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Comment by aranelsurion | Hacker News Reader

I think most of the negative sentiment against Cyberpunk 2077 comes from three sources:

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.

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Part of the problem for example is the story swings between "good" and "great" only if you are on a particular path.

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.

I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.

I'm fairly certain they cut out a big chunk of the "lifepaths" to make the deadline. They don't really make sense as a mechanic at this point. You choose your previous life as one of the main choices but then all the paths merge together after 15 minutes? Just doesn't make sense from a game design or story perspective as a intentional choice.

Paradoxically, we call "cut content" what was recorded but not wired into the game. Abandonded ideas are not cut content, same as content that is cleaned up from the release thoroughly and leave no trace of it.

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.

> Why have them at all?

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).

There was certainly a lot cut, but already back in August interviews said that lifepaths wouldn't lead to completely different stories, but rather add a bit of a different flavor to the same over-arching story [0]:

> 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.

[0] https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-lifepaths/

> In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference

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.

> The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.

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.

Compared to Witcher 3, they DID do this with 2077. 2077's main storyline is roughly 20 hours long, while the Witcher's is about 50 hours. CDPR is kind of known for their longer story driven stuff, and its my understanding they took that feedback in this game and made the primary quest shorter while expanding the optional quest branching.

Gamers unfortunately often make an argument equating number of hours to value for money. Padded open world games are the natural result. You trade a nice, tight narrative for an experience spread thin over more hours.

Any game with full voice acting is going to have certain limitations. Corpo V still grew up with Jackie, and it's pretty common for people from poorer backgrounds to have separate corporate and casual personas.

The key is to accept those limitations. They should have just kept to the street kid start.

I mean this is they key for everything when making great products, accept your limitations and don't make it the users problem.

It is so fundamental you should not have to say it but you are really right in this case.

Also known as code switching. Many people do this all the time in the real world. I know black folk who have two distinct accents depending on the context and audience. Same with many southerners that I know. The drawl becomes a lot less pronounced in "professional" settings. That being said, V didn't grow up with Jackie. They met on a run. Corpo V might have grown up on the street as well, but then it's not really a different backstory.

Corpo V never did runs with Jackie before the game. In the Heros sidequest Mama Wells references that they lived under the same roof, though in retrospect that could be referencing the time skip at the beginning.

The first few missions of Corp path had me almost ask for a refund. Instead I started a new game as a street-kid. Makes way more sense now.

Had the same reaction to corpo path. I think it would actually be interesting to tell a story about that culture from the inside, rather than immediately retreating to the well-trodden anti-corp perspective. For a supposedly ambitious game, it seems entirely uninterested in challenging or evolving the rather tired cyberpunk tropes.

I'm still on my first playthrough (and enjoying it) and am super disappointed to hear the other lifepaths are basically 15-20 minute prologues. I too was really hoping for my corpo playthrough to be playing it from the inside, lots of corporate espionage, dealing with situations with the full force of a megacorp behind me etc...

People's expectations about the life paths were really overblown, they took marketing bullshit and took it as gospel. Then their own imaginations took over.

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.

Fantasy RPGs tend to do a pretty good job of this. The macro path your character follows is consistent, but there are choices and class-specific stories that create a sense of character.

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.

Ah no, that they made clear eons ago - V has broken off with her/his past and is just a merc now. But, they stated that different life paths would give you wildly different experiences. That they would change how others react to you. And one would assume that this would need separate voiceovers. What we get instead is "I used to ride with the Bakkers" "I would never have guessed".

The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts because half-finished subsystems weigh down what can be a very solid game when it focuses on its fundamentals.

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.

I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got.

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.

I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.

It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.

Not comparable, your choices actually "matter" as you play the game, until the end where it's revealed nothing you did mattered.

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.

It's not about ending, but the branching story isn't actually branching at all. You make a decision and, regardless of what you chose, end up in the same place. The amount of decisions that actually stick, or actually change your progression through the game, are very low. "Do x or y" where both X and Y cannot be undone and seem like heavy decisions, ultimately do not change the outcome of any future story items. Side with Ben or side with Jill, doesn't matter, they both treat you the same afterwards and it never mattered at all which you picked.

Even with just one ending, a game can do branching well for all the sub-story endings that most games have.

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.

Assuming all choices are between two options, you could make this claim about any game with (five endings and...) more than three choices for the player to make. if one of the choices has three options, two choices will do the job of selecting between 5 endings.

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 fell into a local maxima or made an assumption that got you tunneled visioned.

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.

The system you describe does not have the property that every choice makes a difference to the ending. Most of them still don't. An internal counter going up, without changing the ending you get, is not making a difference to the ending.

And as I updated my comment, you can ignore what I wrote about endings. Most of the decisions just flatout don't effect the world at all.

Fallout: New Vegas had a handful of endings, but is nearly universally praised for making player choices affect how you play. It's not about what endings you get so much as your actions influencing what options remain open to you as you play.

I posted this somewhere else, the game has a ton of interesting concepts but they ran out of time a long time ago and half assed everything.

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.

> If they had cut off the driving completely for instance

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?

Because people want to drive cars in games. I for one would be very bored if I had to take an automated system like public transport or self driving cars.

It depends on the type of the game. Deus Ex, Vampire the Masquerade, (many) Fallout games and countless others have no or little driving and I don't think it would really elevate those games.

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.

> "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious

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.

The Watch_dogs franchise is IMHO the one that does the living modern city the best...

The Yakuza games are just like that. There aren't any cars, it's just a city for walking around. Unlike CP2077, the NPCs are actually believable in that you can talk to them, go into stores and interact with them, they respond naturally when fighting is going on, etc.

>The corpo path for example is a bad one:

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

> 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

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.

>it's more like a new Deus Ex game

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.

The endless mission markers and incoming phone calls you CAN'T ignore (seriously, the fixers will just blab at you forever even if you don't press T) is what really put me off. I got ten hours in and said forget it

>it's more like a new Deus Ex game

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.

This was the exact line I used to describe it to a friend.

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?

The story seems really good to me. Better than the story for all by the original deus ex.

I mean the original Deus Ex is two decades old, so it's definitely undergone some of the "Seinfeld effect", but I feel generally even a game that old managed to achieve better depth.

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).

Fallout 4 is a great comparison point. It had the bones of something great but the soul was gone. No factions, no interesting NPCs or side quests, no lore. Just a big empty sandbox to shoot stuff in.

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...

4) Add mods and let the users fix the game as with Skyrim.

What's the difference between Fallout 4 and New Vegas? I thought New Vegas was just an expansion.

New Vegas was a standalone game with expansions of its own. Fallout 4 came after it. A lot of people consider New Vegas to be the only good one to come after the first 2, but I can't commentate on that, as I stopped playing the fallout series after New Vegas and attempting to play Fallout 3.

I wouldn't say New Vegas was the only good one, I thought FO 3 and 4 were fun in their own way. But New Vegas was the only great one, and a benchmark when it comes to 3D CRPGs.

I love FO 1 and 2 but was never interested in FO3 and even less in FO4. Would you recommend just playing New Vegas?

Absolutely. I was always a huge fan of the originals and other old-school RPGs like Baldurs Gate, and this is one of the few that actually scratches that itch. The game is highly interconnected and every choice has a realized impact.

I played F3, New Vegas, and F4 multiple times, while my attempts at F2 usually failed (aka bored me) before having 4th location discovered.

Both Vegas and F3 are great. F4 is OK, but could be better.

New Vegas has an actually deep story and interplay between several factions. You have great freedom and influence in world events. The characters have strong personality and motivations of their own.

Fallout 4 to my understanding is more or less devoid of such.

I loved the original Deus Ex and think Cyberpunk does a good job of carrying the torch. While it is clear both games have different priorities in terms of writing and activities but they both have a similar heart. I think Cyberpunk puts a lot more points into atmosphere and worldbuilding than DX ever did, personally.

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.

I’ve finished every Deus Ex game and definitely think Cyberpunk is a spiritual successor to them.

Almost every obstacle in the game has multiple solutions - this was something deus ex really nailed.

>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.

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 that Mankind Divided is just a single open world level.

I would argue the same about Cyberpunk. It’s a bigger Poland from Mankind. That’s not bad at all.

There is very little real open world in it, certainly not even close to GTA.

Well, it tries to do this but is miles from being as open or as flexible as GTA games which came out ten years ago and to compare it to RDR2 is a joke. In Red Dead, all NPCs react to you being there and have almost believable reactions to you, whereas in Cyberpunk people walk straight into you or through you.

Even Skyrim NPCs (2011 game) sound a lot more immersive, the main characters are usually quest aware. Skyrim game started as bugfest too, and it still is one of the most popular games, thanks to modding.

It's Witcher 3 with a pinch of Deus Ex. As a fan of both, I'm enjoying it.

I’m over 10 hours in on pc and there’s more than just “some bugs”.

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.

> I don’t know why people are being so defensive.

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.

I am about 15 hours in on a PS4 Pro and absolutely every side mission I played was bugged.

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.

> 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.

Did you miss the sentence before?

>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'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.

> This is probably the first game that didn't get a downgrade visually, but got an upgrade.

Doom 2016, e3 vs release: https://i.imgur.com/I5mWucM.jpeg

Oh, the AI is really killing me, especially in Silverhand scenes. You can pretty much aim at an empty space and wait for a head to appear there, because it's obvious they will move there before shooting you :(

Dozens of hours here on Stadia. Only one bug, loading the last checkpoint would instantly crash. My workaround was just to load a minute-earlier auto save.

I'm close to 60 hours on the Stadia version now, haven't run into any gamebreaking issues. I have had some hilarious ones though, like when NPCs drive me around they miss a turn and plow pedestrians. I'm able to skip the driving sequences so it hasn't been a big deal.

> I have had some hilarious ones though

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.

Based on a few anecdotes, it seems like Stadia is the most reliable version of the game right now. But if people are concerned that digital storefronts mean you're renting games at full price, then Stadia is even worse -- you're renting a game at full price and hoping the hardware sticks around so you can play it in a few years.

> We were looking forward to a great game and were mislead.

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.

The only reason the public was impatient, is they promissed the game back im April, and have been taking preorders for ages..

Then don't preoder. Making such a fuss about wanting the game right now, then making a fuss that the game is rushed and incomplete, that just makes people sound like a petulant child.

Don't take peoples money if you don't know when you are going to release a product. It's not a hard concept.

Don't pre-order is quickly becoming don't buy titles until they get patched.

There is no reason to pre-order a digital product, so I agree - never pre-order.

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.

Pre-order, I used to do that all the time. After awhile I got tired of having to go back and get a refund when the game/movie would not come out for at least 1-2 years after the pre-order. Now I just wait, and usually wait for a sale. By the time the price falls the big crazy bugs are usually worked out. The only time it made sense to pre-order is if there was some sort of merch to go with and even then it better be some nice swag. Now I have a box full of useless junk that no one really cares about (even me) and a set of games I forgot about a long time ago.

The problem is you only get to make a an impression once (as Sovietwomble on Twitch often points out)

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 think December was more about Christmas sales than appeasement. They didn't want to miss the holiday season and have to wait months more for people to pay off their debts.

It's obviously an "Early Access" game at this stage but it was sold for the full price. Pretty disappointing as I usually avoid Early Access to not ruin the experience for me. I want to test out my new GPU so I've been playing it on and off for a bit.

I went ahead and returned my PS4 copy for this exact reason. Also tried on Steam (linux), but couldn't get it started beyond the intro screen and I don't care to debug further.

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.

This is why the video game consumers are cancerous. They constantly preorder, buy into all of the hype hook/line/sinker, get mad at delays, and yet still get mad when the game is released half-finished/didn't meet the unreachable expectations. This cycle has happened with virtually every troubled AAA game release in the past decade.

Game companies can't win dealing with amnesiac/bipolar consumers.

Blaming the consumer is jot the way to go.

Some of the blame goes to the consumer though. The community here is really playing up the drama in a childish way. Many games have had far worse launches, and got panned in reviews (both critic and user), and haven't seen this kind of outrage.

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.

Most of that is actually the fault of the studios. Few companies are investing in managing their communities and communicating with them, setting standards and so on. Those that do actually see results.

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.

100% disagree. None of the blame is on the consumers. The studio pitches a game. People get excited. People buy it. None of that is the consumers' fault. It's false advertising, period.

If consumers didn't preorder and waited for games to come out and get reviewed fairly before buying, then this strategy wouldn't work.

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.

Those angry consumers have a responsibility to not be complete and utter babies in their response though. And, as a secondary responsibility, not to expect so much.

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.

I agree with your general point and never pre-order anymore for those reasons.

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.

Ultimately, though, the blame does lie with the consumer. Companies seek profit, that's inevitable. The decisions of consumers is what makes it profitable to release unfinished games, and sell hype instead of a product.

It is if you're another consumer

It is if they keep enabling this behavior by preordering. It’s not a limited quantity item, and there’s no reason to. And this keeps happening.

Never jot is my life motto

I’m about 30 hours into the Xbox One X release and it’s a tough love.

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.

Yeah thats the thing, when it works it's pretty great. But that all quickly goes away once the game gets stuck in a weird state. Like I wasn't able to run or use my scanner at one point. I thought it was some effect or something.

Those glitches happen to me as well. The first big glitch I thought was me was not being able to switch camera view while driving. Obnoxious bug for me. It’s not possible to drive in this game while looking from inside of the car without lots of NPC death...

It really should never have been released on last gen consoles.

Which is impressive considering it was announced before those consoles were.

Over 20 hours in on Xbox One X, three crashes. One of them post 1.04 patch, all happened while driving around town.

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)_/¯

You can use memory wipe from your cyberdeck for that

I'm at some silly number of hours (12? 15?) on PC, and haven't even finished the prologue "mission" for Dexter, since I've been doing side missions and exploring.

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'm at some silly number of hours (12? 15?) on PC, and haven't even finished the prologue "mission" for Dexter, since I've been doing side missions and exploring.

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.

I think there are a few reactions that are reading differently to different people.

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.

Cyberpunk has bugs and omissions that are a lot more severe than a typical AAA game launch, and certainly more than a typical CDPR game launch. Witcher 2 was rough, but never this rough, and Witcher 3 was a large improvement.

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.

Why would Sony pull the game and offer refunds if this is an AAA release 'just like any other'?

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 was going to wait for it to come down in price a bit before I snagged it as I get motion sickness easily so 60 bucks is a bit of a gamble. Also watching the slipping dates gave a big clue to everyone 'this is not done'. In a year or so after the modders have had their fun with it, it should be interesting.

I just hope CDPR did not bet the farm on this thing. If so GoG will go with it.

On the other hand I'm 20 hours in with a 3080 and all graphics maxed out. The only bugs I've seen are a couple floating guns and one of the fixers had a weird bug where their cell phone on the table was moving with their hand movements.

Bugginess and performance are areas that can be fixed with patches.

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...

They are going the No Man's Sky route. An incredible game years after it was released.

I genuinely hope this is correct.

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.

People always reference No Man's Sky and praise the state it eventually made it to, but even that updated state was not the game that was promised and hyped pre-release.

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.

What was No Man's Sky meant to be?

For all of the amazing work that Hello Games has put into No Man's Sky, one change for me that I didn't like is that now you are basically thrown into instances where you are meeting other players.

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.

Can they pull it off though? NMS is an exploration game in procedurally generated world. CP2077 is all about the story. They'd need to put a crazy amount of new content in a DLC to get people to play it.

>it's an extremely fun, really well-made game

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...

The OP’s point is that it is highly anecdotal. I have dozens of hours and I only ran into a single bug that forced me to reload. Everything else I have seen have been cosmetic issues.

> The OP’s point is that it is highly anecdotal. I have dozens of hours and I only ran into a single bug that forced me to reload. Everything else I have seen have been cosmetic issues.

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!

This anecdote seems to extend to all players on the most standardized, commonly owned systems (current generation consoles).

So 7 year old PCs?

I'm not sure why this matters when we're on a thread about refunds on said "7 year old PC".

It matters because while most of the blame is on CDPR some should go to players pre-ordering without realizing that getting such a massive game to run well on a 7 year old PC is not realistic. PC gamers would not expect this to run on such an old system for sure.

If it's not realistic, then CDPR should not be releasing a broken version of the game for those consoles. They're happy to take the money of a fully priced game which comes with a set of expectations of what that game will look like. This game has been in development for years, there's been loads of promotional material for it, and it's frankly anti-consumer to say that the customers are idiots for expecting something they purchase to be a functional piece of software.

> and it's frankly anti-consumer to say that the customers are idiots for expecting something they purchase to be a functional piece of software.

I specifically said per-ordering. I agree CDPR should have been more upfront about this being an 'impossible port' so to speak.

Tens of millions of exactly the same hardware setups isn’t really a generalization-failing anecdote the way “it didn’t work on my old computer” is.

I am nearly at the end on Stadia and other than the occasional floating NPC I haven't experienced bugs. So experiences seem to vary quite a bit, they're far from universal.

Strangely, I think Stadia is one of the more stable platforms for the game. I'm in a similar position, dumb AI when driving, the odd multiple dialog lines being smashed together, but overall its not too bad. 28 hours in and I've been mostly distracted by side quests.

I think the issue is rather that it's nothing like Deus Ex which has immersion. Getting augmentations were meaningful choices which alter ways you can approach explorations (such as picking up heavy items blocking vents). Stumbling upon critical information from hacked computers not only fills background info for you but makes your character more knowledgeable, and lets you use that information in dialogs to alter the direction of quests. Important story altering decisions aren't presented as important decisions, they're just side effects of regular gameplay. A hack centric or stealth centric or dialog centric character build are all viable.

In this sense, Deus Ex has "content". And exploration and gameplay are immersively impactful. A more apt comparison might be with Tomb Raider.

> Getting augmentations were meaningful choices which alter ways you can approach explorations (such as picking up heavy items blocking vents).

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.

Deus Ex made the smart choice of not being a completely open world. They had a limited number of environments, where they could design to have different routes for the player.

Attempting the same freedom in an open world is just bonkers.

I'm enjoying the game too and I was defending it in a thread the other day. but now that I've gotten past the intro arc, I'm noticing a lot more issues. mostly just little stuff like NPCs warping around in the background, a suitcase levitating in place when it should be in jackie's hand, objects clipping through walls that can't be picked up. doesn't break the game, but it does take away from the immersion.

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.

Hah, I had the same exact issue with the guard in the elevator, except he just went through the wall a few feet and ended up being equally unreachable. It really broke me out of what was otherwise turning out to be a good action scene.

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.

I really enjoy Cory Barlog's (director of God of War) GDC talk about some of the process behind it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIb-Lt7WX_s

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.

Interesting. When I played God of War one of the things that really stood out to me too was how solid everything about the game felt. I can't recall many games where something like that was noticeably better than everything else.

Really one of the better games I've played.

"It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons." I disagree this adds up to minor reasons. If you bought the game for PS4 based on the advertisements getting a buggy mess isn't minor.

Maybe, but this is one of the few games that were targeted to PC and then just "ported" to console.

Usually we get a inferior console port on PC (GTA IV, Batman game etc.), so I'm glad this time it was different.

I don't think the advertising suggested it at all. There was nothing in the way they showcased the game to console players to make them think they were just getting a port.

That's untrue. They explicitly targeted current-gen consoles, told us the game runs well on them, and even released a themed Xbox One!

I swear some of the stuff looks like a Dreamcast game. People are seeing textures not load. The lighting looks terrible.

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.

> People are seeing textures not load.

I think this only happened in the pre-patched versions of the game (plenty of other last gen console problems though)

I didn't bother to buy it because I hardly ever buy games day 1 (RDR2 being the only exception), but the frustrating thing to me is the pre-release reviews all praised the game and while some casually talked about graphical hiccups and bugs, they really didn't dive deep into the issues and instead just gave it 9s and 10s seemingly across the board.

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.

Interestingly I think this may have been on certain spheres. For me, I only heard about the dangers of this game to people who are photosensitive or have seizures triggered by flashing lights, and also complaining that Cyberpunk 2077 reviewers without glowing reviews were facing harassment.[0]

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...

Unfortunately you're right. "Gamers" are a fucking wierd bunch, they'll send death threats to reviewers who dare not to give "their" game glowing reviews. The one you mention had "gamers" literally replying with GIFs and videos which could trigger a seizure.

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.

The game was released on Thursday, the epilepsy-inducing flashing (during braindance activation) was fixed on Sunday.

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.

I have no opinion on this particular criticism. I'm just pointing out that my anecdotal experience is different from theirs.

Keep in mind console versions were not released to reviewers either at all or not until like the day before release. They only got the PC version which, compared to PS4 and XBox One is not nearly the same order of bad.

Deus Ex, at least the recent games, is not so linear that it runs on rails. Cyberpunk actually locks you into missions.

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.

Bad AI, NPC, cutomization, driving have nothing to do with bugs, it's just not a finished game.

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.

I think we need to remember that the game really was only in dev from mid-2016 to now.

Pre-production since announcement but main development was really started in mid 2016 when CDPR finished all of the Witcher DLCs.

This game was def not in prod for only 4 years. And it's a different team that started working on it. A regular game takes 3 years~~ so imagine a game of that size.

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.

>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.

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.

One of the recurring complaints is with the open-worldiness of CP2077 not being very developed: Police that instantly appear behind you, pedestrians that walk through cars, etc. These are the types of things that mean the world is less a system to interact with than a glorified maze to navigate.

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.

Being a crusty veteran of CP2020; The only real thing tying the game to the TTRPG is the story and general lore (the entire main story is a continuation of the TTRPG lore).

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.

CD Projekt failed at many things in this project, but the things it failed on were mostly moonshots. Nobody except Rockstar and Insomniac does AAA open-wolrd and story-rich game that was expected from CD Projekt, and these studios have enormous head-start. Some engineering projects are not solved by money, they only get solved and polished by institutional experience.

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.

aside from maybe the vehicles (which don't seem to go all that fast), it's not clear to me what they are attempting that's so much more ambitious than witcher 3. novigrad was also very dense with lots of NPCs, a little rough on the GPU, but it worked just fine. that was five years ago.

Fast vehicles? Did you actually play the game? At some point they realized their engine is terrible at streaming assets, so they made all vehicles very, very slow. Yes, it says “160 mph” in the speedometer, but it takes much longer to reach your destination than it should at that speed.

Maybe it is actually km/h

Speedometers are mph, while distances are in KM. Another bug, I guess. Regardless, vehicles drive very slow. There is zero sense of speed.

it feels very silly when you spin out taking a turn at what feels like 15 mph.

Speedometers in mph and distances in KM sound ideal for a game whose currency is eurodollars.

To be fair, they also handle like balls. Making them faster would just amplify the frustration.

The point is that these vehicles are significantly faster than going on foot. When you create an asset pipeline for an open world game, you depend on two things: the camera and character movement speed. Character angle and distance determines how well will assets look to the player, and how detailed they should be. Character speed determines how fast you need to load different assets in the background. As far as I know, all games that have both first-person camera and vehicle movement, like Far Cry, have much simpler art style and a less dense world.

(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).

Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person. They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs. This game is just incapable. Objects sometimes don’t get streamed in. Sometimes it takes 20 seconds for them to transition from low LOD mode to high LOD model. Sometimes the high LOD model loads but the textures remain of the low LOD model. And that’s even when walking on the street, with an SSD. Driving exacerbates the issue further.

> Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person.

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.

I don't necessarily agree. 2077 fails at streaming at the macro level, not just the micro. Entire basic structures fail to load sometimes. And if modding has thought us, at least on PC, the Rockstar streaming engine is capable of streaming many more assets than initially designed (or optimized) for. W3 was OK at streaming, but obviously not at this scale. So, in my opinion, what is going on is that they stressed that system to the breaking point, and instead of rewriting it, or at least optimizing it, they called it "good enough". In my book, streaming open worlds is a solved solution in modern times. Certainly in the days of GTA3 and Driver, it was a novel concept and there was a lot more leeway for LOD issues and streaming problems. Consoles and PCs also had much less memory and slow spinning disks. But we are not at those times anymore, so I don't see any reason why we should give them slack just because they dreamed big bug failed completely at the technical level. It all boils to the overall issue, which is why they released it at all, if it's so completely broken, and so completely cut of promised content. Just delay it until it is done; it's not like the Witcher cash cow didn't provide enough cash.

As a PC player, I hope you're right.

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.

> Unfortunately quite a few respectable reviewers are calling the story/gameplay "hollow" or "unsatisfying"

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 share this sentiment if it's worth anything.

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.

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.

If you were denied the refund on Steam, you should know that you can resubmit refund requests to have a different employee (probably) review it. If your requests are all getting denied in about the same amount of time, it's automated and you should open a support ticket where you request a refund rather than using the refund flow.

I have gotten bad or not-as-advertised games refunded this way after being denied, despite being over the 2h mark.

I'll keep this in mind for next time, my "petty revenge" was sharing my Steam library with a friend who was about to buy it. Denied them a sale and saved said friend having to pay money for the spectacle

I'm also playing through Witcher 3 for the first time and it's baffling how the one thing that made that mostly mediocre game one of my favorites is not that great in Cyberpunk.

what "one thing" do you mean?

Great storytelling in the broadest sense, so not just writing, but world-building and branching narratives where my choices actually matter.

Thanks.

> It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.

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.

I tend to shy away from opinion only review type comments on HN but I have to say...

> 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.

Why is this being downvoted so heavily?

It's a common refrain for people who are enjoying the game to say anyone who isn't is trying to kill their fun... I'd actually agree with that if I hadn't just listed several detailed points. It's not like I'm just saying "the game is crap!"

Ironically what I've noticed is people who are enjoying it go to great lengths to invalidate anyone who isn't...

> 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.

I'm tempted to just leave a snarky "case in point!"... but really, anything specific would you like me to elaborate on?

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.

> so your character says something completely different than what you chose

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.

It's terrible. There are times where it starts to feel like a bait and switch

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 might not have started with LA Noire, but that's the first game I remember playing where your seemingly moderate dialogue choices made your character out to be a total psycho.

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.

On a similar note, I was playing Horizon: Zero Dawn a few days ago, and while it's 95% pretty brilliant, there's a super stand out example of this that really annoyed me.

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. :/

>I think most of the negative sentiment against Cyberpunk 2077 comes from three sources:

>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.

Plenty of the criticisms are not specific to a particular console.

It's really unfortunate, but I think ultimately history will probably be kind to this game as a PC game, especially if it passes that fundamental "is it fun" test. History marches on and in 3-5 years there will be a much greater proportion of PCs out there suitably equipped for it.

I'm thorouly enjoying the game but CP2077 really feels like an MVP rather than a full game mechanically.

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:

https://youtu.be/PsBrkLq31eM

https://youtu.be/1IPRjzrHvak

I'm 60 hours in, and have been enjoying it alot playing on my Macbook through GeForce NOW. There's lots of areas where it feels unfinished and fails (AI, emergent gamplay, details, real choice), but I think it is a fantastic game.

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.

How does it look with geforce now? I'll admit I'm actually totally confused as to how that even works, but it seems like a really cool way of being able to play games on my macbook without spending $1500 on a new graphics card for my gaming PC!

I mean if you own the game it’s £5 to try it but it’s decently playable on ultra settings. Resolution is capped to 1080p though. Input lag is not hugely noticeable but I wouldn’t be playing a competitively on it.

> I'll admit I'm actually totally confused as to how that even works

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.

I just looked it up, and they have a free plan. The fact that I won't have to buy all of my games in "the NVIDIA store" is a big plus, too. Thanks!

I played through 40 hours of Cyberpunk and I'm about out of content worth doing. Geforce Now is great, but it has a caveat that make it dicey: ≤1080p only, and the window it creates cannot be resized. You're stuck with stretched 1080 if you're on a larger monitor (though it at least preserves aspect ratio when stretching).

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.

>Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5.

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.

we expect what was advertised to us. It turns out the marketing was all lies! Companies should be held accountable for lying.

Honestly just curious, but I when played on PC/next-gen what do you feel was advertised but not delivered?

https://i.imgur.com/vtdxe02.png

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.

I feel like there's going to be a lot of personal opinions going on here. I personally think they delivered on all the points, and I'm very happy with it - 20 hours in the worst bug I've seen was my character T-Posing through the roof of my car. But the storytelling is just fantastic, love it.

And....barren city? Are we even playing the same game?

I don’t mean empty of objects. I mean barren in the sense that it fee lifeless, due to nonexistent AI. It’s just pointless exploring. Even GTA3 had better crowd AI, better police AI, etc.

>>I mean barren in the sense that it fee lifeless, due to nonexistent AI

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.

Stop a car in the middle of the street. There is no honking, no reaction. Turn the camera 180 degrees, then another 180 degrees. All the vehicles from the road have disappeared.

So realistic and cyberpunk, right?

You are right, but what people are complaining about is that they can't interact with that world. You can't poke at it. If we had short loops of the game scenes displayed in a museum we would praise it, but people want videogames mostly to play and interact with things.

I'm just trying to think how much you could interact with the world in Witcher 3, which is obviously considered a masterpiece by many, and nearly all of its villages and houses were just set pieces. Villagers never actually changed their behaviours in reaction to anything, and played the same audio clip over and over again if you stood close to them.

I just don't know how much interactivity is required for it to be...good? What part of the AI is missing?

NPC's were much better placed in the Witcher 3 because you had way less NPCs, they were on more distinctive locations and they gave good side quests more often. So, each one was more meaningful. Sure, they weren't much more interactive. But the Witcher is mostly about going around clearing up the dangers of each place. Monsters were the focus, and they were far more distinctive than Cyberpunk NPC's shooting at you. So, it's not like the Witcher 3 was far more interactive or anything, but NPCs had their place and gave the world life. Cyberpunk doesn't manage to strike that balance. And you can't strike that balance by writing more for each NPC in such a densely populated world, so you need to cover for it with better AI, responses to events, emerging events, randomness... cover with more diverse content... or innovate. GTA V, to mention an example (although I'm not particularly interested in GTA games), has better NPC AI, better responses to events and decent diversity. In Cyberpunk, as a watcher it might look really beautiful, but as a participant it doesn't have as much life. I still think the writing is great and many side quests are great and there's a lot of great content, but hopefully this helps you see a bit better what people feel is off in the game (besides the bugs, of course). Like, don't compare by looking at single factors one by one, look at the world as a whole.

It's all set dressing, smoke and mirrors. Compare the following two clips for AI:

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.

> And....barren city? Are we even playing the same game?

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.

>> 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.

it's fair to say the game enables many different play styles, but it doesn't have classes, unless you think a class is nothing more than some starting attribute bonuses and whatever grab-bag of skills you choose. I expect a class system to affect game mechanics in a deeper way (eg, in KOTOR you get different allowances for attributes, feats, and skills depending on your class).

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.

Going to be pretty blunt with you here: holding them to a nebulous promise from 8 years ago, when the game wasn't even out of pre-production, is childish. The actual promise of the game has been updated and communicated over time. If you closed your eyes and ears to all the marketing material up till now and blindly focused on what amounts to a powerpoint slide from 2012, you deserve whatever disappointment you got.

There's statements from interviews from June this year that were completely false: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kbk4ap/the_a...

Those promises were continuously repeated and even ballooned even more and more. At some point, they even removed the "RPG" description of the game, in favor of "open world action", which makes it even more ridiculous, because it fails at everything that that entails.

Studios fall into the habit of making the same game with a different skin.

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.

Plus it had an open world where most of it could be realistically lifeless other than wildlife and monsters.

#1 is not at all objective. I would say a world that revolves around deception, fraud, sex work, black market body modification is definitely in the realm of "Mature RPG".

#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.

Having nudity and dildos hardly makes a world “mature”. More like a juvenile frat boy’s version of mature. If you want mature storytelling, look at the Red Dead series.

Incidentally, I saw this today: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/cd-projekt-red-to-tone-...

If your perception of this game's story is "nudity and dildos", you just haven't played the game at all.

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.

Note: They haven't released the next-gen console versions yet. PS5 version isn't out yet. That comes out in 2021. You can only buy the PS4 version, which happens to also play in PS5. Any suggestion of dismissing the previous-gen as not important is a non-starter.

On PC the game looks better than what was advertised graphics wise.

I agree. I'm not happy when my burger king burger doesn't look like the ads either. I worry that it's never going to change though.

> It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.

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?

By relatively minor I meant a large portion of these issues live in the category of "technical hiccups and such" and not in the core of what the game itself is.

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.

FWIW I came into the game expecting basically nothing. I'm not a gamer, don't read gaming news and don't get hyped. I just knew that this was an RPG made by CD Projekt Red.

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 haven't played Cyberpunk but the Witcher 3 wasn't amazing at release either. The Witcher 3 required several patches IIRC and that was also the case for the first two witcher games.

Am I the only one who remembers trying to do anything within 50 yards of a candle?

Sure, it's not bad as is, but it's bad as compared to what it was supposed to be. "Supposed" being defined by 3DPR themselves.

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.

> zero exploration benefit

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.

Not in the "open world" sense. I think a lot of people were expecting a more open world, but in this case, there just wasn't much to do in that world (from what I can tell).

>Deus Ex with updated graphics

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/).

Didn’t play with it, but with (most of) the mods it’s based on when I replayed it 1-3 years ago.

I've found the game to have fairly solid exploration benefit, but not until Act 2. Act 1 felt like an extension of the tutorial almost.

I found a legendary monowire before I even finished Act 1 just from exploring and side missions and gigs. Your experience doesn't match mine.

To be fair, you can grind a bunch in Act 1 Watson but you can't leave the vicinity of the district. The bridges and exits are blocked off GTA3 style and if you try to head to the badlands the game literally flashes a warning and tells you to turn around before just plopping you back in the city

Deus Ex, especially the first, actively rewards you with experience, items, and new missions if you explore. I can think of three unique areas / paths you can explore in the 2nd mission (Hell's Kitchen) just off the top of my head. And there's no question mark indicators on your map that anythings there - you have to seek it out.

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

The vast majority of the truly negative rhetoric comes from #2 on your list, along with the fact that CDPR clearly knew about the performance issues and hid them. They only gave out advance copies of the PC version to reviewers, and forbade reviewers from using their own captured footage (and I assume that the provided footage from CDPR came from an expensive computer). This wasn't a coincidence. The issues with performance on base spec PS4 and XBones could not be discovered until after launch, and was clearly motivated by the fact that not all of the console customers would pursue a refund because of the inconvenience. Similarly, reviewers might have mentioned that PC required a fairly modern/powerful system but couldn't show their own footage to illustrate it, and they always had the excuse of "we'll assume that performance will improve with a patch and some more driver optimization." It appears that some bonuses were tied to getting a good review score, which also led to the dishonest behavior. Otherwise they might have released console versions to reviewers and taken the hit on the review score, but at least buyers could have known about the performance issues in advance. Then buyers wouldn't be complaining as much.

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.

> 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.

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.

You compared it to GTA V which came out at a (roughly) similar time in the XBox 360's life cycle. It ran incredibly well on those consoles. But I think we are at a different stage.

I was under the impression that dipping below 30 fps is considered unplayable by todays standards. GTA V would drop to 20 fps on the 360.

I didn't follow any of the hype at all so I had no expectations to build up beyond the excitement of enjoying a sci-fi RPG (a bit tired of the usual fantasy setting).

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.

1) As a Deus Ex fan, I'm also okay with that but it feels liks it was marketed as something closer to GTA.

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!

The real negative sentiment surrounds how the launch was handled. They blocked people from making console reviews before the launch, so no one had any real understanding of the state of the PS4 or XB1 versions of the game. That makes the whole thing feel like a lazy cash grab from a greedy developer

Point 2 makes me think of the (reasonably) realistic expectations that game makers have with regard to the prospective release of next gen consoles. Guessing when the next gen consoles will be launched and creating a game time line around that feels intriguing in itself.

I'm loving the game, running on PC. Even with the glichtes I find it awesome. And I'll definitely play it again, after the patches.

CDPR choose a terrible year to launch it. Most people is just hating everything in 2020, for any reason.

> 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.

You need to factor in that the PS4 hardware is really outdated at this point in time, too.

That's irrelevant because it's being sold on that console. There is an explicit understanding that if it's sold for a console, it's going to work at a certified quality level.

> going to work at a certified quality level.

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.

The game crashing consoles regularly is most certainly out of spec of any certification process. People have been reporting crashes as frequently as every half hour to every two hours.

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.

We don't need to factor that in; CDPR does. If the game requires PS5 they should have released it that way.

I'm interested to see how a new PS4/XB1 runs it vs an old PS4/XB1, I have a first day XB1 and it started bogging down on games a few years ago, so I got new one. The reason I bring this up is that I have some friends with PS4/XB1 consoles that say it's playable with a few bugs...nothing like the videos of potato quality graphics. I can only figure the difference between the two could just be the age of the console/dust build up, etc. I'm not sure.

Digital Foundry has video comparisons of both.

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.

What is a Deus Ex game like?

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.

Deus Ex puts the player in an extremely small, dense area where they have tons of options. The game reacts to the way the player approaches each situation, sometimes dramatically warping the story depending on what they do.

So does cyberpunk 2077 feel like I'm on a sortof "track"? Like I basically have to follow the story?

CP2077 is a GTA clone, too. It's in the uncanny valley, though: cops don't chase you, they just spawn behind you. Even in closed rooms! It's not part of the sci-fi lore as if this was a Minority Report or something, it's just a very naive implementation.

The parts of the game that resemble Deus Ex are arguably better, but I could poke hole in that, too.

At the moment, the best CP2077 experience IMO is just to do the plot missions, maybe a few of the side gigs.

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.

note that "extremely small" is only in comparison to modern open world games or MMOs. All 3 deus ex games (ignoring the shooter I never played) felt bigger than e.g. Skyrim to me which is large but feels empty

Yeah, Deus Ex is mostly around a smaller area and a lot more depth. Every mission and most locations have multiple ways of being tackled (because of the focus on stealth, hacking or pew pew as true options for everything)

>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.

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.

Other players, myself included, feel that it's a piss-poor Deus Ex too.

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.

I'm playing on ps4 and I enjoy it.

It's very buggy, and it sometimes outright crashes, but it's just a very good story, progression, and visual.

The only reason I didn't preorder it is because I was worried it would be RDR/GTA-like, so this is extremely reassuring. Thank you!

I watched that video. It's not that bad? It looks like its on the medium graphic version of a PC game.

Based on your description I want it even more now.

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.

That's a misleading description. To me it feels more like an Ubisoft open-world game (big, shallow and buggy) than Deus Ex.

That's a lot of words to say "it's a broken product".

This is an ambitious game, the problem is that CDPR lied.

> It just doesn't run on consoles

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.

> 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.

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.

Porting games that have successfully run on multiple platforms for years to new hardware is different than non-functional console ports of a PC game.

Doom and witcher 3 run reasonably on the switch, which is arguably not true of the console ports of Cyberpunk.

I played Witcher 3 on Switch and it was ok. I’d prefer a better device but I was recovering from a surgery and it was great having the Witcher 3 on a handheld.

It was perfectly playable.

I bought Witcher 3 on PS4 and Switch but I exclusively play on the latter device. Sure, it looks like someone smeared vaseline on my screen, especially in hand-held mode. but it's still surprisingly pretty in its art direction and the story-telling is unaffected by the graphics.

On 720p the TAA and post processing are already on their limit. On 540p it would be gta-vice-city-motion-blur level unbearable

Well, the Witcher 3 on Switch drops to 540p at the low-end.

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.

Cyberpunk uses fundamentally different graphics pipelines that rely heavily on temporal information. On 720p you can already see artifacts such as fizzling, smearing and blur due to aliasing of the TAA implementation, as well as other post processing like volumetric lights that also require high resolution scenes to work properly. That is why a 540p is more detrimental to this game than those other.

https://youtu.be/C5pHpQqhmR4 3:20 https://youtu.be/mVWJPYKCMco 14:30

Doom on Switch was an exercise in removing detail and graphical tricks (I noticed that Doom Eternal had self shadows while the Switch port of Doom Eternal did not) in such a manner as to minimize the visual impact. The game looks GREAT and it's hard to distinguish the differences from the PC/console release without looking closely.

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.

Agreed. Even with the incredible detail in the world I can't but wonder what Bluepoint, Panic Button, or other successful could've done to make it work on previous-generation consoles.

A team of developers (Saber Interactive) did so much work getting Witcher 3 onto the Switch that they presented it at NvidiaCon.

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.

I haven't tried this particular game yet (CyberPunk 2077).

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.

What specifically is entitled about expecting a properly-working game on the platform said game is released on, especially the consoles where not having to waste time and effort to "debug, alter, or otherwise hack games" is one of their selling points?

On console, you cannot make these changes. Or any changes. It's impossible. The deal is, in exchange for it not being a computing device, it plays games. You buy a console game, and it works. Cyberpunk 2077 broke this contract.

If you run CP2077 on Linux, as someone who runs any software on a platform where it's not officially supported at all, you would be indeed not entitled to a smooth experience and at least some tinkering would be warranted.

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.

People are entitled to the product they paid for working as described. That is not "spoiled".

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