Cyberpunk 2077 Refunds
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1) Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
2) It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone. Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
3) There are some bugs and quirks, depending on your platform and luck. I haven't had any major issues, though I know for some it's just unplayable at the moment. This will likely get much better after patches hit.
On a personal note, I like the game a lot. Yes it has its quirks, and I generally feel it's a less refined/polished game compared to what Witcher 3 was, but still it's an extremely fun, really well-made game. Combat is great, world is enticing, story-telling swings between good enough and great. For one reason or another whenever I launch the game another 5 hours passes without me noticing. FPS camera and general art direction also helps with suspension of disbelief, and the game is as immersive as it gets.
It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.
This is what was promised by CDP. None of that has been delivered. It’s a shallow, juvenile experience, with very little depth, bad story, repetitive and useless side missions, non-consequential choices, brain dead AI, barren city with zero point in exploration, terrible inventory system, bad shooting mechanics, bad skill system, ridiculously retarded driving and racing mechanics—just to name a few things. And it’s ridiculously unoptimized and buggy.
And....barren city? Are we even playing the same game?
I just don't understand that point. Many times so far I've just been walking around and admiring the place, it feels like the most realistic city I've ever been in in a video game. There's just so much stuff happening everywhere, I could probably forget the story and walk around and admire it all.
So realistic and cyberpunk, right?
I just don't know how much interactivity is required for it to be...good? What part of the AI is missing?
Cyberpunk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1coBF2_0--k
Red Dead Redemption 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7KnllcYzE
So you mean "realistic" in the sense that it looks nice, which is fine, but it doesn't mean "realistic" in the sense of feeling real, ie the NPCs actually react to your actions, cops don't spawn behind you, etc.
there's a slider to adjust how many random NPCs spawn, so maybe not?
in any case, it's hard to argue that they delivered "a varied selection of different character classes". there are no character classes, just five attributes with related perks.
Well, that's just not true, it's just that your "class" depends heavily on your playstyle. In the same sense Skyrim didn't have classes, but your "build" depended on how you played the game. You can play almost entirely stealthily, put all of your points into intelligence and stealth with some hacking added in. You can play as a brute with tonnes of raw strength, punch everything with gorilla arms. Or maybe you want a typical soldier character, with proficiency in ranged weapons. Or a samurai-like character who uses katanas, or maybe mantis blades. All of these playstyles have their distinct perks and yes, you can absolutely role play as any of them.
Yes, you don't pick "wizzard/thief/rogue" at the beginning. But that doesn't mean there aren't classes.
FWIW, I actually prefer the progression system in cyberpunk. rigid class systems make more sense in party-based rpgs. I just don't think it's accurate to say the game has a class system; it's more like it intentionally has the absence of classes.
Witcher 3, despite being a great game, had a lot of the problems Cyberpunk is getting blasted for. Boring, repetitive combat, "loot everything" inventory management - lots of useless garbage available to collect, very unsatisfying and boring MMO-like crafting system.
But the difference is - W3 could always fall back on its incredible setting, story, music, and memorable characters that we met in previous games. And the main quest + DLC stories were quite good as well.
#2 was mostly a lie
#3 Meh. You level up, you customize your character based on perks and skills. You get items that you can customize. This one seems fine.
#4 Is fair I think. Stealth + hacking + fighting + talking. You can build your character to be your exact playstyle. You can do several playthroughs and have totally different styles.
#5 I think is fair, although I might not call it "gigantic". There are a bunch of weapon types, a lot of upgrades, and then a whole world of body modification and quickhack tools to play around with.
#6 is obviously a lie, given the launch.
Incidentally, I saw this today: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/cd-projekt-red-to-tone-...
There are story missions dealing with sex workers and their validity as humans. There are story missions addressing rape and misconduct towards sex workers. There are story missions dealing with human trafficking. There are story missions dealing with corporate espionage. The list goes on. None of these things are "juvenile", I would say, nor can they be watered down to "nudity and dildos." This game is not Saints Row, it is not cartoony or silly.
You can dislike the story, but you should not mischaracterize the subject matter to downplay certain parts of its validity. The story is absolutely "mature". There is no question.
The comparison to Deus Ex is not off. It's got turn-of-the-milleneum AI, zero exploration benefit, and so on. That's not a bad thing, except, of course, it wasn't going to be that way.
But Deus Ex (The original) had great benefits from exploration.
If it was like Deus Ex with updated graphics, I’d probably have bought it, but it looks more like The Witcher with a Deus Ex paint to me.
It won't bring it up to modern standards by any means, but have a look at Deus Ex: Revision (https://store.steampowered.com/app/397550/Deus_Ex_Revision/).
It's not an "open world" but its level design is much more intricately layered than any part of CP2077, including the main mission set pieces. You can even kill important NPCs and it will change the storyline
Well, or if you're the type of person who can be happy playing Doom or The Witcher 3 on Switch. Which I assume is a substantial number of people—they keep porting those types of games to the Switch, which means someone has to be buying them.
Watching the Digital Foundry analysis, the main thing I'm wondering is if they should have allowed the dynamic resolution to scale down further at the low-end—for instance, let it go to 540p on the base PS4 and/or to 720p on the PS4 Pro. This, again, seems to have been the key to getting games like The Witcher 3 on Switch.
Doom and witcher 3 run reasonably on the switch, which is arguably not true of the console ports of Cyberpunk.
It was perfectly playable.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 can actually go down to 368p. I remember some people were upset about that, but it didn't seem to cause an uproar, and certainly kept the framerate steady.
https://youtu.be/C5pHpQqhmR4 3:20 https://youtu.be/mVWJPYKCMco 14:30
Cyberpunk looks like steaming ass on eighth-gen consoles. They obviously didn't put the work in to making sure the downgrade didn't hurt the visuals too much that Panic Button put in to Doom on Switch.
As of like yesterday, Nvidia started paywalling this great video, but I'll link it anyways: https://resources.nvidia.com/events/GTC2020s22697.
There probably aren't too many stones left unturned, and the Switch community despite issues at least could understand the gambit. It was called the impossible port.
The Cyberpunk 2077 team basically ran out of time on their release and, if I understand it, blindsided PS4 owners who otherwise had no reason to think it would be hitting 10fps in a gunfight.
So it seems there were very different classes of expectations going on between the two scenarios.
The corpo path for example is a bad one:
1. in the intro you litearlly do nothing, you only hear an NPC explain a mission to you, and right after that mission is cancelled and you are thrown in the game proper, you literally do nothing except hear people talking about stuff that later is completely irrelevant in the rest of the game.
2. The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring, whenever you click on the corpo option the character personality, talking style and the volume of the recording of his voice actor changes.
3. Some parts of 2, ditto for nomads, for example if you are playing as nomad, and do a certain nomad sidequest, they say "you don't understand our issues, you are not a nomad", because obviously they assume you are on the streetkid path.
4. It is easy to get lost in the story because of bugs, for example many people got quests totally derailed because they skipped triggers of the scripts or something else broke entirely, and also many people got confused because critical information on dialogue was missed because the constant phoen calls about gigs and delamain cars can play on top and hide the critical dialogue.
So even though one specific path of the game, seemly has good story, even then people can feel like the story is crap because the game sabotages itself.
Concerning the life paths, it's just a fancy rumor that something was cut there. True, the origin stories for life paths in CP2077 could be perhaps as long as in Dragon Age: Origins, but keeping them short and tight is also fine.
Why have them at all? Broadly speaking, they may nudge the player into a specific ending. A lot of players vocal on forums would dismiss anything but completing all endings just for the sake of it, but if we are discussing this seriously as a role-playing game, what goes into the decision which ending to pursue matters.
The lifepath system was a key feature in the TTRPG, obvious handled a lot differently in the TTRPG than video game where they have merged the Roles with the Lifepath.
I think people are disappointed as they were expecting DA:O levels of paths but got 15-20 mins and a few chat options (that don't add up to anything).
> Your choice of lifepath will influence parts of your journey throughout Cyberpunk 2077, and each one will have an entirely different introduction to the same overarching story.
Tho it's a bit telling how one of the introduction quests is used as an example for how the lifepath choice makes a difference past the introduction.
In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference; During a Gig at Kabuki market I could ask another Nomad there about the location of a person I was looking for.
Dunno how that quest would have played out otherwise without that.
A Corpo can get the drone easier by talking to the other corpo and seeing through their bullshit. There are also a few dialogue options based on higher stats, but I'm not sure how much they affect actual gameplay.
I hadn't heard this maxim before, and I haven't played Cyberpunk, but this actually strikes me as something a lot of games do to a fault.
The original Mirror's Edge (a personal favorite) is a good example. That game's story has many obvious issues, from stilted characters to cutscenes that look like cheap flash animations, but I think it all could have worked a lot better if you spent the first few chapters as a normal Runner doing standard deliveries, before things started going to hell.
This would ground you in the world and provide a sense of what it's like to be a Runner, so you'd care about preserving their way of life later on. Games as a medium are uniquely good at this sort of thing, from the early days of Final Fantasy.
It is so fundamental you should not have to say it but you are really right in this case.
No game _ever_ has been like this. You just can't get three completely different fully immersive all-spoken-dialog games for the price of one - unless the main plot is like 10 hours max.
Even the Fallout games have a few bigger decisions (FO3 had the choice of nuking either town), but the rest of the stat-based chat options are mostly for flavour. Maybe a few side quests have different endings or dead ends because of your stats, but the main plot is still essentially the same.
I think the question comes down to the ‘role playing’ portion. I have no problem with single character games, and am not a 2077 hater, but would love to see more ambition around narrative.
OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline.
If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences.
Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base.
Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.
edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner.
For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc.
The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.
Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet.
"The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story.
Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful.
As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.
What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.
You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter.
You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m.
Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics.
You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings.
Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo.
Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y.
That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose.
But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.
Cut the content in third and make it 3x deeper and it would have been a great game (bugs and all). Well perhaps not on last generation consoles, I have not tried it there.
This is one of my biggest gripes with the game. You literally have self driving cars built into the lore (and the story - Delamain) AND flying cars (Trauma Team, police officers), why the hell does anyone care about owning a car or driving it? We have cybernetic eyes and our cars drive/fly themselves and we still need to put up LED traffic lights?
Sure it makes sure in the outskirts to pick up a 4x4 offroader and do some cool desert driving for side missions. But in Night City? It should be modeled after pedestrians, and it is in some cases, but the road layout clearly looks like it was modeled for a city in 2012 and not 2077.
Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the story (watching let's plays no less, I don't have the specs to run the game myself). I think it's a great game despite the bugs and performance issues that will unfortunately haunt CDPR for a great deal of time. But some of the plot holes are just so deep, it hurts to think about because of how much better the story would be.
For example, I know the breaching minigame where you have to click through the matrix to complete the sequence of hex codes is unrealistic and not how you would hack a real computer. Obviously, I'm not going to gripe about that, it's a minigame inside of a video game and it's meant for entertainment, not realism. But, come on, you introduce us to cybernetic eye implants and we still have to use a 27" monitor to check our email? Why would you ever use a monitor again?
Would Vampire the Masquerade be a better game if you could just drive between setpieces in a fully rendered city instead of having a loading screen? Probably, but it would also increase the development workload by an order of magnitude for what would effectively be a gimmick that wouldn't really add a lot to the game.
And even outside of RPGs, there are countless adventure and FPS games without vehicles. Doom doesn't have cars, neither does Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil.
Of course if you're thinking of something like "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious, but if you build the game with this constraint in mind it shouldn't be much of an issue. Then you can focus on other aspects of the game.
Cyberpunk is clearly not at its best when you're in a vehicle, and there's no telling what else they could've implemented and finished if they had cut it entirely and focused on other aspects of the game instead.
The reason why it's tedious is because the map is built around cars. You can't go very far without encountering a road. This makes it fairly hostile to be a pedestrian since you're relegated to walking on sidewalks (or in front of traffic if you're daring).
A city built around pedestrians could have a much different environment, like open green spaces, cobblestone paths, proactive NPCs engaging in little dialogues with shopkeepers, people trying to sell you stuff on the streets, etc. A real "night out on the city" vibe that I don't think any city-style game has tried going for yet.
Honestly your description is an absolute 100% game wrecker as far as I am concerned. At least Mass Effect 3 tricked you into thinking your choices mattered until the very end, whereas this crap ruins the facade at the very start.
Basically, if you care about NPCs and dialogue being believable, then you have to be the street kid. Pretty lame
Ooh! This was it! I knew there was something bugging me about some of the dialogue options.
First you can be calmly speaking about something, picking the lower dialogue options for more info. Then you pick the top one (progress the plot) and V is suddenly angry AF and shouts the question.
Dunno if this is an omission because of lack of time or just bad audio direction.
Unfortunately quite a few respectable reviewers are calling the story/gameplay "hollow" or "unsatisfying". That doesn't sound like "minor & avoidable" reason.
Another strong criticism is towards the game's AI- police, NPC etc. That also doesn't sound minor.
Do you mind linking to the reviews? I'd like to read their criticisms. I've seen a lot of criticism of the story because it's a personal character driven story and not a high minded philosophical story. But that doesn't seem like as good criticism imo.
I'm playing on PC. I'm playing at 1600p with a 3090 and a 10900k, so I think it's valid to say I'm playing the "best version" of the game technically speaking.
The bugs are not why I requested (but was denied)_a refund, the writing is just truly terrible.
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In the entire game there are about 6 dialog choices that matter. Every single other piece of dialog will result in little to no change in the course of a conversation.
It's incredibly jarring because it means often times you choose option A, and the character pays lip service to option A and immediately starts spouting option B!
And from a higher level, the writing is some of the most lazy I've ever encountered.
Nothing is left to the imagination. The writers didn't seem to have any concept of "show don't tell". The whole first act is constantly giving away it's finale in the most insulting way. It almost makes you not want to finish it when you add in how little effort was put into making you care about how it ends...
The next act is just a terrible mess that I'm sad to see Keanu Reeves got involved in. You can tell he never got into this character because the entire time it feels like he's reading a book while doing the voices for it...
There's so little internal consistency in the story. I don't want to start spoiling things, but it's like the cast is just constantly being shuttled onto stage to do a jig and shuffled off.
I'm am 99% sure most players will get the same ending because there's only one character any effort is put into fleshing out, and coincidentally, the "life choice" that they match is also the most fleshed out one... it wreaks of the idea this was a game with one titular timeline with a bunch of half-assed alternatives tacked on at the end.
And I really do mean the end, because of those 6 or so choices that matter in the game, almost all of them happen in the last 20 minutes of the game. The pacing is just so painfully bad, I couldn't believe it as it was happening.
This is not a good RPG, this is not a good action game, it's not a good anything.
It feels like CDPR worked on fun ideas for 7 years then tried to distill this disjointed mess into a game in the last 1 or 2.
I have gotten bad or not-as-advertised games refunded this way after being denied, despite being over the 2h mark.
And in some areas, Cyberpunk was actually trying to do something that nobody in the whole industry has done before. Open-world with such a sense city, with such a density of characters and unique assets, all of which have to work both with high-speed car movement and very close, first-person camera (as opposed with third-person camera, which is used in other open world games). And the art theme and style which is defined by dynamic lightning and reflection!
Yes, they but more than they could chew. But you gotta admire the ambition here, and how much did they get right. I play on PC and just upgraded video card to 3070 for this game, and it truly feels like a generational leap. Rough, unpolished, lacking in many areas, but a leap nevertheless.
(Disclaimer: although I have worked in game development for almost 14 years, I have never worked on a AAA project, so I really don't know how qualified am I to talk about).
This is technically true, but these are not cameras that players primarily use, and these are not cameras that art assets and their quality, texture resolutions and LODs are primarily optimised for and benchmarked by.
> They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs.
Yes. This, I completely agree with. But they are built by a studio that has built and QAed these systems for 20 years (or longer, if you include 2d GTA games). And in game worlds that are significantly less visually complex than Cyberpunk.
Don't misunderstand me. RDR 2 and GTA 5 are fantastic, stunning games. I loved these worlds. But from strictly technical standpoint, Night City has drastically more completely different assets next to each other.
This game is still in alpha.
I don’t know why people are being so defensive. We were looking forward to a great game and were mislead.
I’m personally just gonna hold off on playing anymore until they actually finish the game.
Probably cause the experiences differ wildly between people. I'm over 20 hours in, had one relevant bug (couldn't use my weapons anymore, which I found a workaround for), love the story (mainly the side quests so far, since I haven't done much of the main story by now), the world and having a blast with the game.
One is completely broken to the point where I can’t complete the quest because Johnny isn’t spawning.
And on top of that the Game crashes at least once per hour.
I do expect A LOT more when paying 70€ on a game. No, not RTX, but at least >20fps. The game is constantly hitching every N seconds.
Plus the PR was all about that stunning AI but it’s not there at all. Just compare the 48min E3 demo with actual gameplay.
You mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogihi-OewPQ
This is probably the first game that didn't get a downgrade visually, but got an upgrade.
Not sure what else do you mean by E3 demo.
>Plus the PR was all about that stunning AI but it’s not there at all. Just compare the 48min E3 demo with actual gameplay.
He's talking about the AI that got a downgrade, not the visuals.
He is talking about E3 gameplay demo, so I showed one. I would gladly see the one that showed AI downgrade.
Doom 2016, e3 vs release: https://i.imgur.com/I5mWucM.jpeg
Most of the time these are part of the open-world genre leading to lots of fun, like weird ragdoll physics. Tho they can be kind of a deal-breaker when they happen during scenes that are supposed to have an emotional impact.
Like when a character you are supposed to care for is about to die, and their gun suddenly flies inside their head to get stuck there, while the drama keeps playing out regardless of how absurd it look.
I had to literally lol at that, but it really took me out of the moment/the mood the scene was actually going for.
Did anyone think it would come out polished? The repeated delays were already hinting that the CDPR was in trouble and couldn't cope with the workload. When they finally committed to a deadline to release in December, it seemed more out of desperation to appease the impatient public than an indication that they were nearly done with finishing the game.
So they released it in, as you said, its buggy alpha state. At least I trust CDPR to do right by its players and see the game to completion.
Still, since they are taking pre-orders, and since they had an announced date at the time they sold those pre-orders, delaying by more than half a year your part of a contract is not normally acceptable conduct. It's understandable and not at all abnormal that people who did pre-order were asking for their money's worth.
They have to fix the game, in 3 months they have to discount the game already, and if they are really unlucky the game is forgotten this time next year.
If they had nailed it, they would be sitting on literal gold, also for their next launch.
I only dive into a couple games a year (RDR2 last year), so I'm not going to waste my time until it's stable. I just want to buy the game, take a few days off of work, and immerse myself. If I want to debug things or deal with glitches, I can just go back to work.
Game companies can't win dealing with amnesiac/bipolar consumers.
The gaming community sucks, full stop. I'm part of several reddit communities for various games and in a majority of the cases those subreddits are a swamp, full of anger and bitterness. The more competitive a game is, or the more the game tries to monetize itself, the uglier the scene. It really is bad.
Years ago I worked close to one of Rockstar's studios. Sometimes I'd overhear RS employees talking over lunch, and more than once that chatting was them complaining about the toxicity they have to deal with.
A great case study is Final Fantasy 14 VS World of Warcraft. 2 pretty similar MMOs, vastly different communities. If you dig a little, it's immediately visible that the difference is not coming from game design, but from explicit community management and standards of conduct. The FF14 mods police the community with an iron fist, and are very explicit about what kind of behavior is toxic and off-limits - and the results are visible whether you play the game or look at the reddit.
Most companies though just don't want to invest in that, even to the minimum extent of setting clear guidelines and enforcing them when violations reported.
False advertising only works because consumers are buying games based on promises made in advertisements instead of based on the quality of the game that is actually released.
Sure CDP hyped the game up. But they're fools for believing it. How often do things ever live up to the hype, especially in business?
Hmm, maybe this backlash is naive kids learning how to be jaded.
However: people are getting refunds. In countries with consumer protection laws, it looks like there is little downside to buying in to the hype, if you can get your money back. This may eventually teach companies to rein it in a little.
The game is unbelievably awesome when it works.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work/play well.
I have crashes every 30-45min. Glitches are so commonplace it’s clearly beta quality at best.
I’ve gotten to the point where I know to have the best chance to actually play a mission I need to get to the right location (use waypoints since driving crashes the game), find the NPC for the mission, open dialogue and start a mission, ensure the mission has started (usually when the monologue starts from the NPC), close the game, reopen the game, and start playing the mission. After a mission, expect a crash.
It got old really fast having the game crash during a mission and being forced to play the same mission over and over even if it did help me find better loot.
Was missing Judy's dialog during the ripperdoc mission, other stuff is mostly just graphical glitches, nothing game breaking.
But as a fan of the "stealth archer" the stealth system is annoying, silenced weapons aren't actually silenced. Any shot will alert EVERYONE and they'll never calm down again, they'll even mysteriously know the gender of my character even if they never saw a glimpse of me :D
This is especially jarring for the few missions which are supposed to be "recon only" or "stealth only", where clearly getting noticed should be a mission failure. You sneak around for a long time and then you get noticed. No way to go back to stealth, so it's just a long sigh and out comes the shotgun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've noticed many faults of the game (crappy driving AI, cowering citizen AI instead of running away, etc), and I agree that this is much more similar to Deus Ex (e.g., mankind divided) or the witcher than GTA.
However, I haven't seen any game breaking bugs. I once saw my weapon glitch and be invisible .... until I changed weapons. I'm sure they exist, but I am having so much fun playing the game (even with potato graphics from a 4 year old card). I have hardly touched the plot, as I haven't even gotten to the events that were completely spoiled by the game's trailers, but I still feel like I'm exploring a living city.
I made this mistake with Witcher 3 and got bored. Didn't even see Yennefer or Ciri on my first two attempts, spent most my time looking for a grandma's lost frying pan and shit.
But for CP2077 I remembered that this is a CDPR game. Go on and dive into the main plot, that opens up a ton of new stuff and super-interesting characters.
1) This game is not up to par. It's not as advertised, and for some of the most standardized systems (consoles), it doesn't even work. That's really bad on CDPR. False advertising is unacceptable to some.
2) This surprised nobody. Acting surprised is like being surprised you big mac doesn't look like the marketing materials. That's on the people pre-ordering and buying day of. If I bought it today, having seen all the reception, that's on me. Some people are extending "that's on you" that to pre-orderers.
3) It seems to work as well as any other AAA launch day game for players with certain setups. Some people see their footage or have that experience and think others are just being unrealistic expecting the big mac from the ad.
Personally, I feel like it's a friend complaining about getting scammed on craigslist after ignoring everyone telling them to do due diligence to make sure it's what you expect. Like, that really sucks and fuck scammers, but this was easily preventable, so I'm going to roll my eyes a little.
I played Watch Dogs Legion the other day. They don't even come close to comparing in terms of quality. Legion has functional AI and maybe a glitch every 2-3 hours (but I've had zero of them be game breaking, they're mostly geometry of physics related). Cyberpunk has weird things happening around every corner, sometimes quest breaking, sometimes visually hilarious, always showing the lack of polish.
Plus, I played a number of AAA games unpatched recently and none of them were as bad as this game. This really is quite something else.
I just hope CDPR did not bet the farm on this thing. If so GoG will go with it.
I did encounter one more serious issue. there's an early main story mission where you have to get a key off the body of a guard you just killed. unfortunately, I killed the guy while he was standing in an elevator. his body fell through the floor and (presumably) out of the map. at least the game managed to showed me a waypoint to his body, 1 km below my feet. this just seems like bad judgement by the devs. if you have to have moveable ragdolls, please don't put items on them that I need to advance the game. stuff like this will inevitably happen.
anyways, I'm still enjoying the game but I'm debating whether to shelve it for a month or two while they patch more bugs.
I’ve been playing a huge amount of God of War (2018), really just an absurd number of hours, I’ve completed almost all the side quests, and the number of distracting bugs, glitchy character animations, etc. is zero. (It’s the closest to a perfect video game I’ve ever side, really quite an accomplishment.) This contrasting example causes me to very much notice the almost minute-to-minute minor graphical glitches in CP2077 and be very frustrated by the more frustrating ~hourly bugs.
Maybe if I wasn’t playing GoW concurrently concurrently it wouldn’t bother me so much, but really, CP2077 is not up to the standards of what Good Games are supposed to be like in 2020.
Note that the second half is more of a stand-up routine about an experience he had meeting Hideo Kojima, but the first part is excellent.
Really one of the better games I've played.
A game that was in dev for almost 8 years, and we get AI that is just out of an early 2000' game.
When a publisher tells you it's going to be game changer, it's nothing we've seen before.
Pre-production since announcement but main development was really started in mid 2016 when CDPR finished all of the Witcher DLCs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK5qvys_Jz4&feature=youtu.be... according to that video people were working on it before 2012 which makes sense.
Only if you have never played a DX game before. It is a much lesser experience than any DX game, so that is a real sour point for players expecting, or at least familiar with, that.
And the bugs are not a sideshow. I played 2 hours on PC and returned it. When I had mission markers coming and going completely unrelated to any quests I had started I said "enough". If the game is made playable, then I'll buy it again and likely enjoy it as a cut-down DX Fable-like in a pretty setting.
Edit: the trip point for me will be when the game actually provides a non-lethal path through the game. Currently there is no polish or thought given to this aspect of UX. There are quickhacks and non-letha weapons, yet the game throws you into mandatory shootouts (namely the first scripted car chase) before you have access to non-lethal methods of neutralizing enemies. Maybe there is one small path of points dispersal that could lead to non-lethal options, but if there is it is obfuscated. They never signal to the player how to perform non-lethal combat. It feels like the options are placeholders and the game is meant to be murderous. This is a far cry from a DX game that gives a fair option to go non-lethal, full stealth as a challenge. The DX games were actually playtested.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. I was expecting a cyberpunk New Vegas, but it seems more like a cyberpunk Fallout 4.
I think Deus Ex signals the same thing, we were expecting a deep story driven game, instead it's a pretty shallow RPG and not a very well done action game, so what's left?
Dialog and augmentations actually changed how missions played out in meaningful ways, meanwhile 2077 seemingly has dialog choices to give the illusion of choice (and it's a shoddy illusion since your character always ends up talking their way to the "titular" choice if you didn't make it yourself).
This seems better than that at least in that the soul is a lot better. And it has cool lore and factions and NPCs. But where Fallout 4 had fun shooting and RPG mechanics this seems to have pretty poor shooting. Poor driving. Unbalanced RPG mechanics.
Ultimately I think they need to do three things:
1) Fix bugs
2) Rebalance and improve core gameplay (shooting, RPG mechanics, NPC AI, etc.)
3) Add a bunch more content
And it will be an absolutely fantastic game. No Man’s Sky turned the ship around. Can CDPR do it? I’m hopeful. Maybe if they get rid of the people who pushed for this premature release they’ll have a shot...
Both Vegas and F3 are great. F4 is OK, but could be better.
Fallout 4 to my understanding is more or less devoid of such.
And nonlethal options are presented to you as part of the tutorial. I agree that lethal/nonlethal doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but if you do stealth and melee combat from the start you have a path for nonlethal that will get you all the way through the first major mission. From there it's relatively easy to acquire PAX mods that turn any gun nonlethal.
Almost every obstacle in the game has multiple solutions - this was something deus ex really nailed.
Usually we get a inferior console port on PC (GTA IV, Batman game etc.), so I'm glad this time it was different.
Base PS4 and Xbox One owners are getting a game that looks genuinely bad for a last-gen game -- and it is coming out at the end of that generation's lifespan. You would expect this to be one of the best looking games from that generation.
This stuff is fixable, and maybe the game will look and run decent in six months, but I could see a lot of console buyers being shocked by the state of the game right now.
I think this only happened in the pre-patched versions of the game (plenty of other last gen console problems though)
The fact that it feels like an homage to Deus Ex, or even a spiritual successor, is more than anything I could have wanted. A GTA/RDR style simulator would have bored me to death.
So, I'm quite content with what we got and I can imagine it'll only improve with the typical GOTY edition, as with CDPR's Witcher games.
I think the problems boil down to rushing the release for xmas and poor expectation management. The idea that people will be able to play something as well on a SEVEN YEAR old console as well as recent hardware is absolutely ridiculous, and PS4/XB1 users really need to get their head around that. However, CDPR didn't manage that expectation and one could argue that they mislead people for sales.
Whether this was a good business decision (loss of money for damage of trust and refunds vs money gained by releasing it early and misleading) we have yet to find out.
I subbed for a few months and have never played CP2077 but here's the high level overview:
You buy games on Steam/Epic/Ubisoft game store as normal.
In the GeForce Now client, you pick the game you want to play (and on which storefront). When you "launch" it, NVidia spins up a VM, configuring it to launch the storefront you selected with your game, and connects a remote stream to your local client. You sign into Steam/Epic/Ubisoft (usually only needed the first time per storefront), and you "install" the game and play it.
It works pretty well. If you don't have cutting edge hardware and don't mind a few ms of latency, it's a pretty good deal.
Only caveat is that I would not use it to play shooters that require quick reflexes.
Graphics are excellent, I was running on Ultra RTX (remember, 1080p) in most of the city and getting 50 fps, and latency was around 20-30ms. For how most games play, it wasn't really noticeable. $5 a month is a great deal, though I do wonder how Stadia stacks up. I certainly could have used the better resolution.
It also works on iPad/iPhone and Android decently, if you want to play anywhere. I didn't have any issues trying my iPad, though it appears you're stuck with controller input on that.
Xbox One X runs at a higher resolution than the PS4 Pro. Both are perfectly playable around 25-30fps.
Wouldn't play it on either base PS4 or One S, it's still playable but YMMV if the graphical issues are bad enough to be an issue.
CDPR had even hinted at the problem before when they delayed the launch, citing difficulty with getting a game that performed well on two generations of consoles and PC. But then they never mentioned it again. They never said in any further updates that they had managed to make the game run well on every system. They just went silent about the issue and rushed the game out before Christmas.
The other issues (gameplay different than expectations and the bugs) are frustrating, but were never really the problem. The bugs can be fixed in patches and most people are willing to swallow the fact that a game is different than what they expected as long as it's still a good game.
Fixing the engine so that the game runs well on consoles will take more time than normal bug fixes, and the reputation hit that CDPR has taken will take more than just fixing the game. They've shown that they are willing to sacrifice community goodwill in search of short term profit, which means that it is now a company ran by business types and not people that care about putting out a good product. I don't blame a company for caring about profit, but I can blame them for all the shortsighted bullshit that they pulled. I wish more business schools taught people to care about the core product and let the profit take care of itself, rather than the current approach of caring about management incentives, ignoring the product, and running companies into the ground.
What can't be fixed with patches is that the image of this game the developers sold to players was based on lies. There's a laundry list on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kcve8s/promi...
However NMS is an open-world exploration game. I worry that with Cyberpunk 2077 being fairly linear / story based, they won't make the same investments that Hello Games did re: adding tons of new features.
Some of the "missing features" were eventually implemented, but MANY were not. Instead, they pivoted into implementing different things that were not part of that initial hype cycle, and implemented enough of them that they hoped people would forget about what the game was originally claimed to be.
And apparently it worked, because people always talk about how No Man's Sky got "fixed" without acknowledging that huge, major chunks of that initial promise were never in fact developed.
The space stations are now major hubs and the Atlas even more.
Part of the experience was to feel like you are out in the middle of nowhere. All alone. And it was like that up until the last few releases where they updated the player spawn locations.
Now it seems like when you jump in, you are likely going to end up meeting other players.
> It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
I expected this. It's nothing like this at all.
The writing is atrocious. I do hope "Ghost Off!" becomes a mainstream piece of slang though.
The voice lines are horribly inconsistent in quality (there are lines where it's clear the actor stumbled but the line wasn't redone)
The enemies are brain dead (not just the teleporting cops, all of them)
The NPCs are hollow.
Almost none of the dialog decisions matter. In fact, most of the time the didn't actually add a separate branch for your choice, it needs to loop back into whatever you didn't choose... so your character says something completely different than what you chose
The story is generic and does not at all live up to the promise the setting had.
The customization is a joke. I saw that coming when all we had weeks from release was "genitals and custom nails"
The controls are surprisingly clunky for a modern game
The skill tree is embarrassingly overdone and clearly meant to artificially lengthen the "content" of the game...
The UI is terrible enough to be impressive. Because there's just so much of it there's just so much that could have easily been condensed, and instead they took the brute force approach. I almost feel bad for the programmers who worked on this, but they should have pushed back.
I could go on and on. I actually despise the fact that the bugs have taken center stage, because as someone who hasn't had many, and who's performance has been great, my hang ups go much much deeper than that.
This game will probably never fix the core shortcomings it has because they're not bugs, they're intentional defects and cuts that show a complete lack of focus during development.
Ironically what I've noticed is people who are enjoying it go to great lengths to invalidate anyone who isn't...
And the other way around also. Those that don't like the game try to ruin it for those that like it.
BTW. Your whole previous comment pretty much has a "TL;DR the game is crap", not a single good point about a game.
This is all technically opinion, but I'll do my best to elaborate on factual instances of any and all complaints I made above; because I do really believe that anyone who's under the impression this is "just some bugs" and about to spend hard earned money on the game deserves to know what they're in for.
Oh gosh. This grinds my gears so bad. Wherever this trend started (and I've seen it in many games -- I think RDR2 and Witcher 3 most recently for me), it should really stop. Do developers think it's some sort of positive surprise when you get to see how they paraphrased (at best) the menu option into dialogue? Or is it just laziness/sloppiness around keeping the menus and dialogue in sync?
If I was to develop a game, I'd make it an invariant in the game engine that the wording on the menu option is what your character will say next, full stop.
For example, without spoilers:
There's a point where you're speaking to a friendly character, and a mutual contact is possibly hurt.
Your options are essentially to blame your friend for what happened or to remind them that your mutual friend might be hurt (the idea being you can't afford to give up now)
By choosing to remind your friend of this mutual contact... you berate your friend! Eventually... blaming them for what happened!
I mean it's so painfully transparent that you can literally hear the switch up in intonation where your "fake choice" meets up with the real choice the game wants to go with.
It was comically bad, watching your character lose his shit on a grieving widow when you doubted something she said. The wording of the question or choice had absolutely nothing in connection to the tirade of abuse the guy would spew out.
The protagonist is a kick arse chick that literally hunts down and takes out bandits (by their hundreds) on sight.
Yet for one side mission, it turns out the quest giver (a nobody, not useful further in the game) is setting her up to be robbed and murdered.
She takes out the people trying to murder her, then catches up to the quest giver for some payback. He pleads with her not to kill him, and suggest maybe she could just "cut off an arm" or something instead.
The dialog choice I chose was "It's going to be more than an arm"...
... so the protagonist then proceeds to tell him off with a warning and send him on his merry way.
What The Fuck?
She should have ended the dude, badly. Like literally any of the hundreds of random bandits she'd already taken out up to that point. :/
There are seemingly infinite number of issues the game is having, I can't imagine calling it well-made. Here's a single compilation from the game's subreddit, where there are hundreds more examples:
https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kewhky/i_com...
Cosmetic issues in a game that is supposed to be a 3D immersive world are really bad issues. We shouldn't be writing them off as minor.
We should expect better for $59.99 after years of development. We should not normalize the expectation that new games will be half-baked. New games should be finished, and they should work properly on all of the platforms they claim to support.
If you want to play unfinished games, there is Steam Early Access. All other games are supposed to be finished when they are sold. And if they don't work on the PS4 they should not be sold for the PS4!
I specifically said per-ordering. I agree CDPR should have been more upfront about this being an 'impossible port' so to speak.
Interesting, since CDPR doesn't seem to make these kinds of games are all (Witcher is nothing like these concepts). Without playing any CDPR game before, I was expecting cyberpunk-themed Witcher with more advanced emergent events and gameplay.
You need to factor in that the PS4 hardware is really outdated at this point in time, too.
Is there an objective certificate authority that get give a game such "quality level"?
There are gamers that play on xbox/ps and are happy with it (they are even in this thread, look it up).
So some expect miracles from a dated hardware (with HDD, which is unbelievable on a PC since almost a decade) - one can work magic with it (I mean Carmack-magician), but you need more time (like years) - is there a point in doing that if just around a corner is nextgen and a PC version works fine?
There are people that are happy with such version if you are not don't buy it but don't take the fun away from others that have lower expectations.
This opens up liability to Sony, who have a high risk of many sales being converted to refunds, which both hurts their brand and is not great financially.
People can still buy the game in physical forms, but that at least absolves Sony from the sales side of things.
One suggestion elsewhere has been on Xbox where it may make sense to move the game to early access instead.
And again, regardless, the console version runs terribly right now. It should not be for sale on console hardware that can't support it, if the case is that the game requires better hardware. There's a reason minimum required specs exist on PC versions for example.
In this sense, Deus Ex has "content". And exploration and gameplay are immersively impactful. A more apt comparison might be with Tomb Raider.
It's mostly through stats rather than augmentations, but Cyberpunk has a ton of this. There are doors you can/can't open, characters you can intimidate, obstacles you can get over, things you can hack... there are a lot of ways your build changes how you can approach the missions.
Attempting the same freedom in an open world is just bonkers.
I 100% have assumed this was going to be an RDR/GTA5 style open world game that I could just ignore the story of and go around exploring.
The games I've liked have been skyrim, and GTA5 (I hated RDR), and in both of those I didn't really pay any attention to the story (except as a way of getting money to buy more gear). It was just more about driving/riding around and looking at stuff for me.
The parts of the game that resemble Deus Ex are arguably better, but I could poke hole in that, too.
Play it on the easiest difficulty setting just for the plot.
Then shelve it and come back when the first DLC is released and do a "full" play-through.
I get part of that is because reviewers didn't have access to console versions of the game, but honestly that should have been a huge red flag and put front and center on every single review. The blame falls almost entirely on the developers for this clusterfuck, but reviewers are holding some of the blame as well.
That being said I'm optimistic that with patches over the coming months it'll get to a point where I'm comfortable buying eventually.
However, I'm not a gamer, I'm a science fiction writer who follows a lot of disability advocacy, so my spheres may be very different.
[0] The author who pointed out that the game gave them a seizure later said they were facing harassment for it. https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/07/cyberpunk-2077-epile...
I use gamers in quotes because it's obviously not every gamer who does abhorrent stuff like this but it is certainly an issue within the "gamer" community.
It was nowhere near the 80s/90s japanese cartoon flashing, basically two white lights flashed in alternating patterns for 5 seconds on opposite sides of the screen. In the fixed version, the light is static.
Funny I would say the gameplay is much closer to GTA than Deus Ex. But overall closer to Max Payne in terms how how heavy it relies on story.
What? You said yourself Xbox and PS4 users are seeing an "inferior experience." PS literally stopped selling the game in their store. What about that is relatively minor?
A slow and buggy game can become a faster and stable game over time with patches and polish, a game that is boring, dull or put simply, a bad idea won't become much better. You can't polish a turd and make something better out of it. Take VtM: Bloodlines as an example. People stack patches on top of patches from random websites only to be able to play this game in a somewhat acceptable state, and yet it's a well-known darling of gaming circles.
By impact this is indeed nowhere near minor. I'm just saying most of this could be avoided, and the core of the game, regardless of its issues today, is appealing.
It does run just fine on Series X and PS5. Not the greatest looking game but is running nicely at 60fps most of the time.
And I think largely thanks to not expecting anything, I was quite pleasantly surprised. It was my first game with RTX which was cool to see and as you said, it's basically a new Deux Ex game, a series which I love.
The main storyline was a bit short and unfulfilling but the gameplay itself has been quite satisfying.
I'm flabbergasted by this comment. CP2077 is way more of a cyberpunk-themed GTA5 than I expected or wanted. Admittedly I avoided reading pretty much anything about the game before release to avoid the insane and impossible to live up to hype, but I can hardly wrap my head around the idea that there were people who wanted it to be more like a Rockstar game.
There are really two things that happened, but they have the same underlying cause: The premises of the game weren't spelled out coherently. That allowed the production to get out of hand, and the hype to grow to unmanagable expectations and buyers to feel betrayed when it wasn't what they imagined.
Even the broad title "Cyberpunk" is suggestive of impossible scope, in the way that Microsoft has "Word" and "Office" - it would, at first glance, be claiming to cover all possible aspects of the cyberpunk experience. But it's actually an old TTRPG license, and so right off the bat the game is hamstrung in catering to 21st century consumer expectations by also having to incorporate the nostalgic mechanics and lore of a 20th century design.
Mechanically they are vastly different, with 2077 abandoning 99% of the mechanics and systems of the TTRPG to fit in as a modern video game. Nothing to be hanstrung by there.
Mechanically it's an open world looter shooter with tacked on crafting mechanics with a cyberpunk theme, literally par for the course for any modern game like this.
CDPR choose a terrible year to launch it. Most people is just hating everything in 2020, for any reason.
I did get a Deus Ex vibe from this game from the first moment I heard about it. I've been desperate to get back into gaming, and was looking forward to an Xbox to play 4 games, this being one of them.
Hopefully by April (when I expect to be able to buy a new Xbox Series X), the patches will have made the game playable.
The story is great, the side missions are great, the map is great, the art direction is spot on but the world feels empty, the looter shooter/crafting aspect feels half implemented, the whole clothing system is a mess and you can see where they have cut content (non story braindances being purchaseable but unusable for example).
Now I know Rockstar has decades of experience making open world games but these videos really drive home how lacking CP2077 is in the little things that really make a world feel alive:
>Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
Yes, and that's why TFA links to playstation.com, where you can get a refund for your PS4 purchase. This isn't about the game in general, this is about the awful PS4 version.
Funny, I didn't want to buy it before, but now that you say this, I might actually buy this thing. I never found RDR/GTA style games very fun other than 15 minutes of mayhem at your friend's house. Whereas the Deus Ex games are a masterpiece.
If bugs and performance were the only issue, I'd just have left the game until I got my next-gen console. I asked for a refund because it's a bad game in many other ways too.
YMMV, of course. I hear the story is good and the graphics are definitely pretty. But I'd definitely not describe the game as a 'good' Deus Ex style game.
Personally, the major red flag is that CDPR seems to have intentionally obscured the state of the game on consoles. Why else was PC gameplay allowed in pre-release media, but not console gameplay? As much as I hate the practice of shipping broken games, at least you can give that somewhat of a pass because everyone else does it. But intentionally misleading your very fans is another thing altogether.
That mission early on in the game, where you are stuck in a car shooting at other cars, would never be part of a Deus Ex game. Deus Ex always gives players multiple ways to finish a mission, and rewards exploration. Cyberpunk puts you on rails and literally tells you what to do.
In DX Mankind Divided you were able to leave certain areas and come back, and achieve objectives in any order you wanted. Almost all of the buildings in the Prague zone were open to entry, and contained realistic NPCs and furniture -- e.g. all of the apartments in an apartment building, all of the shops, train stations, bars, etc. It felt a lot more like a real world than Cyberpunk.
Even Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was more open than Cyberpunk, and that came out at least 16 years ago. It was also pretty broken on release, but even so it felt like more of a real world.
Am I the only one who remembers trying to do anything within 50 yards of a candle?
I think we're living in different worlds or something. This game is exactly like a GTA game, and nothing like Deus Ex.
It's an open world game (Deus Ex games are strictly linear with open level design, not narrative, something Warren Spector was extremely adamant about). It's got the atmosphere of a futuristic GTA Miami Vice rather than the industrial atmosphere of a Deus Ex, and worldbuilding wise there's little about the game that touches on heavier issues, whereas politics goes through all Deus Ex games quite heavily.
I would argue the same about Cyberpunk. It’s a bigger Poland from Mankind. That’s not bad at all.
But as someone who games on exclusively on Linux, I'm surprised to learn about the outrage. Personally, I'm used to having to debug, alter, or otherwise hack games in order to play them. I'm also more tolerant of bugs and glitches. I've found that I gravitate more towards Early-Access titles on Steam than big "AAA" titles.
I realize most console gamers aren't necessarily technical people, but when did gaming become so entitled? Is the mainstream PC gaming market this spoiled also? I've heard mostly good things about CyberPunk from fellow PC gamers.
Other people are merely customers. For a customer a game not working as intended is no different than an electric shaver not working as intended. You don't need an understanding, or a modicum of interest in inner workings of electric shavers, you expect them to work.
Insult to injury, people also tend to be more emotionally invested in games than electric shavers, just like any other entertainment medium. Hence they won't just toss one out and get the other, without generating some buzz about it first. I don't see how this is more "spoiled" or "entitled" than customer reviews on Amazon on electric shavers. It's nothing crazy if you feel entitled to things you're actually entitled to, which in this case, an entitlement to a working product gained by paying for it.
It's very buggy, and it sometimes outright crashes, but it's just a very good story, progression, and visual.
2) I see this as a serious reason to be pissed off, and CDPR really shouldn't have released it on consoles in this state.
3) Although I'm interested, I stick to my habit of waiting for a little while before I buy the game. Maybe with the mess they got into I'll get it for a bit cheaper too!
As someone who's worked on a (digital-only) title for Xbox One, I'm surprised this game got through the certification process in the first place. From our experience the platform holders are pretty involved, and we regularly gave MS updates on everything from monetization, to UX and controls, to extensive reviews for updates, which caused headaches when the client lagged behind our other platforms.
Unfortunately for the developers, the fact of the matter is that there are tens of millions of base PS4s and Xbox Ones out there, and gamers got a bait and switch during this launch. As terrible as it is for them to get the rug pulled under them, Sony risks a lot more by not issuing refunds for incredibly broken products. A lot of the appeal of console gaming is the relative plug-and-play factor that comes with it, and the software regularly costs more to boot — via higher pricing, lack of sales, or both.
The industry keeps bleeding to many people that could have made huge contributions, but decided to invest into industries where crushing isn't part of the culture.
For example, I rather do GUIs and 3D stuff for boring enteprise projects than spending endless nights and weekends fixing bugs on engine code.
All of this mess isn't because of crunching thou. It was a massive fuck up from the leadership team. No crunching (or lack of) would ever solve it
The way they lied to the media, players, etc. Their intentions were always to lie and hide the facts.
When I onboarded at a global AAA game dev place in Japan, I got a separate sheet detailing my rights as a whistleblower - it's lucky to have these, but I doubt anyone would risk their standing/future in the industry because of something like this, especially during a pandemic.
Of course you can fight it, but while you do you still have to pay your bills and pay a lawyer, all with no income and no guarantee that it will ever make a difference, let alone when it would be resolved.
EDIT: And all that presumed that the whistleblower protections would actually apply in this case. If it were something clearly illegal you’d have a better case, but really here all you’ve got is possibly fraud and a pretty mild version at that. Proving fraud is tough...
>Niespielak speaks about the situation on a popular Polish podcast, which has since been translated into English. He basically says that CD Projekt Red was running into real trouble when it came to getting Cyberpunk 2077 to perform on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One -- the latter especially. It's unclear whether Niespielak is referring to just the base systems or the Pro and X as well.
CD Projekt Red even responded to the rumours, basically saying that there wasn't really a particular reason for the delay. Guess that may have been true, considering how many bugs the game still had when it released.
>"No hidden agendas, just working on making the game better."
That part may have not really been that truthful considering what we now know about the console versions and how they went out of their way to not show us any footage before release.
https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2020/01/dev_responds_to_rumo...
Why would anyone take the risk to go publicly against management?
Something I have learned from watching this saga is that those rules seem not to apply to "AAA" developers (this appears to have been fairly wide industry knowledge, but I was not aware of it).
It may also be a relatively new development, but because of how hot games are coming in, it sounds like Sony and MS are now willing to assume that day one patches will fix the issues if the studio says that they will. Not just for CDPR.
* yes, I know you can still buy the physical copy from retailers
Sony and MS's teams aren't QA. Neither are Apple's. Apple's team looks for the standard stuff like are they using IAPs properly? Is there anything deceiving happening here? etc.
By the sounds of things Sony and MS's review teams did find that Cypberpunk 2077 was NOT in a good spot. But they took CDPR's word that they would fix it before launch (the typical day 1 patch situation). And that bombed hard.
I think your expectation on what happens is not in line with reality unfortunately.
I suspect the team knows the game was not ready. But its not up to the team to decide.
-- What was to be gained from it? Holiday sales? Delivering a product not delayed again? Management bonuses? Did the developers get bonuses for delivering "on time"?
-- At what cost did the crunch / delivering the product cause the team of developers? Now they need to keep working; fix the bugs; get this back in the store(s) and try to make everyone happy?
We go through our share of crunches. Bugs always get through and we have to fix them of course, but nothing as bad as some of the stuff I've read about this.
Management never realizes burnout is a real thing. I feel for these developers. It's double sided. Keep delaying the game / product and people get pissed off it's delayed. Ship it, and now they're pissed off its buggy. So now, everyone (programmers) are burned out; management is probably fuming over being removed from the store(s) and everyone needs to smile and get back to it, probably as a worse crunch than before. What a shitty way to spend the holidays.
It's like getting made at a company building your house that your water pipes leak but you rushed them to get it done because of some arbitrary move in date. Take the time; do it right; do a good job. Cut corners and rush stuff and deal with the consequences.
Ding ding ding. Missing christmas would be a huge deal.
That said, I think there's a tendency for conversations around this to ignore the finances and suggest that financial concerns shouldn't have any impact on the game's release. There's no doubt that CDPR got the balance on this wrong, but the need to find a balance is just reality.
The long answer is that releasing a high budget, triple-A title across multiple platforms isn't done in isolation. They were busy coordinating advertising campaigns, partnership deals, distribution, marketing, and other time-sensitive external processes.
Many of those external contracts were likely time sensitive, perhaps with financial penalties for missing the ship date. For example, did you know that big box retail stores don't put up giant advertisements or end caps for new products for free? They actually charge vendors to occupy prime space on the retail floor and put up product advertisements within their stores. In this case, stores like Best Buy even had Cyberpunk 2077 ads plastered on the outside of the store windows with a specific release date, which they missed once already. Each time a release window comes and goes without a product to sell, the company loses huge amounts of money to these contractual obligations.
Also, building these games is expensive. If they secured external financing to pay the huge development teams, that money comes with conditions about when they must start paying it back. No product = no way to pay, unless you go out and secure emergency loans to pay off your other financing, which is about as expensive as you would imagine.
These things aren't planned last minute. The launch date window was likely determined over a year ago, with huge amounts of money and work going into those specific dates.
Really, this is a failure of project and product management. The teams should have realized that they weren't on track to reach the launch dates and narrowed their scope early on. It looks like they overestimated how much they could accomplish and assumed they could fit it all in to the allotted time, which was obviously not the case.
I think that answers my question, which was:
Has anyone said why they didnt delay just the ps4/xbone versions? I assume some kind of contracts, but would have been cheaper to break the contract than to release a broken game. Probably would have been cheaper to delay all versions(smaller stock hit + salaries) if reports of losses are true.
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So did they see their game (that was so broken that friendly outlets went out of their way to say "DO NOT BUY") and think "we can take this gamble"?
Honestly the only case where I don't see this having adoption is for competitive gaming.
Also, I really think that Steam is the superior platform at the moment in terms of features compared to Epic and GOG, but in this case I think it would be better to buy it in GOG since not only all of the money goes directly to CD Project Red instead of 30% for Steam, but also there's some goodies if you buy it in GOG...
Anyway, I think if you bought the game 3 times you more than make up for that 30%.
I'm also playing Cyberpunk 2077 on Stadia and I've been quite positively surprised by it. However, I'm not really sold on Stadia generally yet. There's definitely some input lag and I can feel my mouse movements being "spongy". I'm also having a hard time driving, but I don't know if that's the input lag or just the game. Also, even if the game is running at the best possible graphical options (which Cyberpunk 2077 isn't), you're still just getting a compressed video stream, so dark gameplay doesn't look good (https://0x0.st/iFRT.png).
No regrets though, since I paid 50€ for it and I'm getting a free Chromecast Ultra and a free Stadia controller.
I don't have any noticable input lag but I'm on 70/30mbit fiber with 3-4ms ping to stadia.com. Sometimes the stream quality drops for a sec, but no noticeable frames or audio dropped.
I agree with the darkness being to bright, couldn't fix it with the gamme correction either. I have a feeling the 4k does a little better job in that regard. But overal it's not bothering me to much.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stadia%20-extensio...
Depending on how user input is processed in a game, this problem can be mitigated.
The lag is not too bad, but still noticeable. I only play on the PC now. I have no idea how to fix WiFi lag.
They do recommend 5Ghz for Wifi and being as close to the AP as possible. I can image if your AP is behind a wall or in a closet or different floor you get noticable delays as signals come in via reflections rather than directly.
https://community.stadia.com/t5/Stadia-on-Chrome/Fixing-stut...
Hopefully we'll get ray tracing and maxed out settings with the next Stadia hardware upgrade.
I was unable to figure out how to make hardware acceleration work on my T490.
I also bought the game on XBox, but I returned it to the shop.
There's something futuristic about playing the game at 1080p/4K on a 32" external display connected to a 13" MacBook Air with an M1 CPU. It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.
I'm still keeping a PS2 and some old games for when I want to enjoy a local gaming experience that is completely my own, rather than a service. But for Cyberpunk 2077, treating it as a service works well for me.
I often use screen sharing to work on my laptop from my desktop. Both machines are connected to the same switch with gigabit ethernet, but it performs worse and has more noticable input lag than the Stadia games I'm playing over the internet. It must have something to do with the video encoding I guess, Google doing things in hardware and my laptop trying it's best in software.
Tough situation, but considering the options, an understandable move. It’s a classic example of being forced to choose between two bad decisions because you failed to make an adequate plan in the first place.
Multiple delays mean that not only couldn't they set enough time initially, they were repeatedly incapable of setting enough time when extending the timeline, or unwilling to do so. Which makes it quite easy to view as rushed.
Its a pretty common pattern for rushed releases.
The gaming industry today is very different from what it was even ten years ago. It used to be that games made a healthy chunk of their income in the first month of launch. Back then it made total sense to rush a crappy game out before the holiday season.
However, today, the best selling games do so at steady rates over the span of years. The first month or so of sales may only represent 10-20% of total sales over five years. The Witcher 3 looks like it sold around 1.5 million preorders, but almost 30 million units in total.
All the bad publicity around this game is going to reduce gross sales of CP2077 and ensure that the public is leery of pre-ordering a CDPR in the future.
The game will be fixed with some patches in a month or three and it will continue to be exceptionally popular.
I picked up the GOTY Edition some 3 years later during a frequent sale, played it, and enjoyed it. It's still a frequent top-seller on Steam according to SteamDB, and it's a 5-year old game.
Unless CDPR drops the ball in a major way, I'd expect Cyberpunk 2077 to have a similarly long-tail of popularity, meaning most people who will eventually play Cyberpunk 2077 have yet to do so. There are also a lot of video game players who don't follow video game news.
And the lawyering hasn't even started - Sony is probably angling for some kind of damages since this was supposed to be a major holiday release.
If the choices are a) Delay again and risk losing the company or b) release a buggy game and use the revenue to repair the damage done to the company's reputation, I think the right move is b.
I remember I got Dark Souls 1 for 3€.
Just some anecdata. I think publishers are aware that their games are valueable longer longer, and they don't need those $5 buyers really. Perhaps this only applies to very popular games.
TLDR: I wouldn't bet on this being on sale for $5 ever
Hey speaking of, I just found this cool new game called Borderlands - it's a shame that the intro music is so classical, because the setting seems like a cool sort of dystopian punk sci-fi. I wonder if that'll catch on, because it sort of reminds me of some books that I read a few years ago...
See? It's fun!
Of course everyone with half a brain knew that a lot of these were infeasible in such a depth as they advertised but on the other hand, the game was in dev for 8 years, so why not?
Then the game came out and people (like me) waiting for it for 7 years got half-baked game that had so many things obviously cut really late that is painfully obvious. Features sitting there, teasing something you were promised but don't get.
Adding this to the debacle of last gen consoles issues, and ridiculous AI, zero replayability and you get a lot of angry gamers. And I believe rightfully so.
No, the problem is CDPR building all the expectations with lies. I'm not going to link to reddit but there is a thread on the cyberpunk sub listing all the lies Cyberpunk said before release. Nobody forced CDPR to lie about the content of the game, especially all the unique NPC scripting stuff that doesn't exist. It's not just the bugs and the performance. CDPR sold something that wasn't in the game at release.
It must have been an horror for the developers pressured by management to do the impossible, only to be met with contempt by both the management and the gamers in the end because management can always blame developers "for not doing enough" even though every dev must have crunched for 2 years straight.
Also these dev sweatshops usually have high turnover, so they are incapable of retaining experienced developers because they don't value that, only rookies they can squeeze to the bone then throw away when they are burned out. The state of that game is the result of all that culture.
Also, it's just a game folks. Get your refund and move on.
(In response to the guy who wrote he was crying himself to sleep every night after the cyberpunk disappointment)
That being said, I played the game on PS4, and it's jaw-droppingly bad. Not even because of graphics, it's just straight up broken. The mechanics themselves fundamentally do not work. So it's not about high expectations, they just need to either (a) spend more time working on the game, or (b) say no to last gen consoles.
So their tens of millions of dollars spent on marketing did... nothing? Seems quite unlikely.
This makes it sound like they're trying to shoehorn the game on a NES.
In reality, it was the current generation of consoles for the entirety of the development cycle. If it weren't for the multiple delays, the game would have had several months on the Xbox One/PS4 before the Series S/X and PS5 would have even been released.
I'm not saying that it's impossible, but to date, I can only think of Rockstar as the only ones who have done this successfully from the start
Really? I've never played that Witcher game at all, but Keanu Reeves had caught my attention to Cyberpunk.
I only ended up buying the game so soon after release because CD Projekt Red is well known in the PC gaming space and because I saw a bunch of friends playing it (which I guess means I got swept up in the tail end of the hype?)
Cyberpunk made me remember why I normally wait to buy games. I played it for under 2 hours before requesting a refund. It only performed decently on a GTX 1080 when set to look like a 10+ year old game and the mouse input was atrocious. Felt like there was both input lag and acceleration. Also the dialogue selection controls were pretty stupid. Q/E to navigate up and down? Why not W/S? Or even better, direct selection with number keys. (I know it sounds minor, but if I'm going to be making many dialogue choices during the game, it should be ergonomic)
Considering steam can never run out of copies, I don't see the need to ever buy a game particularly a bigger game, ASAP.
I'll give it a year or so, the game will still be available to purchase it won't be in a much better state.
Obviously though there are some issues effecting some players far more than others, could have got lucky.
What surprises me is how lackluster the visuals are compared to last-gen games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghost of Tsushima. I'm playing both on a PS4 Pro and Cyberpunk doesn't hold a candle to either of them graphically.
I play it on Xbox one S and don't experience any kind of game breaking bugs. On the other hand at least on XB one S the first loading screen is completely messed up which makes one question how that could possibly pass Microsoft's QA.
Then again, it's a Polish game from a studio with no American office and apparently with little regard for the current trend in American culture (cue The Guardian review). I didn't really expect less.
The Guardian righty criticized Cyberpunk for misogyny and xenophobia. The idea that these concerns are just some quirk of Anglo-American culture which is alien to Poles is an idiotic, offensive, condescending assertion which manages to be equally wrong about both America and Poland.
And if there is any misogyny displayed within the game, it's from scumbag characters. Emphasizing that the attitude/perspective is rooted in scumbag thinking.
"This fictional dystopian future isn't politically correct!"
CoD features an all white male cast, there's no whiff of female or LGBTQ representation. It's also horrifyingly xenophobic and repaints the history in a grossly nationalistic manner. Those were all issues that were brought up in connection to Cyberpunk even though that game is significantly less horrible in every aspect.
And yet somehow that wasn't a problem for CoD at all when dishing out ratings.
I enjoy CoD games, but all those issues you mentioned are selling point for the game. Look at what happened to The Last of Us 2, then multiply that by 1000 because CoD players are much more militant in their beliefs that the "PC police" are taking the fun out of everything.
Cyberpunk was not well received by the population it was trying to cater to with its customizable genitalia.
https://jygglypuffdaddy.com/2020/12/11/an-almost-exhaustive-...
When your game development costs outclass that of GTA 5 and probably in the ballpark of RDR2 and you release this mess after delaying the game by a WHOLE YEAR you'll get flack because you deserve it not because you are Polish.
Can you point to such reviews? Of course, random people on reddit or your family don't count, since GGP mentioned media.
- Told gamers the game "runs surprisingly well on consoles", which is very euphemistic to say the least
- Didn't give reviewers any review codes for the consoles, meaning console players could only find out about the game's horrid performance on consoles on launch date
- Didn't allow reviewers to post their own footage for the first review embargo, meaning the first wave of reviews only had B-Roll ad footage from CDPR
- After they were caught with their pants down wrt console performance, told customers they could get a refund without consulting the platform, so Sony was stuck holding up a deal they didn't know about
CDPR used every scummy tactic in the book, and yet still got glowing reviews from the press: the game has an 87 on Metacritic right now, and it had a 90 for a few days after launch. Most reviewers praised the game and expected the bugs to be patched. In fact, in my experience the media has been far more positive about the game than actual players! And this is after they failed to deliver on several core promises. It is honestly hilarious that fans of the game are trying to pin the well deserved negative reaction from the general audience on the media.
(And I do have to point out the incredibly funny move of trying to pin this as a "culture war" thing. Yeah, people hate the game because of "SJWs", not because CDPR literally lied to their customers multiple times. Great deflection tactic.)
Added post-release with a patch after seizures have been reported in news.
Why are people so entitled ?
"But it's not what they promised" don't buy it then
"But the game is bugged" don't buy it then
"But the game is expensive and it should not be" don't buy it then
There are tons of game stores, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM provide a refund policy. Why would you whine about your game ? Just. Get. A. Refund.
"But they lied about the game" It's a game, go scream with the same energy at your lying politicians.
I will probably get downvoted for this comment, but the buzz around this game is lasting too long IMHO.
I freaking hate yellow now.
Uh, what?
Until this announcement, SIE flat out refused people getting refunds. On Steam, you have to have played for less than 2 hours to qualify for a refund. Returns become extremely limited or downright impossible for opened physical games.
https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/17/22179460/cyberpunk-2077-r...
The fanboy army defending CDPR is honestly more annoying than people justifiably being upset with an unfinished, overhyped game.
What you describe is flat out illegal in some countries.
https://psxextreme.com/news/gamestop-to-refuse-cyberpunk-207...
https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-and-best-buy-are-now-offer...
Or the fact that CDPR is going to pay for refunds out of their own pockets:
https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-cdpr-says-it-wil...
They're not upset the tool can't do the job; they're upset that their emotions are left hanging. It's a movie without a climax. It's Game of Thrones. A refund doesn't touch on the core of why people are upset with Cyberpunk in the same way that a refund wouldn't matter for the people upset with the last season of Game of Thrones.
Marketing for Hype is a dangerous game. CDPR is experiencing the result of emotion based sales when combined with under delivering.
Others engage with them as media. Both ends are valid, but often in conflict. A game like this brings that into contrast hard. Even the games developers wanted more time in the oven.
It’s a fascinating problem.
For what's it's worth, I would never invest my emotions in a product (aka: i would never pre-order and follow the hype). That's "How to get disappointed 101".
I do not expect miracles from movies/games/whatever. I let them surprise me (aka: no trailers, no reading reviews, making my own opinion of the material).
If I was expecting to buy only good games, either I would not buy a lot or I would be disappointed a lot.
PlayStation Store: "you have 14 days from purchase to request a refund. If you have started to download or stream the purchased content you will not be eligible for a refund unless the content is faulty." https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/store/ps-store-ref...
Xbox Store: "All sales of Digital Game Products are considered final, but we understand there may be extenuating circumstances. When you request a refund for these products, and depending on the purchase or content type in determining refund eligibility, we consider a variety of factors like time since date of purchase, time since release, and use of the product." https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/subscriptions-billing/bu...
Edit: Now that they are offering refunds, you are correct. People should stop complaining and just take their refund.
If you start the game, even for a second, Sony will refuse a refund on a digital download. CPDR would not allow footage of the game on PS4 to be shared, and called rumours of poor performance "fake rumours". If you boot the game up and within minutes find it an unplayable mess, there was no remediation. (Of course, now Sony has offered blanket refunds for the game; I'm just providing context for the outrage over the anti-consumer behaviour.)
https://www.playstation.com/fr-fr/support/store/ps-store-ref...
> Après avoir acheté ce type de contenu sur le PlayStation Store, vous avez 14 jours à partir de la date d'achat pour demander un remboursement. Si vous avez commencé le téléchargement ou la diffusion du contenu acheté, vous ne pourrez pas bénéficier d'un remboursement, à moins que le contenu soit défectueux.
> After purchasing [games] from PlayStation Store, you have 14 days from the date of purchase to request a refund. If you have started downloading or streaming the purchased content, you will not be eligible for a refund unless the content is defective.
How can you be so sure you will keep an unreleased game that you would agree to give up a basic right?
Instead, I find it extremely "entitled" for someone to think that a company should be immune from criticism.
> Why would you whine about your game?
Well, one reason to do that, is to cause financial damage to the company, in order to punish them for their behavior.
If 3/4 of your players ask for refund, I see that as a clear critic that your game has a big problem.
Almost a new thread on the same subject every 2h: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Ok, and having more criticisms through public outrage, further helps hurt the company financially. Thats the point.
Doing even more things, hurts the company even more.
A good overview of the state of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bexA1Oolp0k
The combat is broken and gets really really boring, the AI is buggy as hell and too simple and it almost seems like they used the same AI from TW3 and it doesn’t understands guns.
You can hide behind cover and headshot everyone with the sniper rifle on hard 10-15 levels above you can kill everyone with one shot.
I’ve one shotted a boss with the sniper rifle (the kingpin looking pimp guy) whilst the quest was still rated as “very high danger”.
Other things are also simply mind boggling for example you can get a rocket launcher upgrade instead of grenades that has infinite ammo and no cooldown basically allowing you to spam as much as you want, you can also replace the HE/incendiary warheads with a tranq dart allowing you to basically one shot all human enemies too.
The narrative mechanics are also completely boring and they do not work.
And there is an extremely obvious solution to that that not only works perfectly from a narrative and story progression perspective but also introduces a lot of interesting game mechanics.
I don't know what AI you've encountered but it doesn't do squat it stays there to be picked off with a sniper rifle or a revolver especially if you use the slow time implant it's obnoxiously easy.
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The whole Johnny schtick is an utter disgrace to RPG design, this isn't an RPG anymore it's a GTA5 wanna-be. The prolog is great it works flawlessly the combat in it is also good which is suspect is because it's heavily scripted. How this should've worked out is that the whole story of the chippening and Johnny should've been mechanically integrated into the narrative.
Firstly you are told you have two weeks to live but there are no repercussions to just fucking off and doing side quests for 6 months in game time. There should be a trade off between the power you can gain from doing missions and the damage the chip is doing to your brain.
Secondly the whole concept multiple personalities should've been a game mechanics it's a goldmine for a morality and loyalty system that actually fits perfectly within the nerrative.
You as a player get 3 options, Fight/Control Johnny, become Johnny or become something new this could've been the basis of a morality system that isn't good/evil and you could've essentially had 3 factions that represent your moral compass.
The people who knew V before the chippening, Jackie should not have been killed he should've served as the moral compass for old V, Johnny's old gang like rogue and the new factions/chars you meet in the game after the chippening like Panam and her nomad tribe.
I loved TW3 despite all it's flaws, and I've actually created a lot of mods for TW1 and TW2 I'm not American, my GF is Polish I actually know people who worked at CDPR on previous games so please stop with this whole poor polish schtick it's unbecoming, CDPR has no longer the benefit of being an indie/small studio when they are working on games with a budget of over $300M. Their long term support for their titles is admirable but it doesn't excuse the piss poor state of the game considering that Cyberpunk 2077 had a bigger development budget than freaking GTA IV and probably in the same ballpark as RDR2....
On the other hand, I still have not felt this immersed in a game world and character stories since... well, since maybe The Witcher 3, and before that Planescape: Torment and Terranigma.
Other games have done specific aspects better (e.g. original Deus Ex in terms of level design; Horizon: Zero Dawn in terms of action; RDR2 & GTAV in terms of open-world sandbox; TW3 in terms of sheer story-telling quality.) However, I still find myself role playing my character in a way that I didn't do with any of those games. I have turned off my minimap and most HUDs to increase my immersion. I drive 99% of the time, instead of using the fast-travel system, because driving and listening to the radio is so damn immersive that I want to stay in that world. I actually care about what is happening to the various characters, even if there is little mechanical pay-off for following a particular path. The first-person camera helps create that illusion of being part of that world. There are bugs, yes, but even a t-posing NPC or a floating item is not sufficient to break that immersion.
As far Johnny... my character dislikes him. I oppose him on every turn. However, he still manages to get into my head, and convince me to do things that my character would not have otherwise done. There is no mechanical impact - yet he still changes my/my character's behaviour.
Is this a perfect game? No, far from it, even with all the inevitable bug fixes. However, no other game has created such an immersive experience for me in recent memory, if ever.
For that element alone, I am thankful for not buying into the negativity and giving this a try.
(Playing on Geforce NOW at Ultra/Psycho settings averaging ~40fps. No crashes so far. Input latency is fine - this is an RPG and the combat is on the easy side, so it doesn't really make any difference.)
This game is far more buggy than say Mass Effect Andromeda that was shat on by everyone for how buggy and well lame it was.
As for the RPG elements they are essentially non existent there is absolutely no impact to your choices, and most importantly you have no way of actually dealing with Johnny or anything else the way you want it it all ends up the same. There is absolutely no reputation factor here, street cred might as well be called XP since it's the same thing there should've been actual gameplay mechanic in which the way you deal with situations and missions actually impacts your street cred after a bunch of missions you would get a reputation say bully, maniac, white knight, hassler etc. that would change how characters react to you and the options you get or do not get in future situations.
This wouldn't be hard to actually implement but CDPR seemed to have dropped all RPG elements from the game which is ironically in line with some of the Glassdoor reviews from a couple of years ago: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-CD-PROJEKT...
As for the immersion I personally don't get it, driving just feels terrible (even with mods), there is no easy way to get new vehicles other than buying them, there is no vehicle customization and oh boy don't let me start on gear customization... I'm ok with the entire alt/punk look of the game but seriously some of the gear is just stupid I'm not kidding when I say I'm wearing a bathroom, a spiked braw, a gas mask, a pink bunny hat, diaper and loafers because of stats that to me is a major immersion breaker when your character is forced to look like that because of the sandbox.
The game deserves most of the negative reviews it got for being released as a buggy mess, it doesn't deserve the reviews of OMG they have dildos in shops and prostitutes. But this game cost a fortune to develop it had a budget of more than $300M that's more than GTA 5, it had constant delays and it still released with so many bugs that other than management saying fuck it we don't care about our reputation there is no other explanation to why it was released at this time.
Even if CDPR wouldn't have actually decided to make an RPG out of it but released it as a polished product there would be no questions that this game would've been received we a lot of praise. The issue is that mechanically it is weak in so many gameplay aspects like crafting and combat, it's buggy as hell and it doesn't have really interesting narrative mechanics to compensate for those flaws. TW1 was a horrible horrible mess when it was released, in fact without player mods especially those that change the combat it's still a poor experience but the story was great and you actually had to make good decision despite the limitations of both the engine and the studio at the time. TW2 was them basically trying to make a AAA game for the first time and almost nailing it, they had to make a lot of sacrifices to get it to run on consoles which is why it had about as much of a scope area wise as TW1 AKA Swamp and Back Again (with a detour to the fields of lag). TW3 was, well something else the combat still wasn't that great without balance mods but the overall combat mechanics were deep and that is by a large part thanks to it's setting where you can have more "boss fights" than in a game like CP2077.
The enemies in CP2077 are boring because they are human there is so much you can get by making them into bullet sponges without having the same issues as games like The Division have where you can dump 5 whole box magazines of a light machine gun into someone's face without them dying. Honestly CDPR should've added many more bots and cyborgs into the game and gave them much bigger abilities it would make encounters more interesting while not breaking the immersion of you dumping 600 rounds into someone and only taking 30% of their health bar down.
I can only hope someone at CDPR is still left that appreciates these ideas and has them too and the CDPR will 2-3 years down the line release an enhanced edition of the game, sadly because they've decided to have Keanu play Johnny it will make things harder because adding narrative mechanics would likely require quite a few voice over changes, but maybe they'll be able to deepfake it by then who knows...
to be fair, this is an issue with pretty much every rpg-ish fps. if you're good at aiming, deus ex is also really easy with a sniper rifle or assault rifle with max damage upgrades. hide behind cover, preaim, pop out and one-shot someone, repeat. ditto for mass effect. the only real combat challenge in these games is the hp-sponge sort of enemy, which isn't really fun imo. the difficulty scaling only works under the assumption that the player is pretty bad at aiming.
The game also has poor incentives to go melee, too many enemies can one shot you at close range with shotguns (as evasion is your main damage avoidance stat) and if you do want to go the melee assassin route you are essentially penalized for it.
For melee to work you need to have the Berserker implant which goes into the same slot as the Operating System which means you lose your quickhack abilities which are both important from a narrative perspective and also needed for stealth play.
The only way I have to sum this game up is one poor design choice after another. It has all the right pieces or most of them, but it doesn't have the right glue and with all the puns in the world it needs more polish...
Local (even on minimum settings) > NVIDIA > Stadia and there's a big gap on each of those. The game is already a little spongey / laggy, and an internet connection exacerbates that.
I bet they spent a lot of time updating the engine and graphics over the past 8 years, and as a result the game barely runs on the hardware they were using when they started writing it.
My sympathy goes to the iGDA members trying to fix this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kflkud/i_am_...
They wanted to release in 2020 to honor this significance. It has nothing to do with lying to consumers and maximizing profits from a holiday season during a pandemic with new consoles and hot new GPUs. /s
CD Project Red is a For-Profit company (like EA, Ubisoft, etc...), please stop defending them when they have clearly lied to old-gen gamers. They are not the paladins of gaming as their great marketing reinforced when waved the success of The Witcher 3 (btw great narrative, but what a shitty combat system). Missing the holiday season for them would have impacted their short-term revenue and deflated the hype-train. Actually, they did something worst, but I'm 100% sure that they will recover: they know how to do games. Their brand is clearly damaged and their message "look we are the saviour of gaming" is lost forever.
Four years later, they've released half a dozen major updates, fixed hordes of bugs and have seriously made the game 10x better than it was at launch. It is now fully the game that was originally promised and more. It's also gone on sale with a major discount several times.
Now that may be an extreme scenario, but if a little shop like Hello Games can do it, I think CDPR at least has a shot. I will be happy to wait.
The thought that it was buggy as hell on release, and for some time after, seemed far-fetched during play through. There are bugs here and there, but nothing to pay much mind to.
While playing Cyberpunk, there were quite a few bugs on release for PC (crashing, catching enemies in t-pose, randomly dying, and some others), but I'm noticing them less and less. Idk if whether it's them updating or just my mind, but definitely encountering fewer and fewer bugs.
Only personal complaints I have are not related to performance (not a big fan of Johnny Silverhand's character/writing and wasn't a fan of the Panam quests/story, but that's insignificant).
Enjoying it quite a bit now, but could totally see, and look forward to, this being even better with updates. It's just a shame that the devs had to deal with crunch :/
The game on PS4 running at 720p, texture replacement, drop in, you can't fix this like No Man's Sky, and the best thing to do is refund. At a certain point you hit the hardware wall of a graphically intensive game.
All of these could be improved with enough time & budget in future updates, and any one of them would make it a 'more finished' game. At this point I think CDPR will be under major pressure to do more than just fix bugs. A lot of gamers want to see significant changes in the gameplay itself, and I expect it will happen. After all, Hello Games has set expectations pretty high-- and with 1/40th of the employees to boot.
For this game in particular the bugs and performance issues don't seem present as they are on PS4 and Xbox One.
From the original article calling out the problem.
>>>
When "suiting up" for a BD, especially with Judy, V will be given a headset that is meant to onset the instance. The headset fits over both eyes and features a rapid onslaught of white and red blinking LEDs, much like the actual device neurologists use in real life to trigger a seizure when they need to trigger one for diagnosis purposes. ... This is a pattern of lights designed to trigger an epileptic episode and it very much did that in my own personal playthrough.
<<<
Emphasis mine.
> What possible reason could there be for that?
Probably for the same reason devs model decapitations and other deadly effects off real world references: using real world lighting patterns that are known to effect the brain adds a sense of authenticity to the world.
Even if the intent was not malicious, the device and lighting pattern are too spot-on to be mere coincidence.
> you shouldn’t be intentionally showing a seizure-inducing pattern of lights
I think the intention was to show a cool flickering that looks like it'd mess up your brain (which is somewhat the intent of BD in game). The fact that the flickering also caused seizures, is clearly an oversight.
Maybe save the main questline as the first major piece of DLC to avoid that problem?
While non-storyline gameplay is definitely more fun in Rockstar games, I think the mission and sidequest gameplay is way more fun than CP2077's as well.
Consider this earlier mission in GTAV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikop7td88ks
It involves a car chase, NPCs jumping in and out of moving vehicles, a boat mast swinging into traffic, shooting while driving, etc. This is all done smoothly, with no animation glitches or jankiness.
A mission after that involves a bicycle race, swimming and boarding a boat, followed by an intense jet ski race: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcqvAgzr3To
So far in my admittedly short ~12h playtime of CP2077 on PC I haven't seen anything equally as engaging, well designed or just plain fun. Most of the missions involve shooting galleries interspersed by cutscenes to showcase action set pieces, and there's a lot of on-rails shooting from the passenger seat, which feels like gameplay from several generations ago, not from a next-gen title.
I don't understand complaints that it shouldn't be compared to GTA given that CDPR themselves describe it as an "open-world action-adventure story", so comparing it to games that set the bar for open-world gameplay is only fair, and in my opinion it falls very, very short on those terms.
Just like it does on its RPG elements. Like others mentioned, it falls short when compared to even the original Deus Ex, let alone the more recent installments. This is probably why CDPR decided to avoid marketing it primarily as an RPG in 2019: https://i.imgur.com/oDldUQQ.png
All in all this was a massive disappointment for me, and I actively avoided trailers and marketing to avoid the hype. Even if all the bugs and performance issues are fixed hopefully a few months from now, the gameplay will still be mediocre at best. The only thing I'm partially still interested in is the story, though from what I've read that seems to be underwhelming as well.
This was the cherry on top of 2020. What a year.
Why they didn't make this a PS5/XSX exclusive is absolutely beyond me. It was very, very clear this game did not run on last-gen console hardware.
CDPR share price is down an absolutely staggering 40%+, absolutely massive hit to the company valuation, Sony has an egg on their face and has to issue refunds for this unplayable mess, and all for what, because management decided the game had to be released prior to the holiday season rather than a working product because they wanted holiday sales, which they're now losing money on via refunds?
I don't work in game development but in my industry, that is absolutely grounds for putting some heads on the chopping block.
This is shady business practice at best, downright unethical/scamming at worst. If CDPR considers themselves to be a respectable studio some heads should roll for this debacle.
Can anyone who has it on PS disconnect from network, refund, and then continue playing?
(Maybe it's too bad on console for anyone to want to keep playing though)
the stream i`m wathching here, this from original soundtrack for the game in Polish (yes in been created by Polish studio) https://www.youtube.com/user/Corle1st/videos?disable_polymer...
- CDProjekt worked on this game for 8 years, with employees crunching for several months in exchange for a share of the company's yearly profits. It's worth mentioning that the latter happened during a global pandemic.
- The game's release was delayed several times, leading to more crunch.
- The game infamously failed to add seizure warnings at launch.
Other huge failures I can think of are Brink back in 2011 and No Man's Sky more recently, but this is orders of magnitude worse.
"It may be hard to believe, but the Google Stadia version of Cyberpunk 2077 may be the best way to play for most players right now. Unless you have a 20 or 30 Series Nvidia GPU or comparable AMD card or you were lucky enough to get a PS5 or Xbox Series X / S, this game will not be performing anywhere close to how it was designed to."
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/10/22167303/cyberpunk-2077-...
It performs quite poorly on the base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and basically to get a good console experience, you need a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series, where you'd play the game in backwards-compatible mode (there's no PlayStation 5 / Xbox Series versions yet).
CD Projekt Red never showed any footage shot on the consoles and didn't send out any review codes out for the console versions before release. All of the reviews that came out before the release were for the PC version and even the PC version wasn't allowed to show any recorded footage in their videos (only the publisher-provided B-roll).
The game is also quite buggy and unfinished as well, on every platform. Many were also disappointed by the actual game. There's for example some talk about the AI, which is rather subpar.
Combine the poor performance on the consoles it came out on, the deliberate attempt at hiding the true state of the console versions, the multitude of bugs and glitches and some of the lackluster aspects of the game, and you'll find yourself with a lot of upset people.
As to why Sony is giving refunds, I'm guessing it's because CD Projekt Red made a statement promising big patches for console versions next year. However, in the same statement, they said that people who didn't want to wait could "opt for a refund" and should contact Microsoft and Sony for digital refunds.
However, we later learned that there was not agreement between CDPR and Microsoft/Sony, and they were just talking about the standard store refund policies. In Sony's case, you can't get a refund if you've already downloaded the game. This lead to a lot of people being angry at Sony for not getting the refund they were "promised". On Microsoft's side, people were getting mixed, but slightly better results.
Seems like Sony decided to go with the nuclear option after getting bombarded with refund requests after CDPR's statement about refunds.
Oh, it's worse than that. Sony policy is no refunds if you've even downloaded the game. I bought the last of us 2 over the summer, and reading more about the story line, I wasn't ready for it. I tried to get a refund, and sony denied it. I hadn't even started the game.
I’ve the same setup except running a 3080, hasn’t crashed once in the hours I’ve been playing it. Nary a glitch, but they do happen.
Mine: X570, 3700x, 5700XT Cpu & GPU OC with watercooling.
I’ve seen 3-4 crashes (in the same place) in about ~8h of gameplay.
You don't know how he is playing the game... for example one way to crash the game is if you are doing a crafting build, mass manufacture items for sale, and attempt to sell them all at once, the game has a massive memory leak on the inventory screen that seemly is combinatorial too (seemly it reloads the inventory screen whenever you sell a item, and keeps the old inventory memory alongside the reloaded, so the increase is faster than linear), when it runs out of RAM it crashes.
I know that AMP contains stories about how reviewers were misled, or duped into misleading prospective buyers of the game. Maybe it's true, but I take anything that shows up from AMP with a good pinch of salt.
All I'm trying to say is not to write it off yet. It doesn't seem to be an irrecoverable disaster, not that I have played it or will play it in the next decade, probably.
Most people who critizise this game are in the gaming scene for the trends or just failed to see other RPGs being launched.
RPGs are games very complex, every one launched until now that is considered good also had a rough launch like this one (being hyped AF also didn't helped...).
Also, people shoulnd't expect a next-gen game to run well on prev-gen hardware, specially when we're speaking on the PS4 flat released back at 2013.
That's the whole point of consoles. I absolutely expect to be able to buy any game where the box says "PS4" and have it be playable on a "PS4".
I mean haven't tried it and played on my Xbox Series X and it's fine. I'm not the usual console gamer, I just bought my first console and afaik these consoles aren't just plug and play anymore.
Refund policies need to change IMO.
Specially since the game was released 2 weeks ago and still receiving updates very fast which means in a month it will run fine.
I don’t understand this sentiment. The game’s been in development for 8 years and was scheduled to launch before next-gen hardware. They partnered with MS on a custom skin last-gen Xbox. The game plays in comparability mode in next-gen hardware. In no way was this billed as a next-gen game.
They announced that their next project would be based on Cyberpunk 2020 8 years ago. They only actively started development ~4 years ago. But yea, the original release date was way before the PS5 etc. where even announced.
If I'd guess any better they weren't expecting this blowing out of proportions for that...
I'd probably have bought the game on discount if I knew it was, much like Witcher 3, a mediocre game in most ways other than visuals, and in some ways actually a step down from their previous title.
But I bought this one on preorder because it was presented as not just 'The Witcher 3, but Cyberpunk and wonkier in most ways', but a game that would do an open world well, and so much more.
Normally I don't preorder games, but I gave CDPR the benefit of the doubt. The fact that Sony, of all companies, is actually offering refunds, should make it clear that this game is terrible. It's fine that you enjoy it, but why try to argue it's all 'blown out of proportion' or that 'fanboys expected too much'. Can't you just enjoy the game without needing validation?
These taken together make the game seem like a sloppy mess, regardless of how much money they appear to have poured into the rendering pipeline.
The fact that the game is such a disaster on current gen consoles should not be excused when a game’s production cycle has predominantly been during those consoles existence. Why are we letting companies off the hook when they advertise a product and fail to deliver, because we perceive that hardware as being unable to handle it? Rockstar has excelled at launching games of a similar complexity across multiple console generations. GTAV ran on hardware 2 generations old so let’s not pretend that this is out of reach for a AAA developer with hundreds of staff. I have little sympathy for a major developer and publisher failing to live up to the hype that they created or courted, and leaned into up until a disastrous release.
Meanwhile in Watch Dogs Legion Microsoft Store went against their policy to give me a refund because the game was basically unplayable. But for some reason I don't see the media doing all this chatter (and Watch Dogs Legion was presented as one of the next gen games...)
I mean, they basically failed on the most basic feature of a game: the saving system. Game plain failed to save, had no save game button or whatsoever costing me 6 hours of gameplay or even more. Imagine getting back to a game and finding out you lost all your progress.
Meanwhile in Cyberpunk 2077 it's the ocasional bug here and there, but nothing game breaking like the crybabies are saying.
They went against their refund policy? What was the reason?
As for the game, I'm personally having fun with the main and side quests. Unfortunately, that's really all there is to the game and it feels like an Outerworlds-like game. If the cost of this game was 50% cheaper, I would definitely not be complaining. Still, it's sad to see that vehicles are all the same (except the ones you own yourself) and losing assets when looking away is always immersion breaking.
Took Ubisoft a month to solve this bug and the game was advertised as next gen optimized and they couldn't even get this right...
But yeah, people apparently only get mad about Cyberpunk having lower performance on last gen consoles...
Someday people will get angry because their i3 + 1050 GTX can't run games on ultra.
Everyone is piling on this, but this is _literally not_ the next-gen release. That's supposed to come as a patch that was slated for release next year - what has been released was explicitly framed as a PS4 / XboxOne release that ran on new consoles because of backward compatibility.
What a ridiculous excuse. If a developer releases a game for a console, it should run well on that console. If the game is too fancy for the console then it shouldn’t be released. And if the developer insists that the game runs well on a given console, but they never release screenshots and it turns out they were lying, then their behavior is truly deceptive and inexcusable.
This Barnum-esque idea that it’s PS4 owners’ fault for letting CD Projekt Red rip them off is gross. Although it’s pretty funny that the suggestion always comes from people who think they’re defending CD Projekt Red.
The game is functionally broken in the consoles it was built and released for; only PC is having an acceptable experience.