the doctor’s guild limit the supply of doctors, we are too uncomfortable with ending care for the very old and terminally ill, and the whole hospital and medical device industries could use an antitrust shakeup.
Unless you're in a "no pay, no spray" area and haven't paid your fire subscription fee. Wish I wasn't being serious.
My out of pocket max per year is around $6000 USD, and my salary is double what I was (under)paid in Toronto, and taxes are a bit lower here (CA).
So the take home pay is mid-5-figures more, and worst-case scenario healthcare is mid-4-figures, so it balances out very favourably for my situation (anyone in tech with a full-time job, basically).
(Of course, those who aren't well-paid in tech have a much worse situation and I can't imagine how difficult that must be.)
1. If you have a problematic history (which includes things entirely outside of your control, like being born in the wrong part of the world[1]), it can be nearly impossible.
2. If you don't have a problematic history, it's incredibly stressful. If you're on a TN visa, you can be turned away at the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you're on an H1B visa, you can also be turned away from the border at any time, for any reason whatsoever, including no reason whatsoever. If you lose your job, you need to immediately start dealing with immigration issues, while looking for a new one, or you have to leave the country.
3. If you're married, your spouse can't work for a long time.
4. If you aren't married, your girlfriend/boyfriend/whomever can't even try immigrate with you, even if they wanted to.
5. Being three hours and a border away is not remotely the same thing as being three hours away from your friends and family.
6. There is a long, long, long list of cultural reasons for why a comfortably-living Canadian may prefer to avoid living in the US, even for double the paycheck.
[1] I had a friend whose family fled from Saddam's Iraq, due to their political activities, when he was a child. As an adult, he was consistently singled out for harassment, intimidation, and delays during his crossings at the US-Canadian border. [2] According to him, getting a work visa in the US was not remotely a possibility.
[2] Isn't it wonderful how passports list your country of birth?
I worked for an above-market-rate firm in BC. When I got a job offer in SV, my boss could only counter-offer the financial gains if I relocated to their SV office.
If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed. If there was enough investment available locally and local companies had the resources to hire more workers and were successful enough to pay them well, those salaries would be higher, but the resources to make that happen have to come from somewhere.
I'm not sure I completely understand.
> If local salaries are depressed like that, this implies the outside investment is sorely needed.
It's interesting because a lot of capital is flowing into Vancouver right now in the form of real estate speculation.
There's a fair amount of evidence that this works. It's not like Vancouver is solely populated by foreign studios. Local game companies like Kabam, Black Bird Interactive, Relic, United Front, etc would have all either had their roots in EA workers or would have hired ex-EA workers.
In other words, there are plenty of your “home-grown studios” here, who benefit from the manipulated market created by the multinationals that came before them.
Salaries won’t rise to meet parity until labour gets organized, but as a previous commenter pointed out about labour laws and overtime pay, it’s a massive uphill battle.
Vancouver is a large market for tech as is Toronto, and now the rest of the cities in Canada are picking up. Anecdotally I have never seen this much recruiter activity in Alberta as we're seeing right now.
Which explains why so many Ubisoft games are made in Canada...
Does Canada not subsidize other tech work? I’ve heard the pay at Blackberry was terrible for instance. The only good thing is that Canadians will be impressed if you call yourself a software engineer because they think you have an iron ring.
I don’t know what’s the typical arrangement in game industry, but in software engineering industry at large, B2B contracts are very common, due to rather preferable tax treatment. B2B gives 10-30% increase in net pay, and its downsides are lack of mandatory severance, mandatory time off days, overtime pay etc. In most scenarios these are not an issue, because if one can negotiate high pay justifying B2B, one can also negotiate time off and lack of overtime. Don’t know about game industry though.
For a country with a minimal wage of €610 this is a significant difference.
Most of the companies will offer paid time off to contractors, end even companies offering high-paying jobs like pilots do in do the same: https://www.ft.com/content/b8f77f16-d865-11e8-ab8e-6be0dcf18...
I dunno about Poland, but where I live this type of employment has some caveats:
- You need save for your time off (holidays) yourself. - You save on social security taxes, but it means your salary is not compensated by it when you are ill (or your kids are ill and you need to take care of them), thus you need to save for this yourself. - I would like to say that you would need to save up more yourself for your retirement fund (as you pay less for state pension), but at these level of incomes, usually at both scenarios (self-employed vs being employed) you would like to do that, so it cancels out.
Also it may be illegal, i.e. if you are employed like a full time employee - you cannot work as an independent consultant/contractor. Though AFAIK this definition of "like a full time employee" is not very strict.
IMO problem is that income taxation should be treated (mostly) the same, no matter how you earn the money. Because now (where I live), the wealthier you are, the more elaborate schemes you can run to avoid paying taxes on your income.
Polish here. It is like you described but a) not many people know about this (sometimes I surprise some guys telling them their employment form - independent contractor for one company where you are actually working full time - is illegal) and b) I've never heard of someone being caught practicing this.
Yup. Me too.
It's not as bad with design/IT agencies anymore, but I know that lawyer agencies are still notorious for this. Big-ish lawyer agencies with dozens of lawyers have no employees, everyone is a "partner" (or whatever the term is).
In fact it's a funny rite of passage for most lawyers: after graduation they have to work for 3 years for a law firm before they are allowed to take the bar exam and become "real" lawyers. During this time they earn a salary. When they finally become "real" lawyers by passing the bar, they get fired. :) And immediately taken back on as contractors.
Associate lawyers (what you are before partner) are paid a regular salary as employees.
Law firms aren't healthy workplaces, but I wouldn't worry about the legal rights of the lawyers working for them.
It all depends on how your contract is written - if you have clauses that put some of the business risk on you (e.g. you give 3 month warranty on the code you write, or have some bogus penalties for contract breach, or other things, which I've never seen enforced) then it cannot be treated as full time employment, even if you have just one client for which you issue invoices.
The only thing that is an actual red flag for tax office is when you start as a full time employee, and then switch to running sole proprietorship and your previous employer remains your only client - then it is too obvious that this is just employment in disguise.
EDIT: Also, those "independent contractor" contracts come in different shapes. I, for example have just an hourly rate set, and then I get paid for the hours worked. Some people prefer to have flat monthly rate, and even some paid vacations included in their "B2B contracts", which makes it more suspicious.
Contractors are liable with all assets/wealth.
Hang on I remember mass protests by the artists themselves in favour of that law?
Also, "even a shitty job is better than no job" might lead to people campaigning for that law if that means they get to work on LotR in their home country. Of course this is not really a viable strategy long term.
I think the union leaders trying to block the law were getting death threats from the workers they were supposed to be representing. There's some documentaries about it online as well. I think the union were completely at odds with their own members. Bizarre situation and an example of why people should be cautious about unions.
Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.
We did sometimes get compensated, but always in comp days, never money, and it was usually very uncertain ahead of time if and how it would work.
We've had people join from Rockstar, EA, CDPR, and one thing everyone is always surprised by is how good the work/life balance is. I'm personally in around 8am and always done by 4pm(7.5 hours a day).
[0] - now, all Ubisoft studios set their own policies. Please don't extrapolate my experience in the UK to experiences in other Ubisoft studios in other countries.
The key part I think is just making overtime paid, then the incentives all align much better.
This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.
EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.
Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.
Of the places I've worked that promise some form of bonus, I have only been paid a single one - $172.
In my experience, bonuses are almost solely a carrot to hang over people's head. They rarely actually get paid out even if the company is doing well.
Stock and options have there downfalls, but at least their terms are in writing.
One of the people I served with aboard the USS Honolulu is a game designer for Darkpaw Games. They have nothing like this. Not even close.
Another person is a high-level executive at Activision-Blizzard. He has compensation that is generous, but it took him 17 years to get there.
Yet another personal friend is a junior developer at Obsidian Entertainment. They don't have anything like this, at his level.
Maybe their system isn't perfect, but its a hell of a better than nothing.
Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short.
The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.
source: three people I know who worked there
But no, they should absolutely also pay overtime.
After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions.
"Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors.
"We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.
I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.
There's a real risk that if Cyberpunk was delayed further, whatever cultural winds drive its sails (and sales) could shift and the game would stall.
Duke Nukem Forever just feels like your creepy uncle telling the same sexist jokes from almost 25 years ago. The shtick didn't age well.
They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4 and released it either way because “money>everything”.
Its really that simple.
Weigh the costs of having a bad release against the costs of missing these extraordinary circumstances. It’s not hard to see why they made the decision they did.
If people would stop buying the middlemen’s supply, their exclusivity premium would evaporate, and the rest of the supply chain would be able to catch up and serve the real demand.
Anyway, this is how I think about it.
Publicly owned companies are all inherently sick.
But theoretically shareholders don’t care about these things as long as the company will grow a lot in the next 30 years. There are some alternative stock markets set up to encourage this.
And stockholders hardly exercise their powers. CEOs tend to not get fired.
Meanwhile when Ubisoft releases yet another "Doesn't look anything like the marketing footage", usually also crunched into existence, people just shrug it off.
In that context it's really weird how everybody seems to be dog-piling on CDPR right now for the most weird reasons, when otherwise they have a pretty pro-consumer track-record, particularly compared to the bigger AAA publishing fishes in the pond.
Most definitely when looking at some of the not so technical complaints, like about "representation" or how the studio is allegedly all kinds of phobic and the general tone not being PC enough.
Particularly cynical to complain about the commodification of trans-people, in a setting where even peoples memories and individual body-party are just another commodity. When that's very big part of that dystopian worlds settings, always has been, and not some specific dig against trans people.
Makes me wonder how much of that is simply a pile-on effect from the general situation in Poland with LGTBQ+ issues and CDPR getting drawn into that as some kind of scapegoat.
Sony has pulled the game from the Playstation Store. This is a historically bad release. CDPR might actually implode from this.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22188007/sony-cyberpunk-...
It looks very impressive, but I still boot up assassin's creed Odyssey (of all games) just to wander around (i.e. an OK game but an excellent world), Cyberpunk so far feels like what people who don't like games feel games are like.
They only lost money if they bought on the peak and then sold the stock after the 30% fall. Otherwise, they're just stil holding a piece of CDPR, whose market value fluctuates and is not that relevant until you decide to sell.
Citation needed. In my experience gamers are very quick to forgive and forget a bad game and will still line up for the next hyped release from the same publisher/studio.
Most other big budget case studies either completely failed, were decent within a year, or shipped in a complete state.
In that context CDPR has a very positive track record many people just flat out ignore; I've seen people on Reddit claim the game is an "unfixable mess" and how CDPR will just "cut their losses" by never patching it, it's inane beyond belief.
Yet the game is the second largest retail launch of the year in the UK, only topped by FIFA 21 [0], it allegedly already recouped it's development costs one day after release [1].
Just gets to show that stock prices a very bad measure for actual performance of a company releasing a product, it's mostly driven by hype/shitstorms, of which there is currently a lot surrounding CP2077, some of it justified, other just coming across as tone-deaf and needlessly hostile.
[0] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-12-13-cyberpunk-...
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/11/22170468/cyberpunk-2077-s...
I'm thinking Valve (still is!) and Microsoft. Wonder if there's a correlation.
If by "they" you mean investors, I'm not sure if that's correct.
>CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński has praised Cyberpunk 2077's performance on PS4 and Xbox One in an investor call.
>Speaking earlier this week on Wednesday (and transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Kaciński said that Cyberpunk 2077's performance on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles is "surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world." The CEO went on to say that although the performance on these base consoles is lower than their "pro" counterparts (the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X), it's still surprisingly good.
https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-runs-surprisingly-...
Investors were told that the game would release in April, which is why many of them invested in the company in the first place. It's reasonable to expect them to finish 7 months later.
Reviewers were given the PC version, so I imagine it was a calculation of “how many reviewers are willing to wait on traffic, just to review old consoles?”
It just didn’t work out for them.
I don't understand who tries to complicate that with sentiments like "they should have known better"
If Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't targetting PS4 and Xbox One, CDPR shouldn't have released it for them at all.
Exactly. If they release and advertise it for a platform, it better work. If it doesn't, don't release on that platform.
The game should have been delayed until Xmas 2021 but CDPR probably had contracts they couldn't break with Sony, Xbox, or maybe even Nvidia.
The more you delay, the more it costs and you have to restart the marketing machine to drum up the hype.
it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers, so if anything I would assume the opposite is true: that it's an environment where the QA staff is chronically underpaid, lives in perpetual fear of dismissal, and is told that working on the biggest game ever is the honor of a lifetime.
How so? They changed the revenue based bonuses to be paid out regardless of review averages [0]. They at least tried to make a commitment to less crunch, while over at Rockstar the amount of crunch for RDR2 was something the co-founder publicly bragged about [1].
Now people on forums are citing RDR2 as an example for "How to make a great open world game!", while at the same time lynching CDPR for not living up to their attempt to minimize crunch, after several delays.
The double standards at play here are mind-boggling.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-developers-will-be-pa...
[1] https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games...
But several critical components of the system seem like placeholders. Especially AI in all its forms is really bad (combat, driving, NPCs).
First of all, it's not a double standard: Rockstar faced similar criticism because of the crunch culture surrounding the development of RDR2. The specific article you mentioned wound up being terrible PR for Rockstar; as a direct consequence of that article, their behavior was widely criticized: https://www.engadget.com/2018-10-25-red-dead-redemption-2-re... https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1...
etc. Search "Red Dead Redemption crunch" or "Rockstar Games crunch" and you'll find loads of similar articles.
and the other problem is the usage of the term "lynching". Lynching refers to a vigilante execution by citizenry having no legal authority. It overwhelmingly refers to hate crimes along the basis of race or religin. By contrast, CD Projekt is a corporation worth billions of dollars that is being called out for treating its employees poorly. To equate the two is absurd.
At that point working conditions at Rockstar became a side-topic barely mentioned in reviews and discussions about the game, if at all.
While with CP2077 CDPR at least tried to do better, they set for themselves the goal not to crunch, take the time the game needs, they were not in the press giving interviews glorifying crunch as something awesome and necesseary.
Which for such an ambitious project was aiming very high, maybe naively so, but at least they tried. Yet currently the majority of discourse around the game is dominated by what an evil company CDPR is for still having to put in crunch. To such a degree where mentioning anything positive about the game will trigger responses talking about "slave labor". Which often is, quite uncynically, followed up with "Just look at Rockstar, that's how you make a proper open-world game!", a lot of eating the cake while still wanting to have it.
So what's the lesson here? That crunch is only bad if the resulting product ain't an unmitigated Rockstar style success?
> (lynching) It overwhelmingly refers to hate crimes along the basis of race or religin.
It overwhelmingly refers to the practices by Charles Lynch punishing loyalist supporters of the British during the American Revolutionary war, which had nothing to do with race or religion. Colloquially used it refers to citizen vigilante justice, and that's very much how a lot of this CDPR hate feels like.
> CD Projekt is a corporation worth billions of dollars that is being called out for treating its employees poorly.
CDPR is not even worth half a billion, they are a dwarf compared to actual billion dollar corporations like Take2, Ubisoft, EA or Activision Blizzard.
CDPR also has pretty much the best pro-consumer practices track-record out of all of them, releasing AAA titles with not even as much DRM as a serial; Just an executable anybody could copy and distribute.
They don't sell single-player games with predatory MTX as all the aforementioned publishers do, even for single-player games.
They at least tried to make an commitment to less crunch and taking their time, until the realities of investor financing forced their hand.
Yet apparently none of that is worth any goodwill, nor do labor-rights at companies like Ubisoft, EA or ActiBlizz really factor in any of these discussions right now, even tho they also just released massive games that very likely involved crunching to get them out of the door.
I would understand this whole situation if they all faced criticism like that, particularly the actual billions dollar worth corporations, but that's not happening: Ubisoft and ActiBlizz get a complete pass, while CDPR is made out to be the new EA of the industry.
Also comparing them to other companies is completely pointless and besides the point. Everything you are saying holds no value, and adds nothing to the conversation. You are defending CDPR using illogical and tangentially related arguments.
CDPR saying they worked to reduce crunch means literally nothing. Just because a company produces a product you like does not mean you have to turn a blind eye to horrible practices. Witcher 3 had horrible crunch, it was reported and CDPR didn't address it. It happens again with 2077, they admit it and now I'm your eyes they're the misunderstood good guys? Laughable.
I get my information from total company assets instead of highly fluctuating market cap.
> CDPR saying they worked to reduce crunch means literally nothing.
Trying to make a commitment to less crunch is at least making an attempt at improving the situation, the same can't be said about bragging about how it's a "lifestyle" and then everybody being in awe about all the crunched in details, like pooping horses.
> Just because a company produces a product you like does not mean you have to turn a blind eye to horrible practices.
It's not about me liking the product or not, it's about the fact how crunch is conveniently overlooked when the final product is critically acclaimed and well received, which is apparently how this works when looking at plenty of other examples.
The only lesson corporate leadership takes from that is that crunch is okay as long as the final product justifies it, and because that's the default assumption for any product, as nobody aims to create a mediocre one, it will effectively change nothing about the underlying culture that's the actual root of the problem.
That's why I take issue with singling out CDPR as it's happening right now; It's a scapegoat distracting from an industry-wide problem. I'm willing to bet money that if CP2077 would have turned out like a GTAV or RDR2, then the public discourse around crunch would have gotten drowned out among all the positivity, just as it happened with those two, and plenty of other, games.
Yeah, Rockstar received all of the same criticism for a few weeks, then people stopped talking about it and forgot. Give it a month or two and people will stop talking about this one too.
> It overwhelmingly refers to the practices by Charles Lynch punishing loyalist supporters of the British during the American Revolutionary war
No, it doesn't, that's just some pedantry you learned on Wikipedia. Literally nobody uses the word "lynching" in that way. Language changes.
Estimates put the dev budget a little over $300 million [0]. After retailers & Steam take their cut and given that a lot of sales were full-cut direct through GOG, that puts the game around break-even status before it even hits normal retail sales.
Given this picture, it is highly likely that investors forced through this decision to go forward as much or more than management did. Push the game again and you'll really start losing pre-orders, and the next time a release date comes around people will be even more hesitant to drop $60 before release.
(As a side note, I'm playing the game on low-end gaming hardware and it works fine. Occasional graphical glitches, 1 crash. It's hard to live up to the hype, but it's still a great game. Feels like a mashup of GTA V with heavy RPG elements set in a future dystopia. Small hints of Assassin's Creed stealth, maybe more if you build your character in that direction.)
[0] https://www.altchar.com/game-news/cyberpunk-2077-set-to-beco...
IMO they should have just delayed the last-gen consoles. Would have sucked, but that would have avoided most of the backlash for another delay as well as that for the buggy console release.
Skyrim still has plenty of content-related bugs (i.e. not graphical or performance related); Bethesda never fixed them but oddly enough, modders did and you can download a bugfix mod from Nexus or Steam.
Probably they knew what is up: investors told them to publish, so they published.
- QA was limited and done in-house, thus remotely by people working on the game
- Overestimated their ability to fix the problems before launch
- Reviewers didn't have access to last-gen console versions because they were still working on the last-gen versions through the certification process up until launch day
Of course, I don't put much weight on any of these. However, I'm sure there was a fair bit of pressure from investors to release during the holidays considering some of the questions asked during the call, like how "sticky" the game was despite the problems and whether they would still receive their full cut regardless of the refunds.
New movies and television have been woefully shitty.
Its always easier for ask for forgiveness than permission. <- old military adage
They're asking for forgiveness now, and I'd argue it'll work.
Assuming you got the PC / PS5 / Xbox Series X version. If you didn't... yikes.
The sad simple truth is that this game was never designed with current gen consoles in mind. It was always designed for PCs. When the now-current gen consoles were announced and specs got tossed around, CDPR realized they were basically mid-tier gaming PCs, so they would run the game fairly well.
Visually in terms of atmosphere it looks great, if you can see through the low resolution and terrible LOD. I believe they can and will fix these things; what I'm not confident will ever be fixed though, is the AI/game logic, it seems like it just hasn't been written/implemented at anything more than the most basic placeholder.
Does it change resolution as you play?
The 1.04 patch improved things but many textures are extremely poor while others right next to them are sharp and clear. For example, a building or railing texture will be good, but a dumpster or any other object which isn't fixed will be extremely low resolution. On the whole it's very soft and just gives a "blurry" or "out of focus" feel.
The result for me is eye strain as it feels like I'm always trying to focus on something that won't be focused.
Subjectively speaking, it _feels_ worse quality than a 1080p game when I was playing on PS4. I don't have any real evidence to back it up though.
I'm holding out for the PS5 patch so that at least I can play what _is_ there at a decent resolution. The game looks nice, that and the story is pretty much all it has going for it (in my opinion). The PS4 build is running at such a low resolution (60FPS though) with terrible lighting and shadows on PS5 right now that it's embarrassing. That's once you get past the 10+ times the game has totally crashed out on my since the 1.04 update.
I want to enjoy the game and right now I can't. Let's see how it fairs in a couple of months.
If you want a feel for how it'll play for your giftee on PS4/Pro (at the current patch level) check out Digital Foundry's reviews on YouTube.
One the one hand, a further delay risks losing out a big part of sales. Dedicated fans will buy anyway, but presumably a large fraction of preorders came from people who just jumped on the hype. And who knows if you can recreate this hype after the pandemic ends, after other games come out, after you delay the release over and over. And yes, you can fix some of the damage later.
On the other hand, the company had an incredible reputation for quality, maybe one of the best in the industry. How much of the lost reputation will not be recovered, even after all the refunds and patches? Future games will get less preorders, so less cashflow, so more dependence on external funding - an extra source of risks and tension. Future games will not get as much hype, so will sell less. Even hiring might suffer as the best candidates are quite sensitive to the employer reputation.
I pre-ordered Cyberpunk 2077 because I like this setting much more than the setting of The Witcher. Don't regret it.
Though looking at especially the Xbox One S footage, it is hard to believe anyone could be trusted to make it playable in a few weeks.
1. Crash often
2. Cause issues with the underlying OS intentionally or not (like how an Anthem update supposedly caused PS4s to need to be initialized or recovered)
3. Disobey guidelines like using the official patch process, multiplayer APIs, etc.
Since it's a critical time for both of them not only because it's christmas but also because of the new gen I'm also pretty sure they decided it was more worthwhile for them to still certify it the second time even if it wasn't up to the standards.
Having said that, surely someone from the certification process would have commented on it: hey guys, your game doesn't brick the base PS4, but come on, its a buggy mess!
Performance is fine. Bought the game a couple of days after launch and after reading the reports about horrible performance while downloading, I disabled everything under graphics, but then after a crash it reset its settings (yeah, I know) and it seems to work fine even with all settings on.
Though my last console experience before that was on a Nintendo 64 and I don't think any game ever crashed on it.
Especially lately, I feel as though Nintendo is the only brand who actually cares to provide that “just works” console experience.
The games I have had crashes with have all been ports from other consoles.
Yeah. What about the testing that is a part of mandatory game certification process? Do console vendors look the other way for key games?
The revenue difference between selling at Christmas (even if reviews are awful) vs selling around Easter, the next available "good" retail holiday, is huge.
And since these days, patches are the standard - as in, release with known deficiencies and patch your way to "OK" - it is very likely that from an overall financial perspective, releasing now was the right answer.
If a game studio wants to maintain a very high level of quality, they have to be willing to lose a publisher by rejecting this. Unless that studio is already so well established that they are in demand, they just cannot afford to fight their publisher.
Because there isn't a single other major December release.
I do not think this is a safe assumption to make. You're assuming each person passes this higher and higher up in the chain for a decision to be made.
It was their job to refuse certification and say "Nope, come back when the game runs properly" and they failed. That's part of what they get their money for when we pay more for console games than PC.
It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†.
The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it.
† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?
Dum Dum followed me around until I met Keanu’s character. He would move in front of people during cutscenes and I couldn’t even tell what was going on. Sometimes he would attack Jackie during combat and other times help us.
The first scene with the ripper doc was scrambled. Cutscenes played out of ordered or repeated.
Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.
And removed any semblance of a working cover system.
Totally agree with you.
In terms of gunplay, there are ancient PS3/Xbox 360 era games that are so much better. Deus Ex HR, Far Cry 3, MGS IV, Bioshock, etc.
Edit:
This gameplay from almost 10 years ago is way better than Cyberpunk:
It's not really about Cyberpunk not worth playing, but rather that Cyberpunk severely underdelivered by raising the expectations of players who enjoyed these past games and were expecting something even better. I wasn't expecting something better than DeusEx or older Bioware games (knights of the old republic, dragon age: origins, mass effect, neverwinter nights), but I really wasn't expecting the mediocre story and the abundance of bugs.
The combat is simplistic. The AI opponents are basically broken. The quickhack system does indeed feel like a quickly hacked together game mechanic. V is stuck in a weird state between existing background (a la witcher) and player action defined: I didn't get the feeling of any player agency in what my character is, but neither did I get the warm feeling of learning/experiencing Geralt's(Witcher series MC) life. Life paths, also, are basically devoid of any meaningful relevancy to the storyline.
I've never seen a great interstitial "hacker" interface in a game. Unless you go full Shenzhen I/O, it has to be simplified into meaninglessness.
I wonder if some people just prefer dirt and elves and magic to steel and glass. I like Witcher 3 well enough, but it's not a world I want to spend endless time in. I see the charm, but I'm not that interested in that world.
Shadowrun is probably more engaging as cyberpunk source material, though.
While comical, the lore in the source material drives home that netrunners interact with 3D visualizations of the ‘net. There was a lot of fun gameplay possibilities here, but it was ultimately squandered for the poor breach mini game and quickhack system.
Also, can we talk about how atrocious everything involving driving is? The AI, GPS/pathing, handling, etc is all well behind what GTA IV was doing over 10 years ago.
https://twitter.com/JumpOvertheAge/status/133892916630199091...
Combat and hacking definitely felt noodley and weak at first, but after a few levels, some slightly better weapons (3 hours in?) and a new OS implant combat is much improved.
I'm going to guess that they released on all platforms at once because of contractual obligations.
I think that huge testament to quality of the story and game in general. Even if it's sorely missing a decent final polish, I'll be excited to play it second time in 6 months time once all the patches are out.
Pff. You kids. When I was your age, I once played a game so buggy that when my character walked back & forth to school he had to do in the snow & up hill both ways. Now get off my lawn.
A few other things of note. 1080p is the max resolution. Unlimited Internet is probably a requirement as its about 10gb per hour. After 6 hours the session ends and you need to save and relaunch the game. Your entire Steam library is not available, its up to publishers to allow their games on it.
1. Not good
2. I have fiber
Obviously generalization and I don’t care if someone has 2008 DSL and it “runs awesome”.
I assume they don't release in markets that aren't physically close to the hardware though - it's not available at all here in New Zealand for example.
mobile broadband can easily have 20-30 ms latency to the ISP.
DSL is often 10-20 ms. Coax is in the same range, depending ont he provider.
Fiber is usually 1-3 ms.
On Chrome on PC with a low-latency gaming monitor, you can notice the difference if you play a game natively and then stream it, but honestly you stop thinking about it pretty quickly as long as your ping is under ~25 ms or so. I'm loving Cyberpunk on Stadia and I've been playing shooters on PC since MoH:AA in 2002.
Edit: I have Comcast Cable, not fiber.
the most annoying thing I've encountered so far is the way doors work. there are a lot of points where the door is supposed to automatically open. I feel like it always opens about 100 ms after I expect it to, making me wonder if I'm supposed to open it myself. maybe this is "working as designed", I dunno.
I'm playing on hard and other than the lucky shot when I'm doing content 10+ levels above mine (based on the level of the drops since you can't see NPC levels easily) I feel pretty invincible.
The cyberware launchers are also dumb as fuck no cooldown and infinite ammo you can just sit there and spam rockets all day and as long as you take the perk that makes you immune to your own grenade damage you can use them in CQC also.
The game looks great, the story is pretty good and CDPR really nails voice acting and direction but the actual game mechanics are retarded as fuck, everything seems unbalanced there is no real difficulty because you can heal as much as you like (you won't run out of meds) and hide behind cover without anyone rushing you and with smart guns that unlock way too early you can basically shoot at enemies without looking at them, aiming at them and when they are behind cover (that is if you get bored with 1 shoting enemies with the big bore sniper rilfes since they get 3-5 headshot damage multiplier which is enough to kill enemy of pretty much any level in this game with early level guns).
They really need to look at how Mass Effect solved combat...
A few hours in and I'm already invincible and I also found basically an infinite money trick, craft the blue incendiary grenades that cost 1 uncommon crafting item and 1 uncommon upgrade item and they disassemble into rare crafting items and money is no longer a problem either.
Oh and the driving which is supposed to be a big part of the game is so terrible I rather walk and use fast travel because the car handling makes driving painful it takes you like half a mile to stop and the cars start to drift if you as much as look sideways.
I don't know how much time it would take them to fix it but there is no way that these issues haven't been brought up in testing all previous CDPR games had balance issues but because all combat was essentially melee or within melee range you couldn't cheese that easily (well unless you went into a quen spec in the TW3 early patches, then you had an invincibility bubble that would damage enemies and heal you...).
This game is like 3-6 months away from release on all platforms, it's not just performance and technical issues the core game elements aren't anywhere near ready.
This comment doesn't include things like traffic AI. Only combat.
Old school good open world AIs think of Far Cry and STALKER. Especially the STALKER AI is pretty much one of the main reasons I keep replaying that game, all the unexpected stuff happening.
I wasn't even looking for them, but they managed to find me. I still enjoy the game a lot, but combat has been nothing but frustration.
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/10/22167436/cyberpunk-2077-w...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kbwpps/retic...
Theres a part where you're upstairs and you can hear the ai trying to attack you from the floor below. The game is fun but only barely and I think the novelty is going to wear off quite quickly.
Then once you know who's hacking you, you either need to shoot them, or disable the camera (by hacking or shoot) they're using to hack you with (they can use cameras to scan, just like you can).
The whole quickhack, netrunner aspect of the game is completely lacking in tutorials or explanation. Which is a real shame, because it looks like a really interesting mechanic.
Really looking for something that helps better explain how to fit quick hacking into broader combat. I have really progressed beyond pings and optical reboots, which makes me feel like I’m leaving at lot on the table, but the games hasn’t really expressed what that is.
Not that I'm complaining much. There've been tons of bugs and wonkiness for me, but I've been enjoying the heck out of the game anyway (wonkiness is par for the course in a AAA open-world game anyway). But it definitely has lots of room for polish. Given how above and beyond they went on TW3, I have no concerns it'll receive it eventually (hopefully -after- a well-deserved Christmas break).
The skill gives you a yellow damage indicator and highlights the hacker in yellow outline.
My guess is this is similar to enemy sniper sometimes can see you through walls. If they're close enough to a wall, then their line of sight is calculated as if they were in front of a wall.
IGN went so far as to split their Cyberpunk 2077 review into two separate reviews: One for consoles, and one for PC. Quote from the console review:
> The Xbox One/PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.
The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.
They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible. I suspect console gamers are requesting refunds in droves due to the issues, which is surely going to impact their long-term sales projections.
CD Projekt games historically have been PC with console ports after launch. They probably would have done the same here if not being pushed to be a launch title for "next gen" consoles.
I think Sony/Microsoft are just as much to blame. They also had to QA the game and sign off on it.
Refunds are actually up to the seller in question. They clarified how there's no refund arrangement with CDPR and Microsoft/Sony and that all refunds are subject to normal Microsoft/Sony refund policies. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are failing to get their games refunded.
If one liked Deus Ex: Mankind divided they will like Cyberpunk 2077.
The game has some truly amazing aspects such as writing, characters, music, etc, but IMO it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, open world mechanics, driving... it's all very mediocre even poor at times.
Stealth for example is not nearly as good as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or The Metal Gear Solid series. The tutorial seemed alright but when it came to real gameplay I felt like stealth just didn’t work and I just resorted to guns blazing. But after more effort and getting a better hang of quick hacking I have found stealth to be viable actually. You really do need to make heavy use of quick hacking though. Also that game is very visually busy which makes it easy to miss a camera.
Driving feels pretty good, but not as good as GTA. So far driving really seems to be a way to get from point A to point B and not a core gameplay mechanic like it is with GTA. The NPC driving AI and Cop AI is downright bad compared to GTA but besides being a little immersion breaking it doesn’t seem to affect the actual gameplay much. GTA is very focused around driving and avoiding police, most of the missions involve it in some way. Cyberpunk doesn’t really rely on driving so I can give it a pass on those faults.
Gunplay really bothered me at first. It felt chaotic and a bit clunky. Other FPS/RPG hybrid games have suffered the same issues. Shooting powerful or higher level enemies will just feel bullet spongy. Some of that just needs to be accepted as “this is an RPG, not a shooter”. The cover system isn’t very sophisticated or obvious either. However the more I play the more I get the hang of it and I have found the gunplay to actually be quite satisfying.
Great art, great story, great character/music.
I hated the gameplay. I don't know why, but it felt horrendously clunky, even after the rework.
I'd say play GTA V and the Witcher 3 for a comparison in immersive open world story telling and high caliber graphics. I haven't played Spiderman (2018, 2020) but in gameplay footage (which is only on console) it looks much better as well.
I feel like I'm crazy when I say that the graphics are incredibly underwhelming. It looks good, and there's neat stuff. But I don't care how pretty a shadow looks when the hundreds of NPCs walking around look so rough.
Having "literally millions of weapons" looks good on paper, but it makes for non-engaging gameplay if done incorrectly, which it was in the numbered sequels, in my opinion.
overall, borderlands 2 and 3 felt like a chore to play, "get one hour of grinding in", regardless of how pretty it was or interesting the other mechanics were.
And you know what the main difference was between 1 and 2 & 3? Paid loot boxes / real money transactions.
It does, because a common running theme in RPGs is that you get stronger as the game progresses, and in Cyberpunk, by the middle of the game every character build (melee, stealth, guns) easily dismantles enemies. It is only early-game where the enemies seem difficult because your character hasn't had their skill-trees built up yet.
The simplistic AI behavior makes stealth unengaging, the hacking feels really disappointing (why don't cameras or turrets get harder to hack?), the cover system is worse than Mass Effect, and gunplay is middling at best—better than Fallout: NV, but worse than Fallout 4 or Destiny.
Notice how I only compared it with other action/shooter RPGs? Clearly RPG progression isn't my issue with it.
Mass effect was also a RPG, but had much much better combat.
Combat in the witcher 3 was pretty good.
Try this tonight: make sure you're absolutely alone and shoot someone. A cop will spawn behind you. No AI, no chase, no nothing, just bloop here's a cop.
The game has destroyed the reputation of this company overnight.
Game goes through various phases of:
A) This system is suboptimal but works
B) Let's rewrite suboptimal system
C) Oh god, we forgot our rewrite to propagate, so it's combination of A and B
D) This system doesn't do anything let's delete it
E) nVidia and rayTracing
F) unreleased consoles
G) consoles that are old enough to write
H) OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, Mantle, etc.
I) Marketing trying to hype gamers by promising Pie in the Sky
J) Multiple platformsIs this meant as an excuse? Because it's not. Either they left it out because they ran out of time, or they didn't bother implementing it from the beginning, but the result is the same: they released a game without core mechanics fully implemented and the critiques are justified.
That doesn't really make it good, but I don't think it represents the feature design.
;)
I've also had zero crashes but I do notice quite a few minor bugs. They're a little annoying but I've still sunk 30 hours in. I also can't remember the last open world game that didn't have similar bugs.
1. Friendly NPC left behind in mission area which was scripted to become inaccessible. Couldn't reach the NPC to finish the mission. 2. Killed an NPC two times: once in a side mission and once in a main mission 3. The player goes to sleep perpendicular to the bed and with the bottom half side of the body outside the bed. 4. Friendly NPCs start to shout randomly during stealth missions. 5. There's no driving AI, all machines follow predefined paths sometimes going through one another as if there's no collision.
And probably lots more I didn't remember. And these exclude the physics and rendering bugs and I encounter every 5 minutes.
They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...
Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen.
Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game.
They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.
There seem to be two factions: Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed. But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.
Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.
GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.
But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.
There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.
Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
Gamers are so cranky.
Most expected the latest and greatest, what they got was not that. Every hype/drop cycle is the same, but this cycle is filled with more valid complaints than normal, depressingly.
People felt burnt on Oblivion in 2013 because it was boring green forests and unappealing face design. That game pretty much worked for hundreds of hours of content. Cyberpunk can't even get the basic mechanics right.
I haven't played it since launch, it made for a good internet historian video!
I agree. I played it a few hours on launch at a friend's place and it was completely underwhelming.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
The amount of time we have is finite, attaching a dollars per hour figure to it is a hilariously bad metric to judge how much value entertainment has. People don't play X's and O's all day because it's great value.
I paid $250 for a six person table with dinner at the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra while they played all the best pieces of John Williams' music from his many film scores. Only a two hour concert, but the Jurassic Park theme made me tear up, and I was only 10 feet from the orchestra.
I paid $300 for two Conductor's Box seats at the MSO for myself and a girl I was dating to see the Harry Potter in Concert series, where you watch a Harry Potter movie while the orchestra plays all the music from the film live. For me, it was hit or miss, since I was too old to really get into Harry Potter, but the lady I was seeing was 15 years younger than me, so it really affected her, which of course really benefited me.
Both cases, money well spent.
I don't think this is fair at all. From the earliest days of their marketing, CDPR was promising that Cyberpunk2077 would have "unprecedented" levels of customization, open world interaction, and next-level AIs. It may have been foolish for people to believe that would come true, but CDPR definitely did promise this, and I think it's perfectly understandable that many people feel that they were straight up lied to.
It's a classic case where CDPR just overhyped itself too much. If you ignore the ridiculous amount of bugs, it is a decent game, but it definitely is not at all the "unprecedented" game that CDPR hyped it up to be.
It has some open world jank, which is inconvenient but pretty much part of the genre even for experienced behemoths like Rockstar, but so far I haven't seen any wide-spread reports of actually game-breaking stuff.
When talking about "ridiculous amounts of bugs", in an open-world game, much worse offenders come to mind that have been doing so for literally decades and are somehow still held in somewhat high regard regardless of that, like a Bethesda.
See what I did there? Compare GTA and W3? Because to me, they are similar. I mean, you can't kill random people in W3, but the "go where you want and collect and build" seems the same.
If you're telling me 2077 is not open world, I'll be disappointed.
I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.
Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad
EA gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it's important to recognize their behavior is typical of all major players in the games industry. The whole thing is rotten and you shouldn't trust any of them. They certainly haven't earned it. Always wait for reviews.
Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.
It's extremely a game that is pastiche of cyberpunk, diving neither into the cyber nor punk beyond skinning things. Where's the Ghost in the Shell examination of the self? Where's the dive into what it means to have modifiable bodies? Where's the anti-establishment story (oh wait, the game opens with praise of the cops by multiple characters, including V).
For a game that wants to be cyberpunk, it sure relies on a lot of stereotypes about people and what they can be.
To me, it reads a lot like a Boomer/GenX take on what they remember cyberpunk being (NEON AND CHROME) and not an actual understanding of the genre (exploration of what it means to be a human in a corporate, transhuman world.)
If you want to play an actual cyberpunk game, check out Umurangi Generation or Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake that came out this year is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk.
That said, the game is a serviceable noire and shooter with some extremely always on aesthetic choices which aren't really my taste but they might be other's tastes.
How much of the game have you played? The entire main quest is about transhumanism and corporate control. Cyberpsychosis and the Maelstrom are used as a means for examining the results of the overuse of body modification.
Just like the Cyberpunk RPG, it was very heavily inspired by Gibson's work, and I mean that in a good way.
Gibson himself offered the critique that the game looked like GTA papered over with 80s retrofuturism.
I think it's totally reasonable to critique the game as not really doing anything interesting in the genre or even doing anything more than appropriating genre tropes.
Also, it's only 57 years in the future. You're not going to advance that much in that time. Personally I think the aesthetic seems a little too trapped in 80s retrofuturism -- I guess I agree with Gibson there -- but that was always the interpretation of cyberpunk and scifi that I liked the most so it gets a pass.
There is plenty of whimsical, optimistic visions into the future, and while I think a setting that explores "high tech, low life" in that context would be cool to see, it'd feel a lot closer to Star Wars than "cyberpunk".
That said, media like ghost in the shell and altered carbon (the novels) gesture in this direction. Altered carbon, for instance, has people who have modded their bodies with animal features. GitS goes hard on the ship of Theseus metaphors and has lots of mods that don't fit a standard human shape. Not to mention plenty of discussions of gender and gender roles in a society where you can just choose whatever body you want.
You are right in that I think the universe could explore those themes more thoroughly, but then maybe it will and I'm just not there yet
The Japanese stereotypes and Haitian gangs are lifted straight off the pages of Neuromancer and Count Zero. I dig the retrofuturist 80s vibe, but then I love retrofuturism in general so that's not surprising.
In the end, CP2077 is a AAA video game. It has to appeal to the general population, so yeah, it's probably not going to be the most experimental take on the genre. As mainstream cyberpunk attempts go, can we at least agree it's heads-and-shoulders better than Netflix's Altered Carbon? :)
Yes. It definitely fell flat for me. Having read the source material probably didn't help there since it was so much better. Although even the book... I re-read about 2 years ago and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered it from around 2006.
The tabletop game draws heavily on Gibson and Philip K. Dick by the way of Blade Runner. (And to be clear, I love that!)
The common idiom high tech, low life is another way of describing the genre and also succinctly suggests that the genre is, in fact, cyber + punk.
Happy to provide references, but a quick internet search clearly shows that what you've suggested is factually incorrect.
IIRC this comment was made when you're on a quest and partnered with probably the one good cop on the force, who was also suspended for doing his job. The quest started based on the incompetence of the police leading to him needing to ask V for help to pursue the case. And the comment was made in reference to this one guy you're trying to help out. Meanwhile the next quest V will matter-of-factly state that the cops can't be trusted to handle so-and-so issue.
So please don't take lines out of their context.
Remember that Night City evolved out of LA and imagine that description applied to the LAPD.
But back to the point: you work with all sorts of terrible people in the game. That's sort of one conclusion of the Cyberpunk genre: every level of society is rotten has decayed even as technology progressed. The police are no better (and no worse) than any other faction of human traffickers, politicians, crime syndicates, drug dealers, fixers - everyone is simply looking out for their own interests. You regularly get gigs with orders to kidnap or kill people with no questions asked. So it seems unnatural for you to single out the police as being the one faction where it is unforgivable for the game to have you side with at any point.
On what to means to have a modifiable body, there too from the beginning the game puts it right in front of you where it causes a sort of body dysmorphic disorder that can drive people crazy. There's even a series of side quests that deal directly with this.
But that's the beauty of critique, I think we can both look at the same work and draw different messages from it.
When an article compared William Gibson's visions to Second Life, he rejected the notion explicitly[1]:
But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse's Mouth,
"It wasn't the vision I had."
Neither is Second Life.
Chia and her buds build their treehouses in
corporate ghost sites. That's the difference.
Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.
Unfortunately, the trend over the last few decades in cyberpunk has steadily shifted towards aesthetics. The only true counterexample I know of (and by far the best cyberpunk movie ever made is Sleep Dealer (2008). Its aesthetics suffered due to a very tiny budget, but it was shockingly prescient in its depiction of the "gig economy" and drone violence.
[1] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/#8519138918500...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZr8A_9VZBw&disable_polymer=...
Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.
At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SNES game and Shadowrun Returns. However, I've talked with hardcore Cyberpunk pen & paper players, and they say its un-fucking-believable how well CDPR has brought to life the Cyberpunk universe in this game.
Yes, there are bugs. I have every confidence though that CDPR will iron all this shit out like they did with The Witcher III. This will be a great game by mid-to-late 2021, in every sense of the word.
I genuinely hope in Cyberpunk 2077 II that they'll be able to flesh out the game world, because I really love this game and this world.
But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car" - you have expectations when you put the money down...
Sure you do, because we're moving to a new type of reality whereby software is a determinant of features. A lot of people haven't gotten the memo on this yet though.
All Tesla vehicles ship with everything necessary for Autopilot, all the hardware and sensors. If you want to turn it on, you just unlock it with software. Tesla vehicles also get feature updates regularly.
Computer hardware has been this way for awhile. NVIDIA specifically has a history of improving the performance of their GPUs simply with new driver updates, in some cases with ridiculous performance gains on the order of 7-10%. Just from software optimization.
A video game is purely software, so the optimization limits are truly limited only by the hardware upon which it is run and stored.
Tesla disagrees. Full Self Driving is coming in 2015 ergh 2016 ergh 2017 ergh 2018 ergh 2019 ergh.. end of 2020...
Now the Tesla fanboys are saying that it will come in 2021.
Just look at the world we live in: it contains 6 billion people. If a small fraction of it is into buying a car or a game that will only work as advertised a decade after they buy it, you might still be able to sell the millions of cars, games, etc.
If you check out the news, the amount of people that's delusional is not a "small fraction", but actually closer to ~50% of the population.
That really depends on individual expectations. With many people treating the game like the second coming of gaming Jesus a lot of the disappointment was pretty much guaranteed.
Personally I didn't expect anything like that, I was hoping for an open world Deus Ex like, with a more "colorful" setting, and that's pretty much what I got.
> not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
AMD has been the "current gaming king" only since Zen 3 desktop release, which happened just last month, most of these CPUs are still completely impossible to buy at actual MSRP.
Regardless of that even Zen 2 is mostly performing very well with the game [0], which the HEXedit fix will only improve once it's patched in officially.
In that context this complaint sounds very much like still complaining about the lack of an epilepsy warning; Sure it's not great to overlook something like that, but it's inane to act as if these are unfixable and nonredeemable issues, particularly in an industry where "games a service", releasing early access products, has become the new low-key norm even for much bigger publishers.
Zen 2 is a good deal for it's overall versatility and particularly the amount of physical cores one gets for the amount of money paid.
But gaming wise Zen 2 struggles to keep pace with any Intel CPU above the 10600k, particularly when the Intel's are overclocked, where they have much more headroom than both Zen 2 or Zen 3.
Meaning that anybody who wanted maximum gaming performance, above all else, had pretty much no other choice except for Intel, that only changed with Zen 3, last month.
Now with Zen 3 AMD has the "crown" in both gaming and productivity with CPUs like the 5900x, but that comes at the cost of a price premium as Zen 3 is not nearly as generously priced as Zen 2.
Which means nothing for the vast majority of users since the cpu was far from holding them back which is why we have seen most pc builds include an AMD cpu for the last few years because very few people want to pay way more to get a slightly higher number in a specific benchmark and see nothing in reality for the money.
A common misconception, but in reality the CPU actually is very responsible for min frames and thus pushing up the average frames, preventing frames from skipping. That becomes particularly important in demanding scenarios like PCVR and generally running high-resolutions with high-refresh rates.
> which is why we have seen most pc builds include an AMD cpu for the last few years
We've seen that because they offer excellent price and performance ratio, but that didn't make them the "gaming king", it made them them "budget all-rounder king", which is not the same.
This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.
There is also the lesser known axiom: it's better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.
There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account.
Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.
What are some modern games that are like this?
I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.
SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.
There also some simpler indie games like The Stanley Parable, Papers Please, and This War of Mine
At a surface level it is very reminiscent of the Deus Ex games, but if you go in expecting something profound you will be disappointed
getting some really mixed signals here
> the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined
really reads like "I liked it, but I'm ashamed to like it, so I'm going to say I didn't like it instead"
"If you think the car is no fun to drive, why take it for a spin, twice?"
Playing it twice is what allowed me to form this opinion. The game offers multiple "paths" after all. It's called giving it the benefit of the doubt.
but like, I'm not really trying to convince you of anything, I'm trying to get clarity on what you're saying, because your original comment is so ambiguous that it doesn't actually help me figure out whether or not I want to play Cyberpunk.
As someone who has spent years in the games industry, I strongly encourage you to take your players seriously and don't just assume you know better.
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of a "sunk cost"[0]. You'll probably be happier for it.
Edit: Scrolled down and found great r3view that put what felt into words better then I can.
The game offers you three "life paths" at the beginning so after I finished it once I had to see if a different path would be better.
Well it turns out life paths change nothing besides the introduction. It's still the same dumb game with the same railtracks and the same story. Your choices don't matter and you realize that you've been swindled since the promises and descriptions of the immersive and emergent open-world nature of the game turned out to be a bunch of lies.
Hearing all the stories about refunds being hard or impossible to execute, one has to wonder if legal action is justifiable here. The CP2077 that CDPR framed and advertised gameplay-wise has very little to do with the end result that they delivered. And I'm not even talking about the bugs, but the game itself.
It goes without saying that I'm done with them and my intuition tells me that the CDPR brand will be poisonous to a lot of gamers out there after this fiasco. Bugs are one thing, but blatant lies quite another.
The gameplay is pretty much identical to w3, which is what I expected going in. If you expected more than that you were bound to be disappointed.
I know there are additional endings and side quests, but the problem is that game has no depth whatsoever so I'm not exactly motivated to spend more time. It's mindless action with a few variations on the quests that keep repeating themselves. After playing the game for a few hours, the shallowness and superficiality of it all starts weighing on you.
I've put more than 40 hours in and I'm nowhere close to completing it even once. I'm pretty sure all the dialogue alone adds up to that much.
Even completing the main story, gigs and side-missions is probably going to take me around 100 hours. Maybe someone faster could do it in 40, or maybe 20 if you skipped all of the dialogue and played on a low difficulty. I spend/wasted a lot of time just exploring the city and surrounding areas, doing 'bounties' or climbing on random places to see if there's something interesting/loot to be found.
I suppose you mostly played the main story line on a low difficulty, ignoring all the side activities (which do impact the main story and vice-versa) and likely rushed through or past everything else.
If you were looking to have a good time you didn't exactly set yourself up for success. A bit like reading a book and skipping all of the chapters that follow minor characters for world-building purposes.
I agree that the life paths don't have major consequence, which is a bit disappointing, but saying "choices don't matter" as a blanket statement is just factually incorrect, considering there's a long list of choices that have a lasting effect on the game world, and there are at least 3-5 different endings depending on the choices you made earlier in the game.
There's a list of (so far known) major choices here if you want to spoil yourself: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/Choices_and_Consequ...
Here's the most recent google-cached version I could find, archived via archive.is: https://archive.is/DFb7d
You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
Preorders just allow them to release buggy games in a beta state and patch it later.
Fantastic game with maybe 2-3 bugs
I don't mean the performance, it's clearly just had so much stuff ripped out
I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.
Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK.
The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360.
The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne.
It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either.
--
I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.
I've personally tried the game on Xbox One X and only problems I've found were graphical glitches but it still is not a great experience. It's honestly pretty sad it ended like this with the amount of crunch and the token system the developers had.
It is only released on last gen consoles. There's no native PS5 or Xbox series X/S version you can buy. You buy the PS4/Xbox One version and play it via backwards compatibility. Apart from video resolution or low FPS, have there been significant problems on the last gen consoles in terms of bugs that aren't on the new gen?
- NPCs floating in space
- NPCs walking through solid objects
- NPCs randomly spawning in view
- I have a gun that wont fire if I use a scope on it
- I have another gun whose model disappears in car chases
- Some objects have meshes that duplicate (cigarette floating in space while the character is also holding it)
- Randomly getting flagged by the cops for a crime when im literally just walking around with my weapon holstered
- Quest goals not registering/having to repeat certain actions
None of these are like a huge deal, sometimes it's even really funny, but dear god is it incredibly buggy.
It sounds like such a systemic issue its not like a particular component (eg AI or rendering) is the issue.
Additionally to hands and props disappearing at random.
- I'm figuring floating NPCs and walking through solid surfaces might be from incorrect navmeshes. IE maybe they baked them, moved some stuff around, and forgot to rebake. Or forgot to mark some objects static, etc.
- Meshes disappearing.. not sure, thinking maybe theyre using some fixed size arrays to avoid reallocations but maybe theyre hitting a fixed size limit and things get evicted.
- Weird spawns. Guessing this might be something like a broken line of sight calculation. Maybe similar to the theorized navmesh thing -- occluders could be wrong too
But man, oh man, is it buggy. I've never been soft locked this many times in a game before. As a software developer, it's honestly a bit amusing to find the obvious cases where the individual sub systems trip each other up.
Primary offender is the scripted mission system vs. telephone. You get a phone call just as you enter a scripted cutscene? Two calls coming in simultaneously? You start a yellow dialogue while on the phone? Welp, time to reload.
Management at game dev company ignores all team feedback about timeline and quality, instead promises an arbitrary release date and pushes to crunch to meet deadlines. What a shocker ;)
Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new.
After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out.
This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product.
Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made.
How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?
On the one hand, I wish companies wouldn't do this kind of crap, but on the other hand, the consumers need to be more responsible. This game has already made back the development costs, so all this backlash will probably amount to nothing. It's harsh to say, but gamers will seemingly believe anything the marketing machine tells them hook line and sinker.
The problem however is that execs want exact dates and meanwhile marketing is just hyping up the product which yields to crazy expectations from consumers and this forces the engineers to even more crunch and degrade the quality of the whole thing. Vicious cycle indeed.
Games are most likely biggest and most complex "artistic" projects on earth (certainly they dwarf movie production). And doing artistic things is harder than typical software development for e.g. banks, where you have clearly stated requirements, whereas in games the requirement don't go beyond "it has to be cool and play great". Both of these can often only be verified in advanced stages of development, which leads to big delays where company heads realize that the game they've been developing for the past 4 years is indeed sucky and needs a huge revamp...
Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours
he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
In my experience playing the game on a PS4 Pro (does that qualify as a last-gen console? Not sure), I have experienced no game breaking bugs or performance issues that warrant the level of criticism here. Instead I have been blown away by the level of detail and beauty of the world they created and I personally am over the moon with the fact the game that I had been eagerly awaiting exceeds my expectations for it.
Congrats CD Projekt, take a vacation, give some bonuses, let people upgrade their 5 year old hardware and chill out.
This is news because the quoted statement is false. In fact, the opposite is true. Every genre defining game of the past 35 years has had a genre defining gold print. CP2077 is a dumpster fire. It will never be considered a great because of its launch.
I’m also curious about your statement that every genre defining game has had a genre defining gold print. Can you point to one or more similar games that launched flawlessly across all platforms, on time, without negative reviews?
Flawlessly launched genre defining games:
- Quake (and its arena shooter successor: Halo)
- Assassin’s Creed
- Grand Theft Auto III
- Super Mario 64
- Your favorite fighting game
- Your favorite racing game
- Your favorite rhythm game
- Your favorite JRPG
- Deus Ex
If you came to different conclusions chalk it up to subjective differences. I completely disagree that it’s a dumpster fire but I suspect we want different things out of cutting edge games or technology in general.
Two primary things:
One) They targeted consoles when they shouldn't have. Cyberpunk is a game that should have been pc only first, and then later ported to consoles. They had a hammer (the engine) and saw nails (consoles), but in the game dev world the largest sets of complications come from trying to support different environments. The same can be said often in the normal software world, trying to be cross compatible when sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. When you do the math, targeting consoles, and especially if you go for last gen, the beancounter numbers show the ROI increase over just pc or just pc and latest gen are very high... and then instead of the development resources that should have gone into the AI, customization, bug-squashing, etc, go into console work.
Two) They focused too much on building the individual quests instead of the emergent opportunities which abound. It seems like they spent too much time on hand crafting quest levels, especially the ones that involved Silverhand. Many quests have their own complete loaded levels you can't get to from the main game world. By doing so, they probably wasted tons of tester and dev hours on those individual levels instead of the open game world bugs and features.
I suspect also that quite a few features just got ripped out and replaced with placeholders while the bugs get worked out more. There is no way the AI they touted so long ago is really in this state, for example, so I suspect if you give it half a year, lots of expected features will suddenly start showing up in updates and the game will end up in a much better state.
All in all, I enjoy the game world, and it has moments where it really shines. It also has madness inducing and show stopping bugs that most normal players just won't put up with... (~100+ proc kills/game freezes to finish main story line on linux/proton).
Why do beancounters always ruin everything they touch? What should have been one of the best games ever released was one of the best releases to ever money.
Two years from now it will be primo, I'm sure. The question is will there be enough backlash to change anything? Given the amount of money they made and are still making, I doubt it. Different industry, same bullshit as everywhere else.
This is interesting info for someone like me that doesn't work in this field. It's something that I can understand intuitively, but it's nice to see that confirmed.
It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized".
If I want to build a 1000 brick wall and it takes a bricklayer 1 sec to lay a brick will getting 1000 brick layers allow me to build the wall in 1 sec?
If you analyse this analogy you see where you might be able to get some scale, such as pipeline and starting on different parts, but it highlights challenges there such as alignment and communication.
I think this can still relate to software in many ways as well.
> no practical difference between life paths chosen
> AI system broken/unfinished
> length of the game + no replayabity factor
> linear playthrough
It has been suggested that the game was rewritten to accommodate the Keanu character.
From what I've gathered this game is a solid 7/10. It's interesting to see so many nine and ten out of ten reviews from the "professional" reveiewers and the reviews from the players. This is a trend that has been going on for some time now.
a) There is no way of knowing if the game is gonna be good until real copies land in the hands of people who play games to have fun, instead of reviewers who are too worried about giving an honest review with the fear that they won't get future review copies or get sued.
b) Games generally get steep discounts a year or so after release. This is not universal, but if you avoid buying into the hype then you'll save yourself a considerable amount of money.
The only way to hold these companies accountable is to vote with your wallet, and so I always encourage people to reconsider pre-orders.
I'll be eagerly waiting to see if the game gets the love it deserves over the next year and if it turns out to be a flop, it'll just join long line of over-hyped AAA release flops.
As the industry grows ever larger, that has to be a good way of attracting talent.
https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre...
I've been loving the game. I completed it and am starting my second playthrough. Honestly, my only complaint is that it's too _short_, and I think CDPR took comments about the Witcher 3's long length a little too much to heart. I would not have complained for a second if it was double the length or more.
I started a corpo character, got some fancy tech and a lot of cash 5 minutes in, then I ride a cool flying car around, I felt good and liked my choice. 10 minutes later I'm in a bar and 2 people come up to me that I have a meaningless dialogue with, they steal the tech and cash and from that point on I'm just a regular street kid?
It made no sense to me, I played on for an hour and then restarted as a street kid.
All the PS4 videos I could find barely stuttered and seemed well above the threshold of playable
I tried the game on Linux (Wine + vkd3d-proton). Thanks to CDPR for at least giving the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance, even though they could make a native Linux release already due to all the Stadia work.
I don't think CDPR should have released for old consoles, it's going to misrepresent the game no matter what, and just take extra effort.
And, yet, twelve hours and counting.
They were very nice about it.
https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/
"Janky. If I can describe it with one word.
8 years of hype to launch what looks like an Early Access game.
It's glitchy, it's buggy, it doesn't run well unless you have an RTX card and DLSS enabled. And that's barely passable.
But those can eventually be fixed.
The core of the game, the massive open world, is incredibly superficial, with nothing to do in it. CDPR crafted a beautiful, detailed world, with braindead AI and overly simplistic gameplay.
There's no roleplaying involved like you would find in Deus Ex. There's no extracurricular activities that doesn't involve shooting a bunch of bad guys like you would find in Red Dead Redemption 2. You won't find tight gunplay like you would see in Destiny 2.
The AI completely lacks any sort of intelligence. Enemies rush you without the sense of self-preservation. Oftentimes standing there letting you blast them in the face. Cops spawn literally yards behind you without any chase, or any threat. Walk a block down and they completely forget you exist. No bounty on your head, no search and apprehend procedures. But stand next to them for 3 seconds and they'll shoot you on sight.
Really, there's not much to do except shoot things. Guns feel impactful enough, if you use revolvers or tech weapons, and melee combat is passable. You can go for a stealth or hacking approach, but those don't feel as good as just pulling the trigger on some thugs. Hacking is just pointing your reticle at someone, and then make a selection from the menu. And depending on what you chose, sparks just fly out of their head. That's it.
The story is engaging, yet forgettable. This is a cyberpunk setting, but it's in appearances only. There's all these talks about megacorporations taking over the world, but only one corporation takes center stage. There's no political intrigue, no conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true, no investigation into a greater mystery. Keanu Reeves is literally taking your breath away and you go out to make sure that doesn't happen.
Your personal backstory is forgettable. It's literally 20 mins long, and your entire introduction to Night City is a montage. CDPR failed the show, don't tell aspect. They could've squeezed in a few good hours of character development and worldbuilding with the opening hours. Instead, you get taken straight into Night City, told to care about certain things, and want to have this lofty ideal of becoming a living legend for some unknown reason. You don't have a story to tell, there's a story being told to you.
The characters definitely carry the narrative, from Silverhand's personal vendetta, to Panam's sense of belonging, and Takemura's strong honor code.
Regardless, I did enjoy this game. But there's so many glaring flaws that becomes hard to ignore.
So it pains me to say, I do not recommend this game. The numerous technical issues make this equivalent to an Early Access title. But the gameplay loop, the promise of an immersive experience, a sandbox for you to get lost in are totally nonexistent. It's a beautiful world CDPR created, but it's just a glorified loading screen going from one mission marker to another.
It's all style but no substance."
https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22158019/cyberpunk-2077-revi...
Maybe it's just me, but I definitely wouldn't consider this the core of the game. For me the core is the single player story ("main quest" I guess). Maybe this is because I have played every CDPR game and The Witcher 3 is the only one so far with an open world and, and even there it was clear that the main story line was the crown jewel.
But the part about the immersion breaking over ridiculously bad AI, shallow world... Yeah.
I read the transcript and based on what I saw, there is no way there is not a CYA email saying something along the lines of 'it is not ready. if you release it, it will bomb'. I wonder whether board members will be removed.
edit: Well, now I am annoyed. I can't mow down children in car ..sigh
I haven't found this to be true. it took a bit of playing around with the settings, but with dynamic fidelityFX, I am getting great image quality on my 1080 ti at 4K, sitting right around 50 fps.
For me this is the single factor which has lead to so many of the problems inherent in the game. You cannot just pickup a multi-hundred person digital interactive art project (ie. a video game) and shift it online overnight.
Still, I think CDPR were right to release the game. Its good enough, content is complete, and they need to have the product on shelves before Christmas and before people lose interest in last-gen consoles.
Having the product out there will motivate its staff - still stuck at home in Lockdown Poland - to work on the very public bugs.
Its also interesting that Poland seems to have had basically the same COVID case and death profile as Ukraine, despite Ukraine having a significantly less strict lockdown (bars, restaurants, workplaces never shut this Autumn or Winter).
I have no problem with them including Keanu in the game. I do have a problem with crunch and releasing a very buggy game.
https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964
It doesn't detract from the game or anything, but it just seems like an odd way to spend a limited development budget.
Even a lot of much older shows didn't need star power. Think about something like Star Trek TNG. The most famous person on that cast when it started was Will Wheaton. Obviously Patrick Stewart became huge but he was a total unknown prior.
> We have an internal QA department and we’re working with external companies as well. One thing that perhaps didn’t help us is COVID: internal testers are able to test the game working from home because we provide them with our own connected machines and so on, but external testers working for external companies were not able to test the game from homes –they have test centers and if they’re not there, they’re not able to work. So, we have seen a decrease in the number of testers, but I wouldn’t point to it as a major source of problems.
Big AAA need plenty of market reach to be profitable unless they have some exclusivity deal.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-one-x-1tb-console-cyb...
B) You risk losing even more game sales towards the end of the console lifecycle, as soon as rumors start flying around about new hardware about to hit the market.
If the mission is simply "sell as many copies as possible", it will always make sense to not ignore the largest market share. This is why CP2077 is not having proper next-gen features, but is rather running the same (poorly optimized) last-gen build on both systems. Ironic as it sounds, it seems like the focus was to provide a serviceable experience for last-gen gamers first and foremost.
They clearly failed on that front. So now they have a poorly running game on last-gen, and a gimped one on next-gen.
Sorry, I'm rambling.
So lots of people who have the last gen hardware see that the new consoles are constantly out of stock, and decide that they are 'good enough' for now until you can actually just order a new console w/o hassle. That may not be till well into the new year.
Wouldn't Cyberpunk team have been developing the game for 2 years before rumors even surfaced about the development of a next gen console?
The time lines don't seem like they line up to only building it for a next gen console that didn't have hardware architecture planned out yet.
On the other hand, there are still games being released now that work and look perfectly fine on PS4. Spider-Man looks and plays great on my base PS4 non-Pro. Miles Morales had some crashes and bugs but those were patched within two weeks and now that game works smoothly and looks beautiful on my older PS4.
You could argue that it's a first-party game and it gets better attention due to that.
I understand Cyberpunk 2077 won't look nearly as good on my PS4 compared to PC's or PS5's, but there's no reason it should have PS2-era graphics/pop-in...
This is absolutely not the case. The game was in dire straights long before Covid. (When did Poland lockdown?)
It's not clear to me that you can make the claim you made without providing some additional evidence as everything I've read about the project suggests that it has been in development for 8+ years, and has had a real rough go of things.
https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees...
A much better situation than CD Projekt, which is also a European company (from Poland).
People aren't that desparate to work on games.
Contractors especially get ripped off all the time.
"Hey, that tile is slightly off, I am not paying for any of this".
Are people upset that this AAA game that is trying do everything on all devices for a huge audience doesn't perform well on the last-gen consoles on it's initial rollout?
So, for the first question – whether we’re focusing just on technicalities or gameplay elements; things like AI – for example. To be honest – these are the same for us, from the production standpoint AI and NPC behavior fall within the general category of bugs, so if I can give you an answer – I think it does actually include that as well.
They took full responsibility. Suspended the subscripton for months. People who subbed for at least 3 months before the shutdown got permanent discounted subscription in the new version. They changed the whole upper management of the division responsible of the game. And much more.
Honestly there are 2 games that had a remarkable turn around from a total disaster launch: FFXIV 1.0 and No Man's Sky. Not sure Cyberpunk can do it too.
If the game ain't gonna work on a certain console, don't sell it for that console. Plain and simple. Or if you're going to release it anyway, at least let gaming critics review it and let the public make an informed decision, which CDPR deliberately didn't do.
I'm baffled as to why so many people are defending this incredibly shady business practice by CDPR.
CP77 is the first AAA game released in a long time that was built for PC first and ported to consoles, instead of the other way around. Instead of PCs getting crappy ports hard-limited to 60fps no matter how much GPU you throw at it, and crappy control schemes, the dregs of last-gen consoles got really poor performance and visuals compared to people on PS4 Pros, Xbox One X, and the latest 2020 gen consoles. It's not acceptable, but it's also hard to imagine how you could have made people happy when they're that far underpowered from a hardware department for a game like CP77.
Its like nobody playtested it at all on PC
And yeah, the PS4 and Xbox One are long in the tooth, but there are plenty of games that look absolutely stellar on them. I'm going to only give some PS4 examples here, since that is the one I have, but Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Spiderman, and The Last of Us Part 2 all came out recently and look _really_ good even on a 7 year old console. And 3 of those are open world.
It's definitely possible to make a base PS4/Xbox one game that looks really good, and I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility for CDPR to have taken those consoles into account from the beginning. If so, they might have had a chance of them being fine on day one. I just hope people on a PS4/Xbox One that bought the game will eventually get a patch that make it run reasonably, since apparently refunds aren't really happening.
To make it worse, they will not let a publisher publish just to PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. Your game has to work on all versions of the console.
It's beyond idiotic and I'm surprised it took so long for the consequences to be visible.
I'm glad Sony at least seems to have backed away from fragmenting their own platform in this generation.
CDPR should have done their due diligence, obviously, but the platform owners have done them no favors by adding another dimension to the testing matrix.
Compare the 2018 version to the release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogihi-OewPQ
They probably should've just come out and said they're not releasing the game for the last gen after all, and people would have been somewhat more understanding.
Alternatively they could have reskinned the Witcher and people would have been content
This game will be good in 2021 when released again on the new generation of consoles