Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles | Hacker News Reader

Cyberpunk 2077: How 2020’s biggest video game launch turned into a shambles

theguardian.com

320 pointshelsinkiandrew438 comments

Performance on last gen aside, looking at the online reaction you'd get the idea that this game is a non-stop bugfest. Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here enjoying the hell out of this game. The world is absolutely beautifully realized, both inside the city and outside. The glitches I've encountered are of the "Bethesda" type and I haven't run into any game breaking bugs yet.

I've probably spent around 25 hours in it so far, with a good chunk of that on side missions. Just like in The Witcher 3, some of the side missions are really good. This game is a solid 8 for me right now, and it'll only go up with patches.

Playing on Series X fwiw.

I'm playing on the older Xbox One X (series X still impossible to find), but my experience is roughly the same.

It's buggy, there are sometimes crashes/game breaking bugs, but the autosave makes recovery easy. The world and story are really good and make up for it.

Same. 50 hours in on pc.

A large part of the backlash is around unfinished systems. Without reeling off an exhaustive list the resulting world feels pretty soulless and shallow, it certainly feels like they released it far from being finished.

I've taken the liberty to reel off said list in the past

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25468522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25471233

Well said. I simply don’t understand the amount of people defending the gameplay/story/“open world” here on HN while it’s receiving scathing reviews on Steam and Metacritic. Maybe game players actually more casual here than on those game-centric platforms?

I'm not a casual gamer and perceive the main and large side quests as some of the best I have played over the last 20 years.

But that doesn't mean the terrible AI (in all aspects of the game) or the lackluster attempt at an interactive open world don't bother me.

How is it so hard for people to distinguish the good parts of the game from the bad parts? The biggest offender is the combat AI because that impacts gameplay but issues like "not being able to get a haircut" don't deserve the mountains of hate threads and death threats by the children on r/cyberpunkgame.

I'm going to come right out and say calling people children for not liking what you like is pretty childish...

After all, I don't see any death threats here so maybe keep that commentary on Reddit?

Now to me there's no distinguishing needed. The story was poorly written. The combat is lack luster. The environment is expansive but hollow. What's left?

Maybe you felt differently, but for me Act 1 was insultingly rushed. The fact that the terrible corny VR tutorial (in the future you can learn to fight in the blink of an eye sitting in a car, not missing a beat... well that's great for V but for the player, you just ruined the pacing of the rising action. I missed the beat. The Brain Dances are similar) is followed by a montage of events that could have taught you game mechanics while actually letting you start to care about your partner instead of having it drilled into you over the next hour that the guy who just robbed you while you stole a car, getting you arrested in the process is your bestie ... truly awful

Act 2 is just as painfully rough. The dialog choices still don't really matter, there are two choices in all those hours that change things meaningfully down the line (save a certain person and get close to a certain person) a lot of the writing is just cringe worthy ("Ghost Off!" and Keanu Reeves referring to his impressive c--- is not something anyone has ever asked for, and he doesn't pull it off)

Act 3 is one of the first places where dialog decisions matter... except the game is already pretty much over. It's like a choose your own ending instead of a choose your own adventure, and there's clearly a canonical choice the game guides you towards, every other ending is half fleshed out, the same way every beginning but Nomad is barely implemented...

Now all that being said, to me if a game has such uninspiring combat and such a hollow environment, and lets down it's promises of focusing on customization, and has such an awful bloated UI, and has such a bloated corpse of a skill tree...

It's a bad game. Story or no story, it doesn't save that.

I have books I read where I want a great story that's not interactive and well written.

If the story is interactive, the interaction should add something. Having to slog through a poorly made game for a story in a game of this scale is pretty inexcusable...

There are some middling games as far as gameplay depth and smoothness goes that have get carried by their story, but it needs to be a truly exceptional story, and usually there's a good reason why they couldn't do more with the game play. Games like Hellblade where all their budget went into story telling and the team just wasn't big enough to have some incredibly complex gameplay on top of the intricate storytelling and animation and deep lore... they're able to justify it to some degree. But CP2077 was an almost decade long journey with the kind of resources the Hellblade team wouldn't have in their sweetest dreams. And it's all squandered on what was clearly a lack of direction and focus.

Whenever I see people defending the game it’s basically like “I’ve got x hours in and I’m having a blast” and they seem to ignore or not care how obvious it is that huge swathes of the game were clearly cut or left unfinished. The story particularly has signs of some very last minute changes.

> ... main and large side quests as some of the best I have played over the last 20 years.

On that note, if you haven't already played Horizon: Zero Dawn it's very much worth trying out.

I'd just finished a marathon multi-day session start->finish with that, and it's easily the best I've come across so far.

It's not as huge and sprawling as Cyberpunk 2077, but it's a fairly big open world and the writing is tight. The side quests and story are probably the best I've (personally) yet seen. :)

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cyberpunk-2077 Metascore: 87 User score: 7.1

I have seen all this backslash and does not fit my experience with the game in any possible way. But your criticism fits a pattern I have seen, it criticises without knowing and sometimes even lying on easy verifiable facts.

I do not get the campaign against this game in particular, and it seems that neither many people in this forum.

I just checked Metacritic. The reviews seem great on some platforms.

Skimming the bad reviews for last gen consoles. Some complaints aren’t about issues relating to weaker machines. It seems like there’s some group think or hive mind stuff going on.

Honestly, with both CP and TW1/2/3, I feel that if they scrapped the “numbers RPG” elements, they would’ve had significantly better games on their hands.

> Performance on last gen aside

I think there's your problem, because the majority of people are playing on last gen, as advertised that it would work there.

Except that's not true and I don't know where the assumption comes from. CDPR clearly said that majority of sales so far have been on PC.

And then they repeated that they have no way of knowing which platform you're actually playing that last-gen version on - so people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales.

It's really unbelievable that in today's time of data collection they are incapable of knowing the freaking platform name on which the game runs on. Don't they have any ingame online services or just straight up get the data from Sony. This cannot be true.

Edit: what could be is that they just didn't build a data collection pipeline for this seeing as how they didn't do half of the planned stuff

> people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales.

Because it's a PS4 game. There isn't a PS5 release.

I assume software I buy runs on the hardware it's designed for.

Last-gen Xbox owner here. Lots of us were hyped about this game, and expected it to be the last major must-have game of the generation, because that's what CDPR has implied all along for the last half-decade.

Now, it seems to end up in the same category as Dragon Age: Inquisition on the Xbox 360; possibly playable after a few patches, but nowhere near a state which makes the game justice.

I remember trying to play DA:I on 360 and how much better it was on PS4. As soon as I heard the Cyberpunk PS4 reviews I took the money I had aside for Cyberpunk and got Miles Morales instead. I'll be playing Cyberpunk in new years/spring when there's more PS5 stock, an official version and a few patches.

> so people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales

The PS5 version has some crisp visuals and better frame-rate but it still has floating people, vehicles that forget about collision detection, crappy AI, cars that drive on rails, horrible pop-in effect, and gunfights where you can't take down some pissed off guy on the street without 50 direct headshots.

As for the story; I chose the corpo path and within 15 minutes of cutscenes and limited movement "gameplay" I'm on the street as some punk, never getting to experience anything close to what was marketed as the corpo path.

A few hours in I began to get lost in the world and enjoyed the advanced gameplay mechanics. They really went all-out with what you can do in the game, but then once the cinema-quality quest is finished I'm thrown back into the sloppy unfinished open-world.

When I looked at the videos, I haven't even thought that it's possible to get so many light effects out of 7 year old cards. It turns out it isn't.

There are some huge, amazing looking games on PS4 and Xbox One. It is less an issue of capability and more an issue of Cyberpunk 2077 not being sufficiently optimized for them. The game was delayed multiple times. If it was released earlier the console version would have only been played on the previous gen. Makes me wonder if the delays were in large part to wait on new gen to come out in order to lower the need for optimization of older gen. I guess they should have waited another year.

They should have made a better deal with PS5 and the new Xbox, as many gamers want to buy the new consoles just to be able to play Cyberpunk (I'm getting a PS5 for my friend for Christmas to play it, though it will take more time to get it of course)

I've always wondered, don't Sony/Microsoft do their own QA before releasing a title on their platforms?

They do, but it's not "qa" in the sense of are there any bugs in the game, there's a checklist you have to adhere to and as long as you adhere to it, you're good. It mostly checks stuff like if you've got voice chat, do you respect parental controls,or are you using any undocumented APIs, or does the game crash under "normal use". An unstable game can pass these was checks, and there are no guarantees of quality from this process.

(Disclaimer: I work on Fortnite, have ample experience with making sure the rules are followed)

That makes sense, thanks.

It's like if you play Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch-- it technically works, but it's also a predictably blurry mess. Anyone who's read up on Cyberpunk knows that it's going to strain even the best gaming PCs, so it should be no surprise that it barely runs on last gen consoles.

PC gaming culture (you can play it on that rig but it'll barely run) Vs console gaming culture (it should work and performance shouldn't be a thing you think about)

It's not fair to compare home console ports to Nintendo Switch ports, a mobile console with a mobile-grade Soc. Some graphics and performance losses are expected and excusable, depending on whether it's still worth it to you.

Every trailer labeled "Nintendo Switch" shows footage taken from an actual Switch; you can at least gauge how well it runs or whether visuals are good or not. (And there's tech reviewers like Digital Foundry)

Comparably, Cyberpunk's most recent gameplay demo was purely next-gen (and "mid-gen" like PS4 Pro), and reviewers were playing on PC and not allowed to show footage. You couldn't know about X1/PS4 experience until it was too late.

> Anyone who's read up on Cyberpunk knows that it's going to strain even the best gaming PCs, so it should be no surprise that it barely runs on last gen consoles.

This game was announced when PS4/X1 just came out, even if you account for development starting years later that's still within the peak of their cycle. If it weren't for the last 3 delays (only 7 months combined), Cyberpunk would be releasing on those same consoles before PS5 was even announced. 15-24FPS, 540p gameplay would not be acceptable then and it should not be acceptable now.

You make some good points, so let me try to better explain where I was coming from.

There are certain games-- the ones that get all the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards when it's about to come out. When there's a game like that coming out soon, I just know it's going to run like shit on console and everyone's going to complain. This was true when Crysis came out in 2007: all the PC gamers upgraded their graphics cards to play it, and the guys on Xbox360 just had to put up with a blurry mess running at 20fps. Same thing happened with Just Cause 3 in 2015. A bunch of others, too.

I don't mean to say that it's okay; if you sell the game on a certain console, one would hope that it'd run well there. I just think it's entirely predictable which games are going to have this problem (it's the ones that got the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards so it would even run), and then I'll hop online and everyone's talking like it took them by surprise.

I got your point, and I agree a few generation-defining games are notoriously more demanding and one shouldn't expect a great experience on console, but there's a limit to that downgrade. 540p 15FPS is below the bare minimum something ought to run, if it gets that bad, maybe it's better to just outright say "you need a PS4 Pro / Xbox One X or newer to play, sorry". I say this as a PC gamer with no current-gen (PS4/X1) or next-gen console at all (except the Switch if that counts in this context).

And IIRC Just Cause 3 was just bad all around, the PC port was extremely buggy as well.

The game had several release dates _this year_ that were before the current round of consoles were out. Considering those were the only consoles it was going to be on at release if it hit one of it's many slated release dates this year it's totally inexcusable that this is the state the game is on on that hardware.

They've actually added a ton of settings for the switch to run the Witcher 3 very well: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-the-w...

I basically played it with everything on max and had no slowdowns which is impressive frankly. Obviously rendering on a Switch doesn't compare with a PC - an obvious statement if anyone takes a look a the HW specs.

I get constant audio issues where dialog from one NPC is either not coming through or sounds like it's from 100ft away. I've also had problems getting the next part of a mission to trigger when you're supposed to wait a day for the NPC to call you back (one particular one, I waited an in-game week with 2 game reboots to trigger it). I randomly get stuck in the zoomed view. When I'm being passed a shard by an NPC, it's randomly replaced with a gun. Multiple areas at ground level throughout the map with gaps in collision resulting in you falling through the world. I've been stuck in rooms multiple times where the input prompt to open a door simply never triggers and I'm unable to open the door, requiring me to reload from checkpoint. Texts from NPCs come in the wrong order. Forced NPC calls in the middle of dialog during a separate mission. Sometimes unable to choose dialogue options when driving, requiring me to stop in the middle of the road to get out to give the response I want. Sometimes unable to do absolutely any blunt melee damage, which has resulted in a stuck loop requiring a reload (like the boxing robot near the beginning of the game)

The list goes on and on. With that said, I'm playing on PC with pretty decent performance all things considered, I've tolerated them because I'm still enjoying the game, and I wouldn't classify any of the bugs as necessarily "game breaking", but they're significantly detracting from the enjoyable game and narrative underneath.

It's almost as if not a single gameplay aspect has any sense of polish whatsoever and that sucks.

This has been roughly my experience and reaction on PC as well. Save and load is annoying but not a blocker at 5-10 seconds, but I would probably be pretty miserable at 3-5 minutes per restart.

I'm also enjoying the game, and I love going around in the city, it's amazingly beautiful and quite detailed. But on the other hand, it feels absolutely dead at times, during the missions the city comes alive, but outside of missions it feels empty and soulless.

I've encountered quite a few bugs, but nothing game breaking yet. Usually it's NPCs acting strange, or people just spawning in right in front of me. I definitely feel it under delivers, but I'm hoping it turns into a No Man's Sky type story, where the game actually becomes super fun to play.

> during the missions the city comes alive, but outside of missions it feels empty and soulless.

I don't think that is a bug. This is cyberpunk after all.

:'( ... I'm... Trying man..

ymmv of course, depending on the platform and what you consider "game breaking". I haven't given up on the game yet, but I am growing more frustrated.

five hours in, I killed a security guard and his body (which carried a key needed to advance the mission) fell through the floor. I had to load a previous save and be extra careful about where the body landed. honestly this kind of thing isn't so bad. it's obviously a bug and I know how to fix it.

the worst are the cases where I can't tell if it's a bug, a stupid dev choice "working as designed", or simply me being an idiot. I just finished playing the clouds mission, which is a club with a main area, a VIP area, and offices behind the VIP area. once I got in, I just started wandering around. I saw a guard telling some other NPC that he wasn't allowed in the VIP area, but I tried going in anyway, since he didn't say anything to me. no warning, all the guards open fire on me and I have to reload the checkpoint. okay, guess I'm not allowed in the VIP area. I talk to someone in the main area who sends me to sneak into the VIP area to talk to someone else. this time, the guards don't react, although nothing in the dialogue indicated I had permission to be there. maybe the areas just get unlocked when you have a reason to be there? anyway, I talk to my next contact who sends me to talk to the manager in the back office. since it's now fine for me to be in the VIP area, I assume it's fine to also go in the back office area. the next guard I run into shoots me. what the fuck?

Yes the security guard that comes out of the elevator with the card you have to loot, can fall down the elevator shaft (800m down actually!). Classic! :)

This is one of the (relatively few) documented bugs that I'm sure they've already fixed. Doing continuous level-saves is needless to say a necessity in any game you invest dozens of playhours in..

Still, to manage to have as few bugs like that in comparision to the sheer size of the game is amazing. Once you play a bit longer than this, you'll see the game opening up in so many ways and with so detailed side-jobs and side-plots that it's just jawdropping. That they actually pulled this off at all is a benchmark effort for future mega-games I'm sure.

> Doing continuous level-saves is needless to say a necessity in any game you invest dozens of playhours in..

Clawing at true straws much here? This is literally not how you are expected to play modern AAA games at all.

doesnt make it not a necessity xP

If it's a necessity, then the game should inform you that you should save every 5 minutes to recover from game-breaking bugs.

Ironically, it has "autosaves" that seem to happen (in theory) each time you use a drop point, and at various other triggers. Finishing a quest seems to be one in some situations at least.

Not that it always works though. Grrrr. :(

I'm not sure how it works right now, but nobody has time for Sierra type BS anymore (things like the game lets you go a long time without a needed item and oh now you need to replay half of it because you didn't get that tiny key hidden somewhere at the beginning)

"Welcome to the grittier future" - Sierra's ghost

(I hadn't realized just how much modern users would freak out at * Quest-style hoops to jump through)

I had the same VIP area issue, on reload I watched the guard conversation and then another guard goes to the bathroom where you can jump him for his keycard. There were a few different ways to do it I think.

I had a weird “is it a bug?” moment yesterday, later on there’s a mission where you hack a parade float. I stole a delivery van to drive in.

Once inside nobody saw me as a threat though which was odd. I was wearing an arasaka vest so maybe that’s why?

I was able to just walk past everyone and do the mission easily.

> I had the same VIP area issue, on reload I watched the guard conversation and then another guard goes to the bathroom where you can jump him for his keycard. There were a few different ways to do it I think.

yeah I ended up playing through it a few times. part of why it was so confusing was that I actually went straight to the manager the first time I went in the back hallway area. he seemed a little surprised to see me, but wasn't too upset. I had to reload because I threatened to fight him if he didn't spill the beans and I lost the fight. the next time through, I ran into someone else who just shot me on sight.

> Once inside nobody saw me as a threat though which was odd. I was wearing an arosaka vest so maybe that’s why?

if that's the actual reason, that would be pretty cool! I'd actually love a more implicit/nuanced system for "where am I allowed to be". the thing that really breaks the immersion is wondering whether I am solving a puzzle or troubleshooting a bug. in general, I only do the latter for pay :)

>I was wearing an arosaka vest so maybe that’s why?

Unfortunately I don't think any such logic is in the game. For whatever reason that game just automatically flags you as non-hostile if you drove the van through the gate. From that point on the guards will just ignore you, no matter what you're wearing (I was wearing some random shirt and no arasaka gear and got the same result).

My guess is the group of people they have designing missions and scenarios are manhandling the game world for their use-case without any care for the overall consistency. Just think about how many developers "fix" bugs by addressing the symptoms instead of the foundational issues in the code.

Probably goes something like this: we can make these easy-to-use mission designer tools and hire a bunch of interns to crank out content.

Then such a huge mess gets created it takes over a year for the more senior developers and designers to untangle it. Your VIP mission absurdness is buried under a list of 10k other issues.

Hitman level design is probably at the other end of this spectrum.

100% agree, the game has been really fun to play for me on PS4. I think the issue here came from the PR strategy of CD Projekt Red, they were getting some negative coverage and they came out and told everyone to just ask for a refund if they were unhappy. It seems like Sony didn't want to do that at first and with the shitstorm that it created, they decided great get a refund and we'll just remove the game from our store. Everyone loses.

I think a better strategy would have been saying, "We hear you and we are working hard on it, we're confident we can get this experience in great shape soon. If anyone is considering buying now, please understand that the current version is a buggy and you might want to consider waiting." Instead they made promises of refunds they couldn't afford, hurt their distribution partners and might have created a death spiral for the game and their studio. How miserable it must be to be an employee who worked so hard on this game.

My brother is pretty upset that he didn't buy it in time and when I tried to let him play on mine over shareplay, it doesn't let him because "the game is not released in our region" (the US).

What I heard was that Sony does not want to both sell a game and allow it to be refunded on their platform. That combination invites people to play the game for free by just buying it and returning it later. So when CD Projekt Red announced that dissatisfied people could return the game for a refund, Sony stopped allowing further sales of the game.

As soon as a delay was announced after final master, I knew the game was being delayed because it failed validation with either MS or Sony (or both).

I suspect a title like 2077 failing validation could get some wiggle room, likely what happened was Sony went back to CDPR with a laundry list of failures and gave them X amount of time to tackle them.

It's possible the game went on sale despite not fully passing. But the moment it became clear that it was harming the image of a console they're still selling... that was that. After all, that's the point of validation. Usually the requirements are things that would reflect badly on the console like locking up and crashing vs "not being a fun game" or something.

I doubt it went on sale without fully passing the console manufacturer's certification process.

As someone who has gone through the certification process a few times with these companies, they're not really testing 'does your game have bugs that kind of suck for the player', it's more technical, like 'do the names of controller buttons match our provided excel sheet that tells you what they need to say' and 'did we catch it crashing at certain spots' and 'did the game have periods when it looked like it crashed because there's no animation for X seconds but it's really just loading something and you didn't include a loading animation' or 'can i leave the game on pause for 24 hours and it hasn't crashed during that time', stuff like that. I don't think they try to 'beat the game' or anything either.

And it's usually a standard checklist that can apply to every game.

So something can pass certification but still be a buggy mess in spots, like have objects fall through the ground and stuff, or have crappy jaggy graphics with big dips in framerates like the PS4 and Xbox One versions of this game had.

Although it's been a while since I've gone through the process, so I may not be remembering everything (they are pretty long checklists). Also when we got rejected it was usually just a few small things that we had fixed in a few days (but it took much longer to get queued up to go back through the process, that's what took so long for us). But we also made much smaller games.

Well, I say that, but we did have a game that completely passed certification but the multiplayer networking ended up being super laggy on release and we got dinged pretty hard for that in reviews. The system had a multiplayer test zone where you could simulate low latency, but while we never had problems when testing, it didn't fully emulate what the production environment would be (or at least it didn't seem to for us). We weren't the only game that had that issue either, some high profile games had the same problem on that system and required a patch to fix it.

I've worked on titles going through LotCheck and TCR (now known as XR if I'm not mistaken), I'm perfectly aware of how verification goes.

I never implied that it's about bugs that suck for the player, in fact I said the opposite: "Usually the requirements are things that would reflect badly on the console like locking up and crashing vs "not being a fun game" or something."

---

What I'm saying is I'm aware of what Cyberpunk 2077 means to these companies, especially with the timing in relation to new consoles and the holidays. 2077 is the kind of game that moves units.

I'm very specific in the wording of my comment, it's not that games normally ever get a pass, and it is a standard checklist... but I also know Sony and MS giving CDPR wiggle room not out of selflessness, but out of "psuedo-necessity", doesn't sound impossible.

I'm not saying it's common just because you have a AAA title, but 2077 comes across as the "perfect storm" to see this happen.

Here you go actually, straight from the horse's mouth:

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/for-the-good-of-the-indu...

> [Update] It looks as though CDPR bypassed some of the TRC process, promising the platforms it would be fixed for launch, but that doesn’t change the fact that both platforms have a legal responsibility to their consumers to provide a usable product. “In terms of the certification process and the third parties – this is definitely on our side. I can only assume that they trusted that we’re going to fix things upon release, and that obviously did not come together exactly as we had planned,” said Michał Nowakowski at CDPR in a conference call.

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/c...

The rules are different if you're important enough, I think that is just be expected at this point.

Fair enough. We were never very big, but I assumed it was the bare minimum of what was needed in order to pass and the manufacturers wouldn't give out exceptions that easily, if at all.

That's pretty annoying that they secured a pass but then didn't do as they promised (I realize it's not always that easy when it comes to programming, but still). I'm glad CDPR are getting punished for their rash decision in the marketplace and their stock price, at least, even though they're still probably going to end up making a ton of money off the game and their developers are still going to be crunched to death for little reward.

I think it reflects badly on Sony as well, but less so.

Sony may have assumed based on past success they could make it work.

A whole lot of business is simply not blinking or being seen as weak, and simply fixing it later.

You can still buy the physical version of the game no?

OTOH, they just got themselves a cash infusion ... proving the interest and the potential future ... found a lot of bugs ... and got a -whole lot- of free advertising. Rather like Librem, innit?

It's more than just botched PR. The leadership of CD Projekt Red was saying the game was done and playable in January and only needed polish. Employees inside the company knew that was a lie.

> Now, CD Projekt Red employees want to know why management led them down the wrong path and whether all that work was worth it. On the call, one employee reportedly asked why leadership said the game was "complete and playable" in January, even though that wasn't true. The company said it would "take responsibility," without elaborating. Another employee allegedly asked whether it's hypocritical for CD Projekt Red to make a game about corporations exploiting human beings while the company itself was pushing its employees well past their limits.

https://www.svg.com/298958/cyberpunk-2077-devs-take-manageme...

> Another employee allegedly asked whether it's hypocritical for CD Projekt Red to make a game about corporations exploiting human beings while the company itself was pushing its employees well past their limits.

Or, they only just realized we already live in the early stages of a Dystopic Corporate Cyberpunk existence, and that the people who are asked to make mainstream mediums of it for mass consumption entertainment are not immune from that. I was a fan of things like Bladerunner/Judge Dread/5 Element since the 90s, and read my first Cyberpunk book in the early 2000s (Cryptonomicon) in HS but even then I could see the parallels back then. When I launched my fintech startup I spent a summer (2015) in Sunnyvale and felt we are already there, but people were far too distracted to see it.

As a Californian I soon made my exit out SV and CA a priority for my own mental health and sanity and left for Boulder. Which which was always the plan but then it soon had the same issues after a few years.

Yes I can second this. I'm a big fan of other similar-ish games like Deus Ex, Fallout, and Borderlands, and I can say Cyberpunk has done a great job of delivering some of the best components of each of those. There are a few bugs, the worst of which caused me to lose 10 min of progress, having to load back a save. But there were plenty of bugs in Fallout New Vegas and that is easily one of my favorite RPGs.

Agreed, this is definitely no worse than any other AAA release in recent memory. I wonder if people remember that on its release day, Skyrim's main quest could not be completed due to a bug.

Anyways, I'm 50 hours in and it's awesome.

Glad it’s awesome! I’ve primarily owned Nintendo consoles, and at least first-party Nintendo games - which I would consider AAA - never seem to have any major bugs.

Maybe many people don’t consider Nintendo AAA though?

It depends on the games. Zelda is definitely a AAA, Super Mario Party not so much.

I agree that Nintendo is not the kind of company to release a game with obvious bugs and hope to fix them later.

Miyamoto has this famous saying about releasing a broken game: "A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.". Although it doesn't hold true anymore (thanks to patching), their mantra hasn't changed. He reflected in recent years about his quote, saying: "“I didn’t mean to say a bad game is always bad, what I meant to say is if you release a game in a bad state you will always regret it,". Yes, indeed.

Strongly agree with this. I’ve been playing on Nvidia GeForce Now (so essentially a high-end PC), and haven’t encountered any major issues. I’d say the game sets a new standard in terms of the level of detail in the environment. The first time you leave your apartment in Night City is simply stunning, probably the only comparison would be the Uncharted series (which was much more linear).

Cyberpunk was perhaps the most hyped game of the last year, so no matter what CD released, I expected a strong and polarizing reaction. I agree with their decision to offer refunds, but I think they don’t need to be as apologetic about what was released. The same issues came up years ago with publishers who targeted the PS4/Xbox One — Cyberpunk just drew a lot more attention this time around.

I think it's had too much hype and too many expectations. Marketing did too good a job. I didn't watch much of the hype just a few trailer videos, and it's meeting my expectations. But I imagine someone who was really into the hype might feel its not up to what was promised.

I like it. The world visually is like nothing else I've seen. Absolutely amazing. Missions are entertaining. Fighting isn't that good but hey. Few bugs of floating things in the air, but I can live with that. And they'll prob be fixed in a few weeks.

Marketing did a bad job if they overdone it, because they're doing a disservice to everyone, both to the clients and to the developers because of the backlash.

I'm usually quite good as keeping my expectations in check, and I avoid preordering because it's usually not a gamble that gives a good return.

An example of the games beauty https://youtu.be/oVKl9e3gSAE

That's impressive.

Calling a game's bugs to be of the "Bethesda" type only tells me that its a mess of a game.

But is it Obsidian type?

On PC. Bugs are in line with other games. Not nearly as bad as the original Fable or Watch Dogs (and Watch Dogs Legion), for examples. I do seem to get stuck in “can’t save” or “can’t run/crouch” mode occasionally, but a quick reload fixes it. Visually the game is stunning, it’s a lot of fun. Great voice acting and story development.

Combat is a little better than gta but pretty vanilla outside of hacks (not nearly as good as combat-focused games like dishonored, rage, doom, arkham, or more recent titles like Star Wars fallen order, not really as good as as borderlands et al either).

The game tries to do a lot, and some of it is great - it’s a long, beautiful story with an intricate world. There’s a lot of untapped potential.

Yeah, they said the same thing about No Man's Sky, too. I guess I'll just wait for this one to ripen a bit, and not play it on eighth-gen. Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, Windows XP, Big Sur... some software is still green when it goes to market.

Sony pulled the game from the PS store. So, it's a not just a little deal.

Yeah, it definitely seems like the "big deal" bugs are confined to last-gen consoles; however, the online reaction would make you think it's the game as a whole.

I'm ~30 hours into the PC version (on Stadia) and the only bugs I've seen have been things like food/drinks floating in the air when you knock tables away. Nothing game-breaking, no matter how hard I try to break it.

It is a big deal because both the PS5 and XSX are at risk of going into a death spiral right now. Because most people have only been able to buy units at double the normal price via scalpers, people have been buying way less games than normal. Which means that if this continues, developers just won't make games for these consoles and people won't buy them. The enormous failure of Cyberpunk is only further increasing this risk, by preventing people from spending money on actual finished games.

20-30 hours on a regular (launch model) Xbox One and the game completely crashes frequently, probably 20 times so far. This means you have to relaunch the game, get through to the main menu, then load your game. So at 3-5 minutes each time, that's an hour of my playtime just recovering from crashes.

Maybe 4-5 times I've run into a bug where my character can't move and I have to load a save, or the person I'm supposed to talk to or follow in a quest won't move onto the next action. This takes 5+ minutes to figure out that it's not going to happen and I need to reload.

A lot of the time it's clear that the game has a lot of things queued for loading and it's trying to catch up. You have to wait 30 seconds or so for it to load everything before you can trigger then next event. These are also the moments that usually trigger the crashes.

> Playing on Series X fwiw.

Most of the comments I've read that share your opinion, the person is inevitably playing on the pro version of the console. It feels really like they built the game for high end machines, and then did everything they could to get it working on the lower end machines. I don't know what the equivalent of building a 'mobile-first' website is in game development or if it's possible, but they clearly didn't do that.

But I'm pretty patient and forgiving of bugs, so I've still been enjoying the game despite the issues.

> I don't know what the equivalent of building a 'mobile-first' website is in game development or if it's possible [...]

Sounds like the old 'progressive enhancement' (at least I think that phrase was 'replaced' by mobile-first, based upon personal experience).

While I first heard it used for web development, where you would build up your content and then add JavaScript and (enhanced) styling, there's no reason that can't be applied to game development as well.

In fact, I think you can look at PS4 Pro Enhanced games for how it was done well.

We had this when game consoles were very dominant: PS3/Xbox360 era, start of the PS4/Xbox One era. Games were developed for consoles and then "touched up" for PC. It sucked. Starting from good machines and pushing them is far better imho. They should have cut off the base versions of both last gen consoles, but Sony/MS don't allow that afaik (e.g. either you don't deliver for PS4 at all or you deliver for PS4 and PS4 pro). At some point you have to realize that hardware is too old for something and accept it.

Agreed. I think the PS4 Pro and equivalent Xbox model really muddied the water when it came to the newest consoles, especially since both the PS5 and related Xbox version are at least backward compatible with the previous gen.

Target PC, make a version for the latest console gen.

This is like developer saying "it works on my PC" ... except if you're shipping a half finished game to millions of preorder customers you can see how this could lead to situation that it's now. I'm still interested in this game but I'll probably wait for it to go on sale and for them to iron out the bugs.

It’s a victim of the Witcher 3’s success. Even the Witcher 3 wasn’t all this great at launch. CDPR didn’t become a beloved company just because they released a great game. They listened to feedback, corrected a lot of bugs and introduced quality of life improvements and they put out a couple of very high quality DLCs for free. This coupled with their work in GOG restoring classic titles is what earned them their reputation.

There have been so many buggy video game launches, that I suspect Sony removing it from the store is not as straightforward as it appears to be. CDPR must have done something silly to annoy Sony. Either way these are dark days for the company.

Eh, I have to disagree that Witcher 3 wasn't great at launch. And it definitely wasn't nearly as buggy as Cyberpunk. CDPR already had a great reputation before launch as a beloved company, all that changed was they went mainstream.

Same experience for me, no game breaking bugs so far. However I am worried (a lot) about save files getting corrupted once they reach 8mb [0] . Hope that gets addressed sooner than later

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kfpwt5/psa_s...

It’s not so much about the bugs, but how much overpromised it was compared to what they delivered. Even the 48mins gameplay trailers has many scripted segments and is not representative for the game.

https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kcve8s/promised_...

Maybe but the game is still tons of fun and .... that's what I want a game to be. CDPR deserves some backlash and the situation on last gen consoles is terrible.

But they delivered an amazing game on higher end platforms which suffers from bugs that are mainly silly and rarely game breaking. The truth is that communities like r/cyberpunkgame are just the gaming equivalent for hateful Facebook groups.

How sad do you have to be as a person if you send death threats to CDPR devs because of a fucking game?

Playing on PC and absolutely loving it. It is like a very ambitious Deus Ex.

I haven't figured out a way to word this that doesn't sound smarmy, but I feel like this style of game is not what your everyday gamer was expecting. It is reasonably complex, has morale choices and the combat is frankly lack lustre and more about the numbers. It plays much more like a 90s/2000s RPG than a more simplified modern action RPG, clunkiness included.

For the reasons above I quickly forgive the clunkiness and bugs because what the game is offering is rare in AAA games these days.

I have to strongly disagree. To me it feels like a very luke-warm copy of Deus Ex, where your choices don't matter and all dialogs are written for 14 year olds. Since I'm playing on a PC, I also don't suffer from actual bugs, but more like "second order bugs" which aren't technical but design/writing related: it's clear that the developers had to constantly plaster over the fact that they didn't have enough time to properly fix (or finish) their designs.

I'm surprised we've had such a different experience. Have you been doing the side quests?

I want to add that Deus Ex is hands down my favourite franchise, I've played every installment multiple times (except Invisible War). So I didn't make the comparison lightly. I'm not suggesting it's exactly like Deus Ex, but I think calling it a luke warm copy isn't doing Cyberpunk any justice either. It's got elements from Deus Ex, but it is a very unique game with it's own approach to the genre.

Maybe it's just that deus ex is 20 years old and we were younger than, so that its dialogs and story felt better [than it maybe actually were - not saying it's bad, just maybe a little rose-tinted]. I have a similar inclination as you regarding the story/dialogs of cyberpunk thus far (stereotype-ridden, many dialogs/texts are a waste of time etc.) and I also wouldn't really compare the two games gameplaywise too much (Cyberpunk is a hybrid of open world and structured levels). However, what I really adore about cyberpunk and what makes it very likable to me is the artstyle and world and feeling graphically. It's just so beautiful with these vibrant colors and different parts of the city, especially when it rainS ;) Also, the characters' believable facial expressions really add to the feeling of being in this cyberpunk world. That makes the game worthwhile to me.

I finished it on PC with little issues in a little over 50 hours.

But despite the time put in I didnt really love it. The whole game was an illusion of choice. The side quests and fights gave you some cool Deus Ex like freedom, but the main quest was an interactive movie with some meaningless options for you to engage in.

And given those cutscenes, and scripted parts are so plenty, I really dont see myself replaying this game with a different build.

Its 7/10 for me, nothing like the Witcher.

the main path is a lot more subtle about how your choices affect it. You can reach or lock yourself out of certain quests and endings depending on some early game decisions and which sidequests you complete

No, you can't. That was a feature that got cut. The entirety of the "branching path" system is a series of 3 questions at the end of the game.

Yes you can. One side quest with a companion expires in 24 hours upon receiving. If you don’t complete it, you can’t access that ending.

There is several endings to the game that require you to complete side missions in certain ways. The "secret ending" is only achievable if a certain NPC is a lot in the positive area, even more than is necessary to unlock that NPCs normal ending. If you don't follow up on two NPC's side missions, those endings are respectively locked out too, or if you don't side with them at the end. If you simply go through the main mission, there is only two endings available to you, if you go through everything in a decent manner you have 8 endings available to you.

Side missions also affect eachother and some have hidden timers, if you don't complete an objective in time or don't check in with the NPC, things will happen out of your control.

Hell, if you manage to play the nomad side missions well and a particular NPC likes how you do things, you can get their gun. But if they don't like you, that doesn't lock you from the rest of the nomad options, you just don't get that gun.

For all the bugs that the game has, side missions and choices do affect things and the game makes a good effort on making you feel like it has more impact than it has (after all, a lot of it is simply a like/dislike score, but a lot of games operate on that scale), like some meaningless inquiry option (ie, blue dialog option) can lead you to a completely new dialog tree that can open up a small side mission in a different way.

Where are you getting 8 from? Even being generous about what counts as a difference I'm counting 6.

I was already counting the "secret" ending. Two of the "choices" you can make without meeting the criteria are really the same ending with slightly different dialogue options. Mass Effect did not have multiple endings.

Side missions may have subtle differences but the entirety of the mission is in a vacuum; there's no difference between whether or not that trigger exists outside of that single event.

It led me to feel like a county fair more than a living world. "Next up, head to the torture booth! Ignore the wood scaffolding along the way".

Then a lot of RGPs must feel like county fair to you if "you only get X endings". The ending mission certainly doesn't exist in a vacuum unless you deliberately look away from the choices you can make there. Personally, the only objection I have is that it railroads a bit, but that is understandable since it's the finale for the story, I've done that for TTRPGs campaigns too, when it came for their finale's.

Agreed. It felt like a 2010 remake to me, even on a rig with all the bells and whistles.

Stunningly beautiful when you went looking for a shot, but otherwise, there wasn't much to invest into. Especially once I realized there wasn't any consequence for the way I completed an objective, the illusion really fell apart.

i felt the same way 25 hours in... don't worry you'll start hitting really bad bugs. especially in the last few mainline missions

I noticed that too. The first 25 hours or so were flawless, until after you acquire the biochip. Then things start to get dodgy. I hope it wasn't some deliberate meta-art game development, where the player encounters real life bugs as V acquires them as the story progresses.

"Performance on last gen aside"

The way I understand all of this, Sony is pulling the game from the PS4 store but promoting that it's available on PS5 with additional patches.

CD Projekt Red also already said that getting the PS5 port ready for launch will take all of their capabilities. So it might be a deliberate move to sacrifice the PS4 version in order to improve the PS5 one.

I mean Sony clearly has a financial incentive to push the PS5 onto the market and to make players abandon the PS4.

I don’t object or argue against your point, but I find it interesting to note that as far as I understand, it’s near impossible to buy a PS5 right now, whereas Sony can sell tens of millions of copies of a software on the PS4-copying software is practically free, after all.

Playing on a 4 year old gaming PC with a 1080. Have had no real problems in the 50ish hours I have in. A little sluggish through some of the open world parts until I dialed the graphics back to "high".

I think part of the problem here is they are trying to include beautiful effects like ray tracing for the newest machines, but have to also support 7 year old previous gen consoles as well. With the new Series X and PS5 consoles only recently on the market, this is a tough time to release a big title - because the player base is overwhelmingly not on those new consoles, and that's too much of a market to lose.

Under the original plan, it would've launched before the new consoles, much earlier this year

Just goes to show how easily the public is swayed by a media blitz.

I'm playing on a PC with a 4-5 year old i7, a very fast M2 SSD and an RTX2080. Performance is overall good at relatively high presets and the majority of normal gameplay is ok in terms of bugs. However, every time I get into a car, after about 30 seconds of driving, the game hard crashes to the desktop with a memory access violation. That makes it sort of unplayable once you advance from the beginning and need to travel longer distances. No other game I play has these problems. It's very frustrating because I actually like the game so far.

> looking at the online reaction you'd get the idea that this game is a non-stop bugfest.

It kind of is though. Super common to have dropped objects (eg guns from dead thugs) be stuck in the ground and unable to be picked up. :/

Personally, I installed it yesterday about midday, then played for around 8 hours. Today, played around 6 more hours, finally getting up to the Keanu Reeves piece (after doing many side quests).

Got stuck in a location between objects, 1/2 way between floors. Had to revert to my last checkpoint save... only to discover the game hadn't been saving for the last 4 hours of play time. WTF! :( :( :(

No autosaves when it should, no quick saves either. Even though it clearly showed the saving icon each time I triggered a quick save, prior to getting close to a mission start location.

Uninstalled it instead.

Losing 1/4 of my play time like that, when it explicitly showed the icon to indicate saving was happening.. and not actually doing it, is so far beyond taking the piss. :(

Not sure if I'll try again in a few months. Plenty of other, better things to put time into instead.

Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

Performance/bugs aside, what about the completeness issues? How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

That’s my main concern - I’m sure the performance/bugs will be worked out. But will the game actually be finished?

I haven’t played the game and don’t play video games too often, so my thoughts here perhaps sound naive.

“NPCs not having a problem being attacked” and “cars running on tracks” could be intentional design choices, right? We can speculate that the game’s feature set is unfinished, but is it also not possible that this video game in its “finished” state just isn’t what people wanted it to be? Clearly there are bugs and I agree the product right now isn’t finished, but once any glitches and performance issues are fixed, I’m not sure if the gameplay will ever meet expectations.

Edit: not sure of why I have -5 points.

No. The game is simply not finished.

The problem with creating a huge open-world game and then stating in all your promotional material that this, "will be the most immersive open-world game we've ever created" means that it has to surpass, at a minimum, The Witcher 3.

However, you paint yourself into an even worse corner with that, because everyone's going to compare you to Grand Theft Auto series as well when you use the phrase "open-world game". And that's a real titan to go up against.

Its clearly obvious this game needed a bare minimum of 6 more months of development, if to do nothing more than fix just the bugs. But it really needs about 12-18 months of development just to add the features they claimed the game would have at launch.

Saying it’s the most “immersive open world game” is just marketing speak. Unless they promised a specific feature, it’s hard to say much. I’m not arguing that it’s not a finished game, so don’t get me wrong. I’m just saying that people assumed this was going to be the perfect video game. It’s clearly not, and performance/glitches aside, I’m not convinced of why everyone seems so surprised it’s not.

So you're taking the approach that (a) they were lying and (b) everyone listening to them lie was meant to realise they were lying? That... still seems like pretty bad behaviour.

I’m not saying they were lying. Saying it’s the “most immersive game ever” could mean a lot of different things based on your definition of immersion.

There’s no clear definition of being the “most immersive game”. Every piece of software has a finite feature set, based on time, cost, and a vast set of constraints - whether organizational, technical, people related, and so on.

The game isn’t ever going to live up to the hype.

The two items you listed are inaccurate. I’m taking the approach that the game had practically infinite hype and it had no where to go but to go but DOWN and disappoint people. I’m taking the approach that it’s worth looking at this from a realistic lens. Yes the game is unfinished, but there are plenty of “finished” games that aren’t great or even just good. They are flat out terrible. Why people seem to think Cyberpunk is meant to be some marvel is beyond me.

The biggesr gripe I've seen is that if it is an intentional design choice, it is completely contradictory to what CDPR promised. Through years of marketing they promised "unprecedented" levels of AI and interactability with NPCs. They promised things like situational police presence/response, etc. But currently, the game has NPC AI that's years behind (games released 5-10 years ago have better AI).

The fact that such features were promised is what is causing people to think (hope?) that these features are simply unfinished. If it is an intentional design choice and CDPR has no plan to improve them, that's a whole other issue with what was promised vs what was actually intended.

If they designed it as that from the start while promoting it as an open-world, they made a serious judgement error, as cbozeman explained. If you promote an open world with cars, you need cars that act believable.

If they attempted to have it be a believable feature of the game world, it's apparently entirely lost on consumers (e.g. a world with stupid cars could be explained in an interesting way as one where only few exceptions actually drive themselves, whereas most just rely on stupid automations taking care of it - but you need to present that in a way people understand).

Some of the things people found also indicates that a few systems like this actually exist but are only triggered very rarely, which suggests they were intended to be there but disabled because they don't work well enough/don't scale.

OH no... I've had plenty of issues.

A lot of weird graphical glitches. A game-ending bug that locks you into the Maelstrom base and prevents you from leaving (had to restart from an older save game to get around that one). Non-aggressive NPCs can't always be hit by melee weapons, meaning I have to let the gang members go aggro on me before I introduce them to Mrs. Sockety Wench.

As far as completeness, I actually take a little of an opposite position. There's a lot of really neat side quests, and if you read the shards, there's a ton of interconnectedness. I was hired to kill a corporate executive, then later in just a simple assault quest, I got a datashard indicating she put a hit out on someone.

And there's tons of intersections like this. The Delamain side quest is genuinely one of the best in the game.

Yes, NPC and vehicle AI needs a serious overhaul. Yes, the game probably needed another 12-18 months of development, but its still a decent game even with all these faults.

>Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

The game, no matter what platform or settings, is rife with bugs. Many of the bugs, especially on PC, are not game-breaking bugs. Things like getting into a car and having it launch you 100 feet into the air before returning you to the ground is pretty amusing, sure. Being able to drive straight through other cars with no collision is actually convenient at times. Having your dong flop around while T-posing on top of a motorcycle is pretty hilarious. I think a lot of people are giving these bugs a pass because they're mildly entertaining... but they're definitely still issues that should be addressed, IMO.

I am having plenty of fun playing the game despite the "jank", but the bugs are undeniably there and completely immersion breaking. The game very quickly goes from being a serious game about sex trafficking, drugs, and evil corporations into a meme game about flying cars and funny looking character models... if you don't care much about immersion and just want to shoot things and look at pretty neon graphics, I can see why you would still love this game, but I can't imagine that was what CDPR intended.

Personally I've only had two issues with the game so far beyond sub-par performance.

One is that the mission after "Transmission" didn't show up

The other was that trees would bug into view if graphical settings were too high.

All in all, it's okay except for performance.

I don’t play games, but reading this commentary made me laugh!

I've had none of the issues you mentioned above.

I've had some graphical issues sure, and a bad guy spawned inside a car once. That's in 80h so far in the game.

Everyone's experience is different, but don't say people don't pay attention. If they break the immersion for you, just stay away from the game for a while. It was the exact same situation with The Witcher 3, took a good 6 months for it to get good.

But they are still supporting that game after what, 5 years? I'm absolutely sure they will with this aswell.

Sorry, but I don't believe it. Either you're astronomically lucky or you just don't pay attention to the detail of whats going on in the game around you. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean the bugs aren't there - it just means you didn't notice them. And hell, maybe that's to your benefit - I wish I could just not notice the bugs, it sure would make the game a lot funner.

>That's in 80h so far in the game.

FYI it was just discovered that if you play the game for too long, your save file becomes too big and will be corrupted. A moderator on the CDPR forums just said that "the game is intended to be finished within 30-50 hours" and playing longer than that is liable to break your game, and specifically you should avoid using the "Crafting" function at all because it will corrupt your save even faster.

https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kg47yz/psa_y...

Are bugs you don’t notice bugs at all?

You seem willing to discount the most important fact; people are still having fun. Why do you think it’s so important to you that this game be bad for everyone?

I specifically said that even I am having fun, despite the bugs. But again, that doesn't mean the bugs don't exist, and it doesn't mean the game wouldn't be better without the bugs. Where are you getting this "the game should be bad for everyone"?

If people enjoy this game, then that's wonderful. Far be it from me to interfere with someone's enjoyment of something. The problem is when people insist "well I haven't seen any bugs so the game is perfect and anyone saying otherwise should be ignored!" when that is clearly not the case.

That’s not what people here are generally saying, and it’s weird that is what you’re interpreting their comments as saying.

It just sounds like you want to argue/be upset.

I'm the only one you replied to out of half a dozen replies, and my comment was admittedly the least kind and most confrontational, for example.

>That’s not what people here are generally saying,

You must be completely ignoring the multiple comments here, not to mention the comments in every preceding thread on HN, not to mention the comments on reddit about this game. Because that is what many are saying.

Ironically, this is the same situation as the bugs in the game: just because you're oblivious to the numerous people saying the game isn't buggy doesn't mean there aren't people saying the game isn't buggy.

>It just sounds like you want to argue/be upset.

Who's upset? I've said multiple times that I'm enjoying the game. It seems like you're the one trying to pick a fight for some reason.

How this comment thread hasn't been detached is honestly surprising. This is far from productive.

Agreed. You seem to be less interested in discussing the game and more interested in gatekeeping who is allowed to discuss the game and how. If you'd like to discuss the game, I'm all for it. But if you're just here to gatekeep, I've no interest in continuing.

You're the unproductive element here...

I played about the same amount. I had only one major bug where my character blacked out/was teleported.

I do notice that cars show up behind my back and sometimes disappear but never was I launched into the air or able to drive through other cars.

Only bug I saw in this game - my V is staying while riding the car. That's all. 28 hours in game. I extensively use Crafting.

Obviously this bug really sucks and deserves remedying, but it also seems like aberrant behaviour. I'm also chiming in from the 50+ hours crowd and the only bugs I've experienced have been a bit silly, but nothing game-breaking yet. Clearly this thing needed more time in QA based on other people's experiences, but plenty of us are playing and loving the game all the way through.

From what I understand the majority of players that have run into the save file size issue have been abusing (not saying it is wrong to do just probably unintended) crafting for a profit. That is not to say everyone won’t eventually run into the issue with time but I think it is a little overblown in the moment with all the bandwagon hating.

I have run into very few bugs over my 45 hours and when I have, I think it’s been in places where something was meant time to clean up. Such as going back to a npc after a long interaction that lead me away. So maybe bug frequency has a little to do with play style which I bet can vary person to person and is not compared in-depth via quick internet comments.

I've played on OG PS4 for 8 hours and no significant problems. I heard that OG PS4 actually has significantly less problems than PS4 Pro, due to how the game tuning per-machine was done.

29 hours in and also none of the bugs you mentioned. I'm sorry you're having a bad time, but there are legitimately a lot of people having minimal issues. Worst bug I had was a corpse clipped into a wall and I couldn't get the loot.

I've got about 65 hours in. I've had one crash. One side quest is bugged and I can't finish it, which does suck, but it isn't a critical quest at least. I've had similar issues with quests being bugged in basically every other open world game I've ever played.

Had a similar save file being too large issue with Skyrim that was fixed months after release.

Let's see here, from playing maybe 30+ hrs or so:

Never been launched into the air.

Never driven through any NPCs or cars without collision.

No wardrobe malfunctions. Slow loading of textures when switching armor through, in the inventory menu.

Once had a T-pose flickering for a few milliseconds while driving a bike.

My computer is a 4 year old system with a 1080 card, and I have not touched the graphic settings beyond turning off motion blur. I have had a few glitches but so far only one bug that actually annoyed me and force me to repeat content. After a long period of unsaveable and unskippable exposition scene, which I see as a bug in itself, I had a race condition where I tried to take control of a turret just as the turret died and I got stuck in the dead turret interface without any option to exit it. Those are the bugs that I suspect they are working to fix in the first few patches.

The sad thing is PC version has a lot less bugs compared to PS4 / XBox version, and main review was done on the first one.

I’m on PS4 pro and have the same take as you. Game is fine to play, collision bugs & other graphic related bugs are issues that should be resolved. The game is not unplayable, the universe is well designed, story enjoyable BUT bug are common and I cant imagine playing on a base PS4. My experience with the pro is probably my lowest acceptable limit to play a game.

I’ve completed it on the base PS4. Spent about 25 hours.

- I had maybe 5 hard crashes.

- Had to walk through doors frequently (I guess they had opened but still showed on screen as closed).

- Got into the car while crouched in one sequence which breaks progression so you have to reload your last checkpoint and get into the car standing to progress.

- HDR is unusable.

- Had to disable all graphical extras (blur, grain) or it looked really messy.

- While driving lights didn’t enable quick enough so that I was driving into darkness as lights turned on after I had passed through.

Those are the main issues I had. Besides that there were constant minor graphical issues.

The story was enjoyable enough that I finished it, largely skipping side quests. Once they have the issues worked out or I have a new console I’ll go back and enjoy the world a bit more.

Worth pointing out I mainly play sports games and only casually. I don’t have the kind of expectations a lot of people would have had for this game and just on bugs alone I would say it should not have shipped. It’s an mid level beta release at best.

Thanks for this. This definitely cements my decision to just wait until they release the next gen version and I get an Xbox Series X. I’m a patient gamer, I can wait. I just played Fallout New Vegas this year on an old Xbox 360 and loved it.

1080 is still pretty close to the best money can buy. That’s like a $750 card even today. You’re pretty much at the top of the capability curve.

It's a high-end card for sure, but "pretty close to the best money can buy" is a big hyperbole.

The RTX 2070S beats the 1080Ti by a comfortable margin, while the 1080Ti beats the 1080 by a strong margin as well. I left out the RTX 3000 as they are hard to come by, but it's beaten by the RTX 3060Ti which, at MSRP is a $400 card.

And the 2070S is $900.

The list prices are meaningless if you can’t buy them at that price.

I’m just saying, the 1080 is a very high end card even today. You can’t afford it in a budget or even a mid range PC.

> ...I can't imagine that was what CDPR intended.

Is it not CDPR. It is 2020 and thankfully it is coming to a close.

I've had none of the issues you mentioned, some 40-ish hours into the game. I don't even get much in terms of visual glitches, other than sometimes a character's rendering starting slow (first a bald head, then the headgear, then the hair). The thing that saddens me is the terrible AI, in all its manifestations: terrible enemies, terrible drivers and terrible wanted mechanics.

Edit: come think of it: I somewhat often get the visual glitch of foliage which should have been obscured being visible.

> terrible enemies, terrible drivers and terrible wanted

yeah enemies and police are stupid, you can basically kill the hardest enemies with sharpshooting and hiding. from the police you can run away pretty fast.

and the drivers. well you can create a jam by parking on the road.

still love the game, since I think the story is not that bad and the side quests are sometimes amazing. not on zelda level, but still a good game

> Things like getting into a car and having it launch you 100 feet into the air before returning you to the ground is pretty amusing, sure.

These types of bugs can be very hardware-specific. If people are playing on hardware similar enough to the game developer's workstations, they might not encounter them at the same rate that you do. Something to bear in mind.

Just wanted to offset the sibling comments by mentioning that I've experienced most of the bugs you describe and then some. And a ton of soft locks. On PC.

I had truly great fun for 40 hours, but it has slowly taken its toll. I'll be waiting for patches before diving in again.

I think the only reason people are piling on is because he called out that anyone with a different experience must be lying or not paying attention, nobody denies lots of players are having issues.

> I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

It feels dismissive, but I agree. It seems unbelievable that there could be such a massive difference in bugs just based on different hardware.

Did these people never have a bald 'V'? Or have other characters clip into them? Or spook an entire street by dodging? Or get a wanted star for shooting a gang member? Or not have the weapon accessory page not update after salvaging? Etc.

I'm a game developer so I'm pretty sensitive to bugs and no, the worst I've had in my 25 hours so far is some characters T-Posing, and oh, I sometimes can't loot stuff on the ground, the prompt just doesn't appear. None of the issues you mentioned. Playing on PC.

> It seems unbelievable that there could be such a massive difference in bugs just based on different hardware.

Most of the bugs I've seen recorded can basically come down to failed animation triggers, or animation interacting poorly with physics, or behaviour trees breaking on animation cues.

Animation isn't just character posing, it will be many scripted behaviours.

And that animation logic? Usually it's quite sensitive to timing issues and race conditions in complex, many-agent interactions.

That makes it quite sensitive to cpu differences.

> I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

I feel the same way whenever anyone talks about their Linux Desktop that way, but I still give them the benefit of the doubt because I have legitimately been in that situation with a game.

Looking back at the moments when I thought there were no bugs on my linux desktop supports his theory. It wasn't a lack of bugs, it was a lack of my ability to spot them.

What's funny is the number of people below your comment suggesting how they don't have problems, only to list a bunch of problems that don't make the game unplayable, including a bug that literally makes finishing a quest impossible, otherwise known as unplayable.

A game can be a buggy mess and CDPR should get called out for misleading it's customers by hiding reviews of the only officially released console versions (next gen hasn't actually been released yet). There are without a doubt lots of bugs. I have friends who enjoy the game who are still seeing the bugs.

It's okay if you like something that is still buggy. Don't be so insecure that you can't enjoy something even with it's faults.

Just don't pretend those faults don't exist.

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

Because I don't interact with NPC's and traffic. I treat these aspects more like a decoration to the game, not an interactive content. There is plenty of interactive content and side missions, so I have enough of fun spending my time there instead of killing NPCs and pretending this is a GTA, so that I can fight police.

I am one of those who was initially disappointed with the game and its numerous failings, but later enjoyed myself upon completion so I will try to convey why.

The product is incomplete, this is correct. But there is a degree of incompleteness or artifice I am comfortable with if there are other elements that work. Same goes with actual role playing games. When I play this game I have to wonder what is artifice? what is incomplete? and what is a concession for performance that has gone awry? In 2077 I feel all of these each session, which is unusual.

But with me: Immersion breaking issues such as cars on tracks, don't bother me. Following the narrative (though far from perfect) was a source of "fun" and being "acceptable" for me. I would be wishing all of these elements were strengthened, over the massive effort put into of an open world that doesn't really provide. I'm going to be won over by these arcs, and core gameplay and not point to point hijinks and antics. I don't feel 2077 ever lied in there, or at least the experience I wanted.

For a while in games they don't have to be real cars, but I want them to "feel" like real cars. So we get a complete games in a year where the AI to work beyond the paths, and now what is involved? It will be more immersive for sure, but how much longer till it is complete? For some playing the game, squinting at the 3D models now rendered as car sprites in the distance is enough.

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

This is a minor problem, NPCs are a background, so it is nice to see that they have a brain, but it is more like "cute" not "OMG".

E.g. notice that in Witcher 3 you couldn't attack non-enemy NPC (e.g. you couldn't kill everyone in a village).

Big problems are bugs in quests that don't allow finishing them or a story that doesn't allow choice in most cases.

I’ve had very few issues. One dialogue failed to trigger and I had to load a checkpoint to continue. I had some minor RTX shadow issues in the Hotel heist mission. Last night after about 15 hours of gameplay I had my first CTD. The most annoying bug is how frame rate tanks when in a car.

The game definitely has issues and the patch notes for 1.05 show how there are severe scripting problems in many missions. However there are also huge disparities between the game running on different systems and even within subsets of PCs. The removal of AVX support is particularly interesting in this regard.

Apart from all that the game is very similar to the Witcher 3 in terms of its core gameplay and mechanics. So yes, the implementation of crowds and traffic is poor compared to what we see in GTA. The world is a very densely detailed backdrop and not much else. It definitely could have (should have) been delayed but that would not change much about the core of the game.

If you want a Deus Ex game from the folks who brought you the Witcher this is pretty good, if excellent at times.

Is it your first game ever? Any game has some bugs/imperfections. If you are expecting perfect open-world game without bugs and with mechanics every player loves - you’ll be waiting more.

>completeness issues? How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

I don't know what to tell you except that in my 10 or so hours of play I have had plenty of fun. The highlights of the game for me so far are the story missions themselves and the world -- the environment itself. Seems like a finished product to me, albeit a buggy one with a diminished scope from what people seemed to be expecting. Don't forget that they intend on releasing what was it 3 expansions of content similar to witcher 3? I'm interested to see how they use the world they created for that purpose.

The Cyberpunk 2077 game is already amazing in terms of art direction, level design and story wise. I would also argue that the game is excellent in terms of graphics, although it has massive issues with performance. In my opinion, in addition to a lots bugs, at the moment the weakest aspects of the game are the complete lack of NPC AI, as well as some emptiness in the game world outside of story and other quests. The latter is understandable, there is room for multiple updates in the future, without affecting the storyline, including massive online multiplayer game mode.

As for poor, or rather the lack of, AI and NPC behavior was mentioned as a "bug" that will be fixed at a recent CDPR board meeting. In 2018 CDPR were advertising full day cycle AI system for all NPCs in game. The promise was not fulfilled. At the moment there is simply no AI, like it's 2003 again. Including awful police spawns behind player's back with no vehicle chase.

However, users reported that rare glimpse of intelligence does exist in the game, perhaps through an oversight, e.g. police is actually able to chase player in a car[1] (for a short distance though), and some NPCs can actually be found in unusual places[2]. We don't know for sure, but it's believed that CDPR hastily trimmed all of the NPC and vehicle AI in the game. If so, we can only guess for what purpose. Maybe they didn't have time to polish it for the mandatory release date on December 10, or perhaps older consoles weren't able to process it. However, in its current shape NPC AI is at the level of AAA games from 15 years back (GTA: San Andreas), not to mention the CDPR's own Witcher 3. In fact, it is so awful that it is even good: it gives hope that AI system will get significantly overhauled with one of the game's upcoming updates (two major updates are expected in 2021Q1).

Nothing of that prevented me from enjoying this amazing game for 100+ hours with great pleasure. I haven't been as excited about a videogame as a kid since 2004, when Half Life 2[3] was released.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-OZqwjzNas

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/kewbai/...

[3] The Prey (2017) was an unexpected gem which I fell in love with, but I had zero hype since I didn't know anything about the game beforehand. I highly recommend reading Aphyr's (yes, that Jepsen's Aphyr) excellent Prey game review: https://aphyr.com/posts/344-prey-the-real-and-the-symbolic

Nitpicking but San Andreas does have AI where police chases work and NPC do not feel completely brainless, and cars do not only follow tracks, it does not feel empty and lifeless.

San Andreas was also, what, the third GTA game in the GTA III engine? It's a comparison between the first urban game in an engine (and the first ever for the developer) to the third game in an an engine that had years more polish (and at least the fifth urban game from the developer).

It's interesting how many of the current comparisons made to Cyberpunk are to sequels and much later iterations in various franchises (GTA, Saints Row, Crackdown, etc) and people have rose tinted glasses of the launch issues and bugs of some of their first titles.

"It's like they jumped back in time X years ago" should be the expected case for any game series because the games industry is one that notoriously doesn't have a lot of knowledge transfer, nor shared source/shared libraries, between developers and intentionally reinvents the wheel over and over again with almost every game/new game engine.

If gamers want a steadier sense of progression from game to game, studio to studio, they want a different game industry that reinvents fewer wheels between games. Expecting a single developer to somehow side step that industry problem is counter-productive to that goal. CDPR had no way to call up Rockstar and "borrow a cup of sugar", nor would they have probably been interested in doing that even if it were possible because it's less of an interesting problem full of engineering challenges to be "passionate" about to answer "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the GTA engine?" than "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the Witcher engine where the fastest vehicle is a horse?"

There are numerous large audience streamers doing just fine with the game. A few have described their issues and most are related to undelivered original promises of content that would have been in game. However I have yet to see one play on anything other than a PC

It is pretty easy these days to generate outrage and make an issue appear far larger than it may actually be. It also can be an incident highly isolated to subset of gamers who play the game.

After about 20 hours or so into it I was pretty shocked to see people who have comments that say its a great RPG or that the gameplay is great. Because at least for someone who likes to try out lots of different games, not just the big tentpole AAA games that get released near Christmas, this game is exceedingly mediocre at gameplay.

Its one undeniable quality is that the story missions are compelling and interesting, because I keep coming back to them and I want to see where it goes. But if you take any of the systems in the game, they leave a lot to be desired: crafting, gunplay, sneaking, hacking, quickhacks (or this game's magic system), driving, side missions, voice acting. Hell I find even many of the animations pretty generic most of the time when they are outside of the main story stuff.

The bugs are immersion-breaking for sure, and I hate when I need to restart a mission because of one, but the game is otherwise pretty mediocre. I compare it to Skyrim, where the bugs were present, and the individual systems were sometimes pretty lame, but I otherwise was still immersed in the game world completely and was always having a ton of fun. It was greater than the sum of its parts. Cyberpunk is not.

I've been telling friends that it plays more like Saints Row than GTA, and it's certainly nothing like Pillars of Eternity.

There are bugs. After 60+ hours of gameplay, I can say Cyberpunk is significantly worse than the Witcher 3 was at launch.

The thing is, on PC, the bugs are mostly visual annoyances or obvious lack of polish. Menu's not updating, UI glitches in cut scense, etc... I've had the game crash on me exactly once.

The core game has a great story. The side quests are unique and interesting. Characters have depth. Combat is surprisingly good. Cyberpunk has all the things I need to enjoy it and I did enjoy it.

Was looking for this comment. Game had no bugs for me on PC but was obviously an unfinished mess.

Mass effect 1 style gun progression? People hated it in 2009 and I hate it now. It's unneeded here, and that's just the very tip of this really large sized iceberg on just how much they fucked up gameplay / RPG elements

The two things you mentioned don't really affect the gameplay at all. I guess if you were looking for a GTA style sandbox game where you could just cause chaos in the streets it does not satisfy that. But if you want to explore a huge detailed city and do quests/mission etc.. it works really well.

The police spawning/ai issue is really dumb when you encounter it, but as long as you aren't trying to shoot random people in the street you don't encounter it.

The traffic is mostly just background detail. Again if your goal is to create a big traffic jam ala GTA then it won't be nearly as entertaining but in terms of just making it feel like you are in a living breathing city.. it gets the job done.

Many of the side missions are fairly detailed and interesting, it is fun just exploring the city and completing missions.

I'm surprised by people saying they haven't had issues. Have they just not noticed the issues? Like characters in completely static, motionless poses? Every little while there will be an NPC stuck motionless somewhere, or sliding along the ground as if they are a, well, non-animated 3d model. UI elements appear when they shouldn't, and a prompt to "[C] Skip to next" is almost always showing at the bottom right of my screen, during pretty much all gameplay. Further, I've had repeated crashes of the game which actually crashed the GPU driver (NVIDIA) and required me unplugging and re-plugging my HDMI cable so the GPU would reset and work again (most people seem to just reboot their computer altogether in this case due to not knowing the unplug/replug workaround).

Outside of straight-up bugs, the performance is utterly atrocious even on "Low" settings, and my PC exceeds the recommended specs by quite a decent margin.

At the same time, CDPR's prior games have received a ton of post-launch support so I can only hope Cyberpunk 2077 will receive a good amount of improvements in the new year. Fingers crossed!

Being unable to pick up items that are supposed to be lootable is a constant occurrence. Just earlier I had a quest NPC glitch out and cancel the dialogue options I was supposed to be able to potentially choose from, so they attacked me (as if I had chosen certain sub-optimal dialogue choices). During that fight (which shouldn't have even been happening), I defended myself with a single shotgun blast and that happened to send that NPC flying and .. through a chair... where the NPC then froze in place and became "deactivated", wouldn't fight anymore, couldn't be killed?? I was already going to reload the last save due to the dialogue glitch regardless, but... This kind of stuff is so commonplace, I basically save the game after almost every action. Already have 81 save files. :)

I do have a beef with this too. I bought a perk called throwing knives and... there are no “throwing” knives! You throw your regular knife and you can’t pick it up again. You lose the knife.

I remember that moment. I turned to my girlfriend and said "Whelp, guess we're not playing a stealth build".

You have to combine crafting with stealth.

Throwing rare quality knives you create yourself (they're cheap to make) does a holy shitton of damage if your appropriate stealth levels are high.

Wouldn't that mean going through the inventory system every time I want to throw more than a knife or two? That seems irrationally clunky. Like making someone use a menu for cut and paste.

Crafting is in a really fucked up place, its true... you can only craft a single item at a time, which is strange because eventually you can craft consumables (grenades, autodoc items, etc.).

I should be able to input a number of knives I want to craft, hit the craft button, and boom, I have 20 knives.

Ammo clips too. Now every 10 minutes I have to stop so I can hold the A button for 2-3 seconds for each of the about a dozen clips I need. It's super boring.

> Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

It's really hard to reconcile with the sheer number of video clips I've seen of bugs that are totally unacceptable in even alpha level software. I have to wonder whether those who are claiming they don't have that many bugs have simply grown up in the current era of buggy games on first release, or if they're just being dishonest because reasons.

Just watch The Act Man's compilation of Cyberpunk bugs and tell me that game is worth full price.

>haven’t had any issues with the game.

I try to be a kind and generous reviewer and it gets frustrating to hear people try to invalidate my experiences. I have a 2070 that runs this game just fine from a performance perspective but I've encountered multiple broken missions. I play stealth non-lethal, so me finishing a mission usually means lots of saves and a lot of time invested only to be rejected at the end because its too buggy to finish properly. Target NPCs not spawning, scripting logic errors, hostile NPCs just staring into space, broken pathfinding, broken GPS, etc. Its all here.

And as you say, completeness is an issue. Night City feels empty and boring to me. Sure its super pretty but so what? NPCs just give some canned smart-ass one-liner, traffic/life/pedestrians, etc are all simple robots. There's no "soul" in this game like in other virtual worlds I've experienced.

Also, so much of it is well written, but honestly, by game standards its where a YA novel would be. Think the first 3 Potter books, not the last 4. Its not challenging art. Its written on the 5th grade level especially Silverhand's snotty and dismissive sophomoric politics.

Lastly, its all feels so 'last gen' to me. I'm doing old school inventory management constantly because the game focuses so much on loot dropping. I can't dress up V like I'd like her to look because I need to use the top armor pieces I have. The driving feels 'cheap.' The driving GPS is not level aware so it'll take you several stories below where you need to be. The world V lives in feels dead, not vibrant and alive, which was their major marketing point.

I think the "there's nothing wrong with this game" crowd is either being dishonest or are just running and gunning speed runs and avoiding some of the more subtle bugs and don't care about this game being anything but a dumb and pretty shooter.

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

This is such a surreal comment to me - like “How can Tetris be acceptable or fun when it doesn’t even have cars or NPCs in the first place?”

(Answer: because (for me at least) the game isn’t about those things)

What hurts about CyberPunk is how well polished some parts are. The voice acting, story, and world are beautiful and polished. It's clear that they just didn't have time to implement like half the gameplay they promised.

The result is a big beautiful and empty world with a linear path. There's little to do, and really little point to the huge open world. 90% of missions are inside buildings on foot. And the ones that aren't uniformly suck because vehicle mechanics and AI just isn't there

To me, the voice did not match the way characters were moving. It seemed very unnatural and not polished. Quite a big diff in sync between audio and video on my end.

I need to agree with you on this one, some of the NPCs throughout the story have terrible voice acting, but I can forgive it because they're a small part of the game. But the players' character is something that bothers me everything he speaks, it feels so emotionless, and often doesn't match the environment they're in.

I haven't had too much to gripe about with the female player character voice acting thus far.

Something I will never understand... your character never uses personal pronouns in reference to their self.

And I don't mean gendered pronouns, just pronouns like "I" and "We". It seems none of the characters do.

Instead of: "I need to get lunch"

It's: "Need to get lunch."

"We need to get in there, and we need to do it fast"

"Need to get in there. Need to do it fast"

"I'm tryin' alright?"

"Tryin' alright?

"I like chocolate"

"Like chocolate"

It's even more grating when you add in the forced sounding "Gruff Guy" voice the male V uses. I don't know what kind of weird tough guy vibe they were going for but it's like nails on a chalkboard sometimes.

Something is definitely off with the voice acting in Vs' (male) voice, I can't quite put a finger on it, but most of the responses just don't match with the conversation that's going on.

Maybe that's how people talk in 57 years.

Leaving the personal pronoun out indicates more humility, and it could also indicate dissociation, like lying. It's ambiguous and/or contextual, though.

Might have something to do with the fact that the dialogue was apparently originally written in Polish, which usually omits subject pronouns (they can be inferred from the verb form). If the translator was Polish, they might have carried that over to English.

(Noticed how I dropped ‘it’?)

I heard something like this, but I figured with a 100 million dollar budget and an A-list actor, surely they had editors who would catch an error made through out the entire game, right?

I wanted to believe it was a poor stylistic choice to go with the "gruff upstart" image, but yeah I guess it really just might be basic translation issues...

Playing the game in Polish feels weird... as if the dialogue was originally written in English and then hastily translated. It's nowhere close to the first-class feeling of Polish version of TW3.

That seems odd, because I saw a marketing video where they showed the band Refused working with an English language coach whose job it was to a) go over the lyrics and b) the singer's pronunciation/enunciation to make that in-game band that Refused is playing seem more of an authentically American band instead of a bunch of Swedish dudes.

Maybe that’s just how people talk in ‘77 Night City.

My friend who played on PC basically told me the exact same thing. It runs smoothly on his gaming setup, but the game is too linear with pretty much zero replay-ability because of how shallow the world is. It's clear they left a _lot_ out of the game. Even features that would seem "basic" for an open-world game, like AI, are apparently very awful (cops just spawning randomly right around you but they don't chase you and oddities like that).

While the console issues themselves are huge, it definitely seems the game itself is missing way too much for what it costs.

It’s crazy because the Witcher and Skyrim (content, not bugs) didn’t have this problem with an equal amount of development time or less. The amount of content in the base Skyrim is still staggering, even if it had content cut. I wonder what happened here for it to fail in this aspect.

I don't know where the assumption that cyberpunk has little content comes from? There's a crazy amount of side missions and all missions support different outcomes depending on how you play. Skyrim I personally find frustrating because almost all missions are just shallow fetch/kill quests, even compared to Oblivion, Skyrim has loads of content and very little of it is interesting at all.

I think the issue is that a lot of people are trying to play this game like a cyberpunk GTA, which it just isn't, just like Witcher wasn't a medieval fantasy GTA. I see people going on a murder rampage in cyberpunk and then complain that the police chase that spawns isn't sufficiently realistic. Like......I don't feel like that's how this game should be played, just like it wasn't how Witcher was meant to be played. It's an RPG where the cyberpunk city is a background to an amazing story, it's not an open sandbox like GTA is.

And no replayability? The depth of character development is huge, that alone is worth another playthrough, would love to build a character that's built differently than my current one. And most missions support a huge variety of outcomes depending on decisions you made earlier and how you behave. If that's not replayability....then what it?

Blame CDPR’s marketing, not the consumers. Have you seen their marketing efforts recently?

Of course, I'm just saying that it doesn't seem to me like the game should be played this way, so I'm not surprised those who try are having a bad time.

At the same time, cops not acting like cops, or spawning right in front of you, is a problem.

They marketed it as a game that could played that way, so it's on CDPR for setting incorrect expectations, not on the people playing for doing what the marketing told them would be part of the fun.

It doesn't seem to you like the game should be played in the way they reinforced and strongly & continuously advertised?

And you're wondering why people are angry? It's your prerogative to cut CDPR as much slack as you wish, but let's not pretend that those who don't do that are in the wrong.

Now that is something that I would pay good money for, a steammpunk GTA, an artdeco GTA or a synthwave neon GTA (though a new Vice City will do).

I haven't played the game but I've seen a lot of their trailers. The original announcement trailer was all about police bringing in a cyborg person who went on a killing spree. Granted, that trailer is most of a decade old now, but their recent marketing is similar. I just saw a commercial saying something like "nothing is illegal in Night City... As long as you don't get caught". Even though it was coolguy marketing fluff, I assumed that the police AI would at least be at the level of 15 year old Grand Theft Autos

The game was not advertised as Cyberpunk Witcher. It definitely was advertised with a huge focus on the open world.

It has a Wanted system like GTA. The comparison is accurate.

Most character skills are damage addons. If you don't pick assault rifle, your going to have a pretty slow time. Crafting is pointless, augments are just another skill tree.

'The way it's meant to be played' was the same apologetics we got with No Man's Sky on launch. Like three people wanted to play NMS as an empty grind-a-thon in a chill atmosphere that goes nowhere.

Cyberpunk failed to finish development. We all know it, why the rub?

> I think the issue is that a lot of people are trying to play this game like a cyberpunk GTA, which it just isn't

I am 41 hours in and it definitely feels like cyberpunk GTA. Very much so.

>The depth of character development is huge, that alone is worth another playthrough, would love to build a character that's built differently than my current one. And most missions support a huge variety of outcomes depending on decisions you made earlier and how you behave.

I'm about 15 hours into a second playthrough and this is just patently not true. There isn't much variety in character building outside of combat mechanics, you pretty much always play the same V as far as narrative and dialogue goes. I was doing a second playthrough just to see how different things could be and intentionally looked for dialogue I hadn't seen the first time, my experience was that it showed how on-rails 99% of the experience is. At this point, I'll pick it up again in a year or two when they've added some content and hopefully fleshed out the open world somewhat.

>I see people going on a murder rampage in cyberpunk and then complain that the police chase that spawns isn't sufficiently realistic. Like......I don't feel like that's how this game should be played

I mean, then why are you able to go on a murder rampage and get in a police chase? It's just a basic level of competence that the game doesn't have. Park your car in the street and come back after the mission to find a huge traffic jam because the AI is incapable of driving around your car. Accidentally hit a civilian during a shootout with the local gang? Cops will just spawn 10 ft away from you and continue spawning until you die unless you get in your car and drive for 15 seconds.

Maybe you're lucky and the way you play doesn't expose you to a lot of the things people are complaining about but it seems kind of silly to dismiss complaints of game mechanics as "you're doing it wrong".

I think a lot of people are under the false impression that any of your "choices" in the game actually affect the outcome, and they think that during second or third playthroughs they will be able to unlock a different experience...

Unfortunately they're wrong... the game very cleverly designs some of the dialog or mission choices in a way that makes it seem like your choices affect the outcome, but in the end there is only one single choice in the entire game that affects the ending. And even for the side missions and other dialog, it turns out that almost every single choice will direct you to the exact same path/outcome anyway. They might give you very slightly different dialog responses from the NPCs, but that's about it.

All of the "choice" in this game can be summed as:

Character asks you to do something. Your responses are:

1) Sure, I'll do that

2) Sure, I'll do that but my response is going to be snarky

3) Sure, I'll do that but you need to give me more information first

4) No, I don't want to do that, but you're going to tell me that I can't refuse you so I'll end up doing it anyway

5) No, I don't want to do that right now but you'll message me later and I'll find out that I can't progress any further without calling you back and saying yes

It's very shallow "choice", and I personally don't get any entertainment from that level of "replayability".

>>Maybe you're lucky and the way you play doesn't expose you to a lot of the things people are complaining about but it seems kind of silly to dismiss complaints of game mechanics as "you're doing it wrong".

I think you're probably right, I'm 25 hours in and I haven't been in a single fight with police other than one scripted side mission. That's kind of what I meant - in GTA I just start going on a rampage randomly because it's a fun thing to do, seeing how the city reacts around you. In Cyberpunk I just haven't felt the need at all, there's too much focus on the story.

They shouldn't have said it would a cyberpunk GTA then.

They literally said immersive huge open world in their marketing videos. If you say open world, you're comparing yourself to Grand Theft Auto 5, and you goddamn well better deliver.

They didn't and now they're suffering.

Bad open-world games are hard to develop. Good open-world games are extremely hard to develop.

> It's clear that they just didn't have time to implement like half the gameplay they promised.

Yup. From an art/style perspective, the game is top shelf and legitimately impressive. From a gameplay perspective, big parts of it are barely there.

It's like the opposite problem MGS5 had. That game had a great gameplay loop and well fleshed-out systems but it obviously lacked the assets to make the story work or offer much variety.

This. Why are people saying the game is good when the AI is simply bad? Without a good sense of immersion and real world simulation like police response time and behavior, how is this game arguably any good?

> they just didn't have time to implement like half the gameplay they promised

That's because they promised a time instead. You can promise a release date or you can promise features, but not both. Rarely both for a game this ambitious. It makes more sense not to hype a game up or promise a release date, and instead maintain power over when the release date is.

Gamers don't care if they get a game 18 months later, as long as it's better. They'll bitch and whine but they will always still buy the game. They're not going anywhere. Best to release a finished RPG late than release a half-assed one on some arbitrarily agreed upon date. Hopefully CDPR will learn this lesson, as countless other game developers have.

This largely matches the recent narrative that "gameplay" should take a back seat to the story and art. Who would have thought.

I think the vehicles have a scale problem vs the roads, and they implemented some odd road pieces that just restrict movement even more.

When you get a motorcycle it immediately becomes a lot better.

As to the world, I'd have loved a lot more interaction between characters in the world, and with you. They tried to make up for it by having a ton of people on the street, but even so it feels a bit empty.

But having said all that, I'm still having a great time.

> The result is a big beautiful and empty world with a linear path.

This may be the #1 reason why I don't play games anymore. Every game made in the last decade masquerades as open-world and turns out to be a linear path. Either wandering outside that linear path leads to a total void, or you get annoying game behavior forcing you to go back to the linear path, or you get bullshit like death timers.

Marketing hype backfired. People are angry not just because the game was released buggy and unoptimized (although maybe standards are higher on consoles in this aspect). People are angry because they were promised a groundbreaking game, a landmark game, and got an unremarkable mix of Deus Ex and GTA. Except for raytracing, there's nothing exceptional about this game. No new mechanics even.

I watched the disaster from sidelines, but what makes me angry is that the hype was so strong it made gamers fight each other, blame each other, and make excuses for the company. Gamers are not to blame for the game except for the fact they preordered. The deceptive behavior was rewarded and costs were recouped from preorders alone. Yes, CDPR is taking a reputation hit, but fans will believe what they want to believe.

I think the hype was part of the problem, but the developers focus on the game might be the bigger issue. It's hard to me to say from the outside if the hype caused the lack of focus or vice versa, or was just an aggregating factor, but after beating it (and having a blast), I think it would have been better to release only some of the ideas with more polish.

The game was extremely well written in my opinion, the gunplay was good, sneaking worked and combat reasonably executed. As a result, the linear parts worked well, but it has a smattering of rough open world mechanics tacked on, just enough to draw comparisons to gta (which are all very unfavorable), and many rough edges around core gameplay things like vehicle driving, enemy ai, and scripted events triggering out of order / not triggering at all. And that's assuming you are playing on pc, and not a console brought to it's knees every hour.

My diagnosis is that it feels designed by committee with no one willing to make deep cuts, and as a result suffered from trying to be everything ever marketed to everyone, and ended shipping all the ideas both late and unfinished. They seemingly had no time to polish the core of the game because it was too big.

I agree the writing is exceptional. But other than that, all gameplay aspects are mediocre or even poor. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, driving, etc, have been made much better in games even 10 years older than Cyberpunk.

And let's not forget about the outright lies in all the marketing videos. CDPR promised many features which are nowhere to be seen, even on videos that were released weeks before the final release date.

> I agree the writing is exceptional.

Can you give some examples? I'm half way through act 2 and I didn't find anything exceptional.

What I did find is a lot of gameplay time padding. Wait for this or that to call you (instead of going on with the mission). And you can not actually wait, have to do other missions. Go through this interminable chat with an npc where you are being given options that don't alter at all the end state (that milltech lady for example). Have this unsinkable part where you find out all kinds of crap about a character that you met 20 mins before and most likely not going to meet again. Not to mention he tried to kill the protagonist in 2 of the pre(?)-prologues. Why did the fat fixer have to die? Why doesn't every vet that panhandles have a story about the wars? I would love to stay a while and listen...

I didn't play enough Witcher to see if they have the same kind of issues, but I am ready to bet most of the success of that series was caused by the content they had to work with, produced by a real writer. I can't stop to wonder if there wasn't a better idea to not get Keanu involved and use that money to hire a bunch of sf writers. Is like GoT (the tv series), while they had content to rely on, all was good. Then we got Season 8...

> What I did find is a lot of gameplay time padding. Wait for this or that to call you

You can just wait 24 hours instantly in the menu to get npcs to call you back. It was a narrative technique that I think balanced a sense of urgency while letting the player control which thread they want to pull on next, not meant to pad out the game. But I'd agree that the wait function in the main menu could have been introduced in a tutorial (As could most of the games systems)

The padding comes from the random events (Like assaults or robberies) that have no story, you just show up and start shooting (but don't hit any innocents, or the cops will suddenly show up, despite being too busy to show up when the bad guys shoot them).

Are you really surprised "the fat fixer" gets what's coming to him? He dies to show you how ruthless the corps are. He was already dead when the heist went south, and he knew it.

The character of Alt and the Johnny redemption arc was great for me. If you choose the right dialogue options Johnny basically realizes how being pure concentrated 80's sci fi action hero has made him toxic to everyone around him.

> It was a narrative technique that I think balanced a sense of urgency while letting the player control which thread they want to pull on next, not meant to pad out the game.

I actually appreciate that in this game. Nothing quite like open world games with incredibly high stakes where the narrative demands immediacy, but you want to mess around with side quests for a while. This gives you a chance to explore the world while remaining "in character".

> It was a narrative technique that I think balanced a sense of urgency while letting the player control which thread they want to pull on next

What are you on about? If I don't want to progress on the main story line, I can choose NOT to start the relevant mission. If I started it, I want to go on with it, NOT to wait for 24 hours. Not to mention that main story missions that consist in driving somewhere, going through a badly written dialog tree, just so you can wait to do it all over again is BAD WRITING. You want a good example of balancing the urgency of the main story, yet still allowing to explore the world? Fallout 3. All the beggars you meet demand water, the main goal is to sort out Project Purity, bring water to the wasteland. No forcing the player to progress in the main mission, no waiting, no nonsense. In short, good writing.

Here is another example of this wait bullshit simply padding the gameplay duration: the racing missions. Have to text Claire, then wait, then call her, then go to the place (far away from a quick travel point), then wait some more, than waste time staring at nothing because some npc wants "to get into my head", but misses the queue marked by the dialog option expiring and keeps at it for another minute or so. And to top it off, have the game crash twice in a row before gate 25. This was the second race and in a tragi-comic moment, the whole text-then-wait-than-chat-then-wait happened while Clair was right next to me, after finishing the first mission.

> The padding comes from the random events (Like assaults or robberies) that have no story

No, I can chose to ignore those events, they are not in my way to finish the game. All the wait shenanigans is.

> Are you really surprised "the fat fixer" gets what's coming to him?

What's coming to him? Did we play the same game? He was more than correct in his dealings with V, he got them the best transport option and the "killing of V" comes at the end, when he though that might save him. And his death doesn't help anyone and definitely does not prove "how ruthless the corps are", since Takamura is NOT part of a corp anymore and he had all the reasons in the world to keep around "the best fixer in NC". The fixers death doesn't serve the story at all. Heck, keeping him around as an unwilling partner to V and have them work together to survive would made a better story than shoehorning a best friends ever thing between V and Welles, which failed badly. Ffs, the dude tried to undercut V for 2 of the story lines and a crappy montage doesn't change that.

> The character of Alt

Didn't get there yet.

> the Johnny redemption arc

The dude detonated a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city. There can't possible BE a redemption arc from that.

I hope Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't mean nobody else will put out a cyberpunk themed game. Imagine if this game was made by Obsidian.

> Not to mention that main story missions that consist in driving somewhere, going through a badly written dialog tree, just so you can wait to do it all over again is BAD WRITING.

That's pretty diegetic though: in the real world you wouldn't expect everything to be placed right next to each other or that things would happen immediately after without time to research/track down leads/prepare/sleep on it/whatever.

The game tries to make up for it by offering outs: The skip time button prominently in the menu. The Wait Zones immediately outside most mission start locations which skip immediately forward to start the mission. (It took a bit to get used to finding these, there probably should have been a tutorial for it: they have a clock icon for their interaction and usually are chairs/benches to sit on or walls to lean on nearby to where the objective marker is. But they existed for every mission I encountered after learning to look for them.) Even the fast travel is something that is easy to overlook. As much as I enjoyed driving, the game was much better realizing that Fast Travel and walking/sprinting everywhere was generally faster and way more convenient than driving anywhere. (Which is an almost an ironic statement of the importance of public transportation in an urban environment.)

It's well written == "better than Ubisoft". But the gap is smaller than it used to be, and of the gap that remains the widest is in the lore books and notes.

> I watched the disaster from sidelines

How can you assert all the things you said if you didn't play the game?

I haven't played it either, but it's honestly difficult to get an idea, because I feel there's so many people complaining that didn't even play it.

There are forum threads and video reviews contrasting what was promised and what was delivered.

That doesn't make the game bad. Even with points being dropped for bugs it has got a 87 on Metacritic. It is clearly a great game and nothing to seem this upset over.

> what makes me angry is that the hype was so strong it made gamers fight each other

I mean, that’s really on them, isn’t it? It’s just a game. I don’t understand why people invest so much of themselves in something they have no control over or personal stake in (aside from maybe paying some preorder money?).

((As an aside: who preorders digital products????))

I feel like consumers really need to reassess their relationship with these big companies. We still seem so naive and overly susceptible to marketing strategies. Superficially people seem to be more cynical than ever, but we keep falling for this BS that is sold to us. What’s going on?

The word "fan" actually originates from "fanatic"!

I think video gamers have accumulated a lot of learned helplessness. We're supposed to believe that matchmaking, clients like Steam, Origin, Galaxy are about convenience for the user. It's actually about control. You can only play the game in the way they want. The system decides who you play with. You can't modify it unless you're explicitly given modding tools or map editor. Even playable demos are long gone. Most publishers don't do that because it cuts away the stream of DLC. In the end video gamers are stuck pleading to the publisher or developer because they have nothing left. With board games, making a mod is as simple as saying "let's make a house rule: (...)". Board gamers own their games. Once copy can be used with all your friends.

I’d agree if steam etc were the only way to get good games, but there is GOG and itch.io that are full of great games that are relatively (and often completely) unencumbered.

I like GOG and Humble Store very much, but they suffer from other issues. It takes many days for a patch to reach these stores. Many developers rely on steam overlay so much they don't implement "show FPS" feature. Modding or level editors can be restricted to Steam.

This makes sense. I've been playing the game on PC (thankfully very few bugs compared to everybody else it seems) and loving it. The difference? I avoided reading or watching anything about the game prior to release. So on fresh eyes, I just think it's a good, fun game that has the average number of bugs.

I played through the first 7 hours or so on PC, and, meh, the bugs aren't that bad. The performance is fine, but I'm on a RTX 3080 so that's to be expected.

What gets me is how utterly boring games have become. There's not really much of a game to even be played here. There's lots of talking, lots of sections where the characters are doing things and you end up pressing F to engage some action that continues the, erm, "action" to the next section. There are parts where you press W to get out of a pile of rubble (which engages the prescripted animation of your character getting out of the rubble) or "W or S to crawl", where S doesn't do anything and W makes your character continue his prescripted crawling animation. Press F to take your pills and watch your character perform his prescripted pill-taking action, etc etc etc.

The actual gameplay is very nearly nonexistent in the first 7 hours. It's just about 98% thinly-veiled cutscenes, where the only say you have in the "action" is pressing a button to make the characters continue to do the thing they're already going to do. Or picking dialog and listening to dialog. With maybe 5 minutes of really mediocre gunplay mixed in.

I don't really see how people have the patience for this. None of this is fun, none of this is engaging. None of this is high-quality enough storytelling to be as good as even the worst B-movie dialog and exposition. If I want to watch scenes where characters act out dialog and action happens, literally any movie would be better than this. I play games because I want to take part in what's going on. I don't want to watch someone else do it.

But, I recognize that I'm in the minority here, and most people would rank this game 10/10 if they had the right frame rate and didn't have any bugs. Because I guess people like this sort of thing now. Meanwhile I think modern gaming has just about lost me for good.

(Until I remember that Doom Eternal came out this year and that it's hands down one of the best games I've ever played, and I remember there's still hope for gaming.)

Just curious, can you recommend games that are pure fun gameplay?

I haven't tried Doom Eternal but it sounds like he's looking for a story-rich, choices-matter game, like The Wolf Among Us, or Life is Strange, or these tags on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=1742,6426 (People really liked Disco Elysium but I didn't much)

If somebody likes Doom, that’s basically the polar opposite of "story-rich, choices-matter game” — in the opening scene of Doom (2016), an NPC attempts to deliver some plot via video call; to which the player character responds by punching the computer screen and immediately going back to shooting demons in the face :P

Ok, but one of his main complaints was that he was completely bored by the story and that it was short and meaningless. Sounds like he wanted more and better story.

Horizon and Spiderman (original and Miles Morales) are both great gameplay wise. Spiderman is more of a button smasher but still a little tactical, Horizon on hard difficulties really makes you think on your feet while still being an rpg.

Outer Wilds is one of the best things I've played in years. I don't want to spoil anything because it's main appeal is exploration but think walking/space sim mixed with a platformer and a puzzle game. That doesn't do it justice because emotionally it's an incredible experience but unlike name rpgs the story is told through exploration rather than cut scenes. Best £20 I've spent all year.

Omg yes. Horizon Zero Dawn is still so amazing to replay. Amazing story, tight mechanics, and beautiful open world.

Definitely get Horizon Zero Dawn if you are on PlayStation. It is what I still consider one of the best games of the last decade.

People had expected cyberpunk to be as good an immersive sim as the first Deux Ex. It's not, and cannot live up to the hype. Regardless of the bugs.

This was one of my biggest complaints with the game, too! Playing the game felt like I was just going through the motions in a story that I was completely bored by.

The game doesn't have any of the whimsical charm that Witcher 3 had (like Gwent mini-games). It was just a boring snoozefest of a story with lots of dialogue and pressing buttons to go to the next pseudo decision.

Combat is ridiculously broken. Just get a tech sniper rifler and you can clear out entire enemy camps by one-shot headshotting them through walls. Not to mention the countless bugs and crashes. It was annoying having to save the game constantly every single time I did anything, because if I didn't, boom it crashes, and I just lost another 10 minutes of my life. I think the game crashed over 50 times during my playthrough.

And the elevators... I hate hate hate waiting in elevators! It's such a cheap and boring way to hide a loading screen. I don't want loading screens at all! I'm playing on a PS5, not an xbox 360 damn it.

I suffered through the game and finished the main quest line and was like, "That was it?". My character was barely even leveled up! My character was only level 15 and done with the main quest. They clearly wanted me to spend more time grinding repetitive side quests along the way (even though I did do a ton of them).

Needless to say, I uninstalled the game and requested a refund from Sony. Maybe I will come back to the game next year after they release the PS5 enhanced version and have addressed the complaints.

I feel the "reaction" is over blown. Especially when I see what some people complain about.

There's tons of legitimate criticism, pretty much pertaining to bugs but damn... I remember Skyrim being just as "buggy" but I don't recall the reaction being nearly as bad.

I'm bias though as I've played on PC and had a phenomenal experience. Last gen players should 100% get a refund. Beyond that though, I just don't see it. There's some other viable critisim but when I weigh that against what the game is I just don't get it. Its objectively the most detailed city in a first person action/RPG. It objectively has the most detailed quests:quantity. I can excuse the bugs... again though, talking from a PC experience with 0 real bugs. I can see how it would be annoying with bugs but I've played GTA and Skyrim, I can survive them lol

I really think it's mostly the issues with having advertized it for last gen consoles and then not actually delivered a playable experience on them. It sounds like there are indeed a lot of other bugs, but those seem like issues they would have been permitted to patch their way out of over time.

COD Cold War is another big title this year and is quite buggy, but it is playable in spite of those bugs on all the systems it was advertised to work on.

> Its objectively the most detailed city in a first person action/RPG. It objectively has the most detailed quests:quantity.

Sure, it's gorgeous and the on-rails scripted side-quests are fantastically written and animated, but driving around the city just makes me realize how empty it all feels because only the handful of vendors actually programmed to have an inventory are capable of interacting with you. But then on the other hand, they didn't animate half of the immersive shit you actually can do, like buying a drink from a bartender. It feels like a game that wants to be an immersive sim, but the second you try to immerse yourself in it you realize that it's just a massive facade.

This is far and away the biggest letdown of 2077 for me. There's no emergent gameplay. The world is simply a beautiful aquarium filled with schools of mindless, swimming NPCs.

Think about the rich interactions in Skyrim: you arrive in the town of Whiterun. Your inventory is full of junk so you drop some. A beggar picks up a discarded sword and excitedly asks you if he can keep it. Just as you say yes, a brood of vampires attacks! Peasants run for the hills, but your new friend and the nearby blacksmith joins your side and smashes them to bits with her majestic warhammer! The fight resolved, you decide you want that warhammer. So you wait for her to end her shift, head home, and fall asleep. In the dead of night, you steal into her home and snatch it for yourself. But her husband was awake and saw your robbery! The guards are alerted! You escape town with your life, but just barely. You decide to sleep off your wounds in a bedroll outside of town. But when you wake up, your eyes glow! You have fangs! You've become a vampire! So you decide...

I could go on. (Hell, I probably went on too long there.) Point being, Skyrim is flush with these unique experiences. Given CDPR's claims, I really, really hoped we'd get at least a few mechanics for unique encounters. But the world CDPR created is a beautiful corpse.

Nice description of the captivating nature of Skyrim. It had that promise at release but it took a year or more and the DLC to create the experience you actually enjoyed.

At release + 6mo? I forget... it was still captivating but had ragequit annoyance bugs and far too many crashes, still. I'm figuring "No Man's Sky" is about ready to look at, myself.

We must have played a different Skyrim...

I’m surprised the unavoidable progression breaking bugs are not the talking point. That isn’t acceptable in a fan creation from 2002, why is it acceptable for a AAA game in 2020? It isn’t. That’s why I returned the game. Animation bugs and unpolished gameplay are disappointing, but not over the invisible, constantly moving line of “what is acceptable behavior for game publishers”.

I played about 14 hours on PC before uninstalling it.

The performance was fine and I had minor glitches here and there. The story bits were simply amazing, but the gameplay needed another year or two of development. This is clearly an unfinished game and most of the promised features are not in the game.

I reinstalled Deus Ex Mankind Divided and the tutorial level has better gameplay (gunplay, stealth, hacking) than Cyberpunk.

I will certainly revisit it in a year or two. Hopefully CDPR will keep on improving the gameplay, not only solve bugs and performance on consoles.

Maybe I'll reach that point, but honestly, apart from a couple of asset glitches now and then, I'm loving the game.

The story is solid, the voice acting great, the gameplay is pretty darned good. I don't see what has everyone so upset I guess.

> I don't see what has everyone so upset I guess.

In part it's because many people (me included) think the execution of the gameplay is poor.

And the other major part is that the game simply did not deliver the promised features on all the marketing videos by CDPR.

> And the other major part is that the game simply did not deliver the promised features on all the marketing videos by CDPR.

Like what? I keep seeing this, but nobody is being specific about it. I’m genuinely curious.

There's a whole thread full of them on reddit[1]. I encourage going through the linked threads in the post, a lot of the details are crucial, and the sources for the "promise" are damning.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kcve8s/promi...

That's the secret: I literally had to look up what the game was about before I bought it because all I knew was the name.

Same. Graphics are excellent. Art assets are pretty well made. Human models look a little Daz3d like but it's fine. I don't have any performance issues on my Core-i7 9 series and RTX 2070. I do have an issue with a few gameplay elements though.

1: Driving feels sluggish, unresponsive, like I'm remote-controlling a buggie on the moon driving through molasses. I turn left and 250ms later I go left. Yet the wheels turn visually instantly. It's bad. Real bad.

2: Shooting feels like my bullets are digital slot machine values. I shot an enemy every 4th bullet does damage. I don't know what they were going for (Fallout?) but it makes gun fights tedious and not that fun. I feel less like a bad-ass pistol gunslinger from Blade Runner and more like a "pistolier" in a table top game of Fate. Gun fighting doesn't "feel" real-time like it should. Shooting a goon 12 times with my revolver (6 shot) at point blank range isn't my idea of immersion.

> Shooting feels like my bullets are digital slot machine values.

In a tabletop RPG they are literally rolls of dice, and CDPR set out to build Cyberpunk 2020: https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020

So, the question may be: is this an RPG or an Action/Adventure looter shooter?

Some time ago I built a battle simulation based on the Cyberpunk tabletop rpg rules and official weapon stats and whoo boy, was it broken. Pistols did almost no damage at all whereas assault rifles were pretty much destroying everything in one turn. I really hope CDPR did not lift the system straight from the rpg.

The tabletop rpg rules for cyberpunk are for tabletop. Where math can’t be done in real time because humans. I expected a real-time adaptation of the rule set. If they wanted to be true to tabletop rules, it would be turn based.

> Gun fighting doesn't "feel" real-time like it should. Shooting a goon 12 times with my revolver (6 shot) at point blank range isn't my idea of immersion.

Totally agree.

Going from a dialogue to a shooting scene is like going from a Rembrandt painting to Team Fortress.

>Driving feels sluggish, unresponsive, like I'm remote-controlling a buggie on the moon driving through molasses. I turn left and 250ms later I go left.

And I'd been thinking that my complete inability to drive in Cyberpunk 2077 was because of Stadia lag.

lol, I can’t even imagine the frustration. At that point, just let Jackie drive.

The braking of the cars reminds me of driving my Mom's minivan in high school, whose brake pads had been corroded by road salt.

I highly doubt the're gonna be changes on the gameplay. As you advance theres way more to do unlocking abilities and skills, but the core gameplay is the same.

I don't know, the gunplay and melee combat has been awesome for me. W/o perks and in early levels, the guns are pretty inaccurate, but once you start specializing into weapons you can do some amazing things. A couple examples:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kfllqm/john_... https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/kd7994/...

I understand that console players are having a really bad time, and CDPR definitely blew it in releasing the game in its current state, but I love the gameplay loop of the side missions. Sneaking into an outpost, hacking a bit, getting into a strong position, then breaking into a killing spree amidst the incredible soundtrack.

Did you expect an RPG to have better gunplay than an FPS?

For a game to launch unfinished and to turn out disappointing is pretty common. Batman Arkham Asylum, Assassin's Creed Unity and No Man's Sky come to mind. Some even required full reboots, such as Final Fantasy XIV and the current work on Artifact and Anthem.

What's different here is that this is the first that that a major release is getting delisted or refunded by all the major retailers. CD Project Red did not have a track record of thrashing, or shipping something half-baked. The Witcher 3's main game and DLC are among the most polished AAA releases ever, and great value for their price. This drove lots of people to be excited by Cyberpunk, since 2013.

It's not just a story about crunch and unmet hype. It's a studio that simply let a lot of people down.

Arkham Asylum was disappointing? The 2009 game? I thought it was universally loved

Arkham Asylum was perfect. Op is probably talking about Arkham Knight.

He means the PC release of Arkham Knight.

Arkham Knight straight up did not work on PC for my configuration for about a year or so. It would crash after one of the introductory sequences.

The studio also refused to let reviewers comment on the console versions, which is where a lot of the anger is directed. So you have a bunch of gamers who went on the PS4 version based on what they were seeing from the PC alone, not knowing the state of the game. The reaction wouldn't have been as strong if people knew what they were getting before committing

I suppose that refusal came in the form of an NDA, but even so is that actually enforceable? Seems to me this whole debacle essentially amounts to false advertising, and if reviewers failed to mention that the thing doesn't actually do what it says on the tin but claims otherwise, are they not in some way complicit?

I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea but I'm genuinely wondering whether a studio actually can order reviewers to stay quiet about such fundamental issues? Sure they can blackball the reviewer from future releases, but who cares if what they produce is crap anyway?

> […] and if reviewers failed to mention that the thing doesn't actually do what it says on the tin but claims otherwise, are they not in some way complicit?

CDPR didn't provide PS4/XBOX versions for review until the day of release, afaik.

They most likely can't but reviewers basically depend on the goodwill of the publishers in order to get pre-release copies for early reviews. If they don't get them they will simply loose out on money (reviewing the game 1-2 weeks after everybody else already did so is kind of pointless) and I'd guess a reviewer would risk getting essentially blacklisted by the whole industry as there is no reason to assume that a reviewer would uphold one NDA but not the other.

Game publishers also tend to advertise their content on said review sites and youtube channels so that would be another income stream gone.

All of what you say makes sense to me, but one thing still bugs me – is it not true that reviewers live and die by their reputation? If they brown nose publishers to not lose out on first mover advantage, to the point where they’re essentially aiding and abetting a bait-n-switch, does that not hurt their standing with the consumers of their reviews? Aren’t they in the trust business? Are their revenue streams so dependent on the good will and reach of publishers that essentially they are forced to be shills? I genuinely have no idea how this works, but it sure does seem odd to me.

I’m still curious about what potential legal ramifications there might be for a reviewer saying a product is great when in reality it doesn’t even work, and they know it.

It's true that reputation and trust matter - at least they should. I guess it comes down to the question if a large enough portion of consumers actually know and care about this stuff and would be willing to reward a more open/honest approach enough to actually keep a business running. It might ultimately mean that consumers would have to reward a site/channel that doesn't actually review product X - kind of hard to make a living on that when most revenue ist ad/click based. There might be smaller outlets/youtube channels that do exactly that and use patreon or similar support channels but the bigger sites apparently don't want to bet on that. There was some sort of attempt by consumers to highlight these issues a few years ago but that was completely curbstomped by the gamergate shitshow.

The console versions not being reviewed was a matter of no review codes being sent. Media were able to request review codes for all platforms, but they only sent PC review codes. The part that was covered by an embargo was that you were not allowed to use your own video footage - only the publisher-provided B-roll was allowed.

VentureBeat had a good article about the whole thing.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/12/16/cd-projekt-red-risked-the...

> The Witcher 3's main game and DLC are among the most polished AAA releases ever

Witcher 3 was notoriously unpolished at release with game-breaking bugs being a dime a dozen, though.

Let's not forget games like Ghost Recon Breakpoint which released as sequels to successfull games which ended up missing half the game systems from the original like AI teammates which they are adding 1 year after release due to popular demand. Like, how hard can it be to reimplement a system which you already had in the game before. Wouldn't a game source code for a system like AI be orthogonal to the rest of the game code and easier to just port over to a new game. I cannot believe a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can not have driving AI in a 2020 game. It's been done already with various success rates in 100s of games. How badly do you have to mismanage to have nothing after 5 years of development??

Assassins Creed Valhalla crashes for me every 15 minutes on rx480. I get that a game would lag, but how the hell can it crash? You have exceptions which you cannot handle on any layer of your code? The game lags when the map is open. What is happening in then code for the game to lag when a world map is open? And it doesn't stop lagging as if it's finished with calculating something unrelated. It just lags

Games are very complex interactions of various systems. There are many many ways that things can go wrong. Then you throw in the fact that you're on a significant time crunch and you're building a system that is impossible to test every interaction. They are complex

> The Witcher 3's main game and DLC are among the most polished AAA releases ever

what haha

TW3 (and 2) were pretty much unplayable when they came out. Took a good year for things to not be a bugfest.

Even with the very latest patches I still had a few glorious crashes in TW3.

There's a rumor on a Polish website that CP2077 underwent a major plot overhaul in the middle of development. According to this hypothesis, supported by some early quotes, there were initially going to be 3 mentor characters to choose from:

    Johnny Silverhand (tech solutions, tech weapons),
    Morgan Blackhand (handguns?, power weapons),
    Saburo Arasaka (Hacking, smart weapons)

It is said that 2018 e3 gameplay presentation featured the choice of mentors.

Then Keanu Reeves turned up. Eventually the marketing team had a brilliant idea to get more out of Keanu. And since he's so awesome, why not make the game MORE about Keanu... In fact, why waste budget and manpower on the other 2 actors?

This type of problem with high profile actors is endemic in movie industry. A movie with Bruce Willis or Ryan Gosling will be about Bruce Willis and Ryan Gosling. The actors don't have to even act that well because plot will be adjusted to play into their strengths.(Look how much screen time aging Bruce Willis got in Looper and the new Blade Runner!)

(polish) https://www.wykop.pl/link/5853285/czy-rola-keanu-reevsa-jest...

There are various speculations in the thread, including that the game is so lacking in its systems (police, NPC schedules, driving...) because they were ordered to cut them out. They were meant to be in the game initially, but major direction shifts in the development meant they had to reassign developers to something else.

Some content in the game seems to support this line of thinking. There's a quest with a monk that works slightly differently depending on which story act you're in.

There are some hints that developers really wanted to make a great game, but were gaslighted and bullshitted by the management. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-18/cyberpunk...

----------

If you want to know my opinion, I think CDPR also overestimated their ability. A modern, urban world works very differently than fantasy sword game. CDPR had 3 games to perfect the formula, then they jumped into completely different setting. I don't blame them, in fact I feel for them because it's nice to work on something different once in a while.

> I think CDPR also overestimated their ability

Totally agree.

Third person combat wasn't amazing on the Witcher 3, after 3 games polishing those mechanics.

Then suddenly CDPR thought they could pull off a FPS with stealth, open world, driving, hacking, etc. They simply needed more time.

> They simply needed more time.

They needed more games, not more time.

People forget that there are over a dozen games and expansion packs that make up the Grand Theft Auto franchise. They didn't just make GTA5 in a vacuum. They had all those previous games to draw on. They've been working on police chase AI since the games were top-down with 2D car sprites.

There was no chance that CDPR could do something comparable on their first attempt. They tried to do way too much new stuff all at once in one blockbuster game. They should have made several smaller games with those different mechanics first before trying to pull it all together in one game.

> There was no chance that CDPR could do something comparable on their first attempt.

Yes, they could, by hiring experienced game developers or people who previously worked at Rockstar or whatever. The work conditions at CDPR Poland are apparently so bad the turn over is so high that most people who worked on Wither 3 dev left for better opportunity... in the USA... CDPR was left with hiring rookies, and even some of them quit before the end of the dev cycle.

> They needed more games, not more time.

they needed to keep their talent. A large number of talent left after TW3. When a studio loses talent - which took releases and experience to create - it's not so easily re-acquired.

Or more modest expectations for a game outside their expertise.

The issue won't be solved with more time; the root cause is lack of appropriate planning, pre-production and project management needed for this level of complexity. Even if they're given 2 more years, CDPR is very likely going to waste 22 month due to fluctuating project expectations and repeat the same development fiasco.

> (Look how much screen time aging Bruce Willis got in Looper and the new Blade Runner!)

Bruce Willis wasn't in the new Blade Runner :)

You're probably referring to Harrison Ford.

Yes, sorry :-).

Hah, I thought you referred to Ryan Gosling in the new Blade Runner and just phrased it oddly.

Thank you. I was confused. I was like “I could have sworn there weren’t any good actors in the new Blade Runner”. ;)

Off topic but you should watch more Ryan Gosling. The Big Short, First Man, Drive. He's solid.

Okay, I was a bit lazy and picked a name off top of my head. There are definitely worse actors.

The plot with keanu was one of the few parts of the game that felt well executed. I think they could have done more cutting and focusing elsewhere too.

I've wondered this throughout my entire play through. Supposedly the lead voice actors for Red Dead redemption 2worked full time for ~5 years to get everything right (assuredly with endless rework). An A-list star usually spends 6 months to a year at max recording for a movie. How much did they have to tweak just to make sure they were getting the most from the Keanu investment vs. pivoting/cutting what wasn't working?

I was pretty excited about the game until the Keanu Reeves announcement. Something about having celebrities being a major selling point of video games never seems to work out well.

Symptom or cause is unclear.

> CDPR had 3 games to perfect the formula

That's a very good point. The first Witcher game has interesting ideas but not all that great just decent and innovative. The second was very much a refinement of the concepts from the first game, expanding the game world but keeping it within a workable scope. Then Witcher 3 basically took everything they'd learned from the first two, refined the gameplay even more, created a truly excellent story (not sure how much the story was planned as a trilogy) and on top of it all expanded it into an incredible open world. But by the time they built the world for W3 they'd had two games to refine everything and had a formula that worked.

Compare that to Cyberpunk and it makes sense that it's not as polished. You can make the same irritative argument for Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Spiderman etc. I'm super excited based on that to play the New Horizon game.

The big weight around their neck was releasing it on the last gen consoles. I suspect it wasn't that high on their priorities to optimise it on 7+ year old hardware.

It's a tough one, maybe they could have bit the bullet early and said this will be a PS5/Xbox SX/PC release only, but hindsight is wonderful thing...

Current (last?) gen consoles were the original release target though. They started development before the new generation was even announced.

Exactly. The problem is simple - CP came out a year too early. It needed a LOT more play-testing and refinement. Unfortunately few studios/published take a true "it's done when it's done" approach.

I'm not even sure why. Half-Life 2 was famously delayed by a ton and yet people don't really remember that - they just remember what a massive gaming milestone it was. The original release date was in September 2003 and it came out in October 2004 since it was so unfinished in 2003.

Stocks. Markets not liking it is the only reason to avoid delays (at least if your budget can support it, of course). Valve is privately owned and not publicly traded, isn't it?

Market is not really reacting positively to the current state of affairs either.

Remember this the next time someone tries to justify shareholder value theory as anything other than “that bad”.

Remember this one anecdote when someone suggests a theory has validity? That's hardly a sound intellectual framework to formulate one's model of the world with.

Empirical models need to be based in reality. Case studies have value.

Judgments on the validity of theories shouldn't be done based just case studies.

Well duh, that's a gamble. It works often enough so it is being tried again and again. It didn't work this time (or at least it seems so right now, we'll see how it turns out long-term though).

I'm not sure if it's a good gamble if you're at a point where you're not sending out console review codes just to prevent people from seeing what the game looks like.

At that point in time you're already way past taking that gamble.

It's hilarious to me, since those same users blamed Stadia for the late release. Oops.

Assuming they have a limited edition Xbox One X, that would’ve been a problem.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-one-x-1tb-console-cyb...

Feels like Xbox doesn't have the best track history when it comes to releasing game tie-in console bundles.

They made a Fallout 76 + Xbox One X console bundle back in the day, where the console was the same basic console as the regular edition, but came with a Fallout 76 download code. And since Fallout 76 flopped quite spectacularly, apparently this bundle was not very popular. And it was apparently so spectacularly unpopular that the Fallout 76 Xbox One X managed to retail for a full 62 euro less than the normal Xbox One X console by the end of it at one retailer at least (https://twitter.com/Mailia/status/1193539896704667648).

Well, maybe they made the right decision in this case by selling out the console before the game actually came out.

While I agree that they should have cancelled some of the console releases there seem to be major issues in other parts of the game that are only partially related to performance:

* Physics simulation: Cars flying through the air upon hitting pedestrians; driving through walls/lamp posts * AI: Police cars fail to pursue the player; NPCs and police "pop up" as your turn around

At this point I've enjoyed watching YouTube videos about the various bugs more than actually just playing the game.

Other games like GTA V, Skyrim or Deus Ex: Human Revolution have shown that believable world-building is possible with far fewer resources.

For 60€ players shouldn't be alpha testers for a half-baked game. It should have been obvious to CD Projekt Red that the game just isn't in a state where releasing it would be a good idea.

Yeah - I'm enjoying it and I think the world and story are really cool, but the driving physics are a bit of a bummer. It's buggy too, but not unplayably buggy. The autosave is good enough to be okay on a crash and it crashes infrequently enough to still be enjoyable.

I'm still happy I bought it and it's been fun, I think it'll get more stable over time.

On a related note, it sucks that GTA has been ruined by GTA online. 7yrs, three console generations. All the creativity that used to go into a new really great GTA game every couple years has been sucked into the boring money maker of GTA online. It's the console equivalent of in-app purchases ruining mobile games.

It's a shame low effort stuff like that makes so much money - I don't really understand what people see in it.

That was certainly a very conscious and no brainer decision for them as a business. The install base for next gen consoles is nil compared to the ~114mm PS4 and ~48mm Xbox one units sold. Given that they clearly wanted to sell to this customer base they damn well should have been optimizing for at least the pro models. I’d be choked if I was Microsoft or Sony because up until very recently (until the current base/pro split) the implicit contract with consoles was that games would run well on them. (With a few noteworthy exceptions in the past.) This release breaks that contract and this hurts confidence in consoles.

Unfortunately targeting next gen for a holiday 2020 launch isn’t realistic when you can’t actually get the hardware.

True, although I think the contract was broken quite a while ago, some games on the base PS4 are crippled - for example Control by Remedy games drops to single digit FPS in some sections

Yeah I was thinking of Control specifically when I wrote “until the base/pro split)”.

I think it's important to note that there isn't a PS5 or Xbox SX release. This is a game designed and advertised for the last gen consoles that happens to have compatability on next-gen.

Here's to wishing Cyberpunk 2077 a 'V' shaped recovery.

I love puns and this one was excellent, thanks for the chuckle.

Granted I'm playing on PC, but I'm 25 hours in and having an absolute blast, and just like the Witcher 3, I'm having more and more fun the further in I get.

Great fun, phenomenal graphics and seems well optimized, It's one of 2 flat-screen games to really keep my interest this year (doom eternal being the other).

I think it helped that I didn't really keep up with the hype train, I just watched a few trailers and bought it. Based on that, It's been great.

Same experience, 37 hours in. I have a friend who"s 64 hours into the game (he just finished his Ph.D. presentation, so it's a deserved distraction) and he's enjoying it just as much.

TBH, even the pretty prevalent bugs are almost "quirky", to the point I've only run into two situations where a bug had gotten on the way of the fun.

It's a shame the last-gen consoles are getting such a bad experience.

Can we talk about the AI? Why is the AI so bad? From driving, to police not being able to chase you in cars, to spawning randomly.

Does the game use Lua or a scripting language for the AI? If not, I think that would easily explain the problems, as it seems like so much behavior of the NPCs was never iterated on.

This is my main complaint. What's the point of having an open world if there's no mechanics. I can shoot a cop in the face and walk half a block a way and they'll just give up.

Yeah but in fairness, if you just stare at the cops too long in this game, they'll shoot you.

So I don't mind breaking out the monowire and fucking up every single one of them - even MaxTac - until they give up. Which is also funny... lop the heads off about 8 patrol officers and 4 MaxTac enforcers, and the cops get the message.

IMO it's just placeholder stuff from earlier in development that management didn't think was worth finishing.

Driver AI? Let's just assign them a route to follow to see how it looks, we'll worry about real AI later.

Police AI? Just give them gang member AI (shot on site, aggressive when looking at them) until we can do a better pass.

Wanted System? Just spawn in mobs to something happens when the player gets a wanted star. We'll sort the real system when Driver AI and Police AI is finished.

Etc. Etc.

Stadia offers a 10 EUR OFF voucher for your first game when signing up for a Pro 30 day trial. Until a couple days ago, they also had a Cyberpunk special promotion that upon purchase of the game you also got Stadia Premiere edition bundle (Chromecast Ultra + Stadia Controller) for free.

Moral of the story, for 50 euros I got:

- Cyberpunk,

- a 30 day Stadia Pro subscription,

- A chromecast Ultra

- A stadia controller

I'm blown away by the quality of Stadia, and the fact that Cyberpunk is running super smooth and did not experience almost any glitches / bugs.

Loving both the game and the platform.

I regret not jumping on this offer (expired two days ago)

I'm a Steam addict and don't do Stadia, but I have a chromecast ultra and I'm on love with that thing.

> It might seem impossible that a game this prominent, that’s been in development for this long ... could launch in such a state

The author is failing to account for the fundamental rule of software development: no matter how soon the launch date is, project management will demand that you add new features right now but never adjust the release date.

One of a common modern thought about how to be successful when software is involved, is to favor time-to-market, ship first and patch later. That in a good number of areas bugs are said to not really matter that much because you gonna have some, so why not having some more so that you can sooner have something instead of nothing.

One of the sector where this can arguably be applied the most is videogames. Nobody dies in real-life, nor has their data stolen, when a video game crashes (esp. a single player one). Or when the polygons are sometimes all over the place. Or when characters randomly T-pose pantless on their motorcycle for 2s. Or when scared NPC just disappear when out of your field of view.

Well actually this is a reminder that enough is enough, and that garbage is garbage, and not a sign of success nor wisdom. And don't even get me started on the consequences of this attitude for people doing the real work. Would CDPR codebase be more easy to improve right now if management had not imposed this failed launch after repeatedely telling plain lies during months? I don't know, but from my experience this is likely. Maybe on some axis the operation will have some net temporary positive results, but in the long run this is just a complete disaster: the reputation and trust that permitted such many pre-orders in the first place is likely broken for years. This will also affect other important things for their business: current or prospect employees might be less likely to want to work there.

This is also a reminder of how fragile the value brought by giant digital stores is, (if it is even net positive, considering your own priorities). Between Sony and MS selling unreviewed garbage to their clients, GoG refusing games for political reasons, and concerned digital stores commonly leveraging (abusing?) being for a specific hardware platform for imposing partial (only possible digital store) or total (if the only possible digital store is the only possible way to install software) monopolies for said platform with completely arbitrary and changing rules, sometimes even fighting local consumer protection laws, one might think carefully if the positive things that remain, if any, are worth it. The current overall situation may not be in the interest of the developers, and even less so of the users. At least I consider it not being in my interest.

I've been somewhat weary of this kind of approach to videogame development for a while now. You could possibly say that it's a function of the current size of the market.

But the demand for videogames was always dynamically tied to the quality of the product.

The EA update of Sim City was quite a memorable event of a similar class. My personal bugbear was Street Fighter 5. Duke Nuke Forever, and also, possibly Daikatana, were truly legendary death marches.

With these commercial failures in mind, The Last Guardian is actually something of a Sydney Opera House - esque miracle. Especially with the purported performance boost it gains on PS5.

A bit of a rambling rant. I hope they have a chance to fix Cyberpunk though, because this result sounds like a team of ambitious artists were bullied into rushing their work.

It’s like No Mans Sky all over again, except with more human genitalia customization...

funny how cyberpunk's woes are basically the inverse of NMS lol... no man's sky's tech was mostly there, but there was no content.

there's a good amount of story and voice acting in cyberpunk... but the tech to support it is extremely broken or not there.

No Man's Sky actually aged like fine wine with the updates they pushed over time. We still have to see what happens with CP2077.

If they do plan to milk the IP and eventually make a multiplayer for it, they need first to salvage this. I think I heard that they won't be planning the MP until 2022 or 2023, so I assume they'll be spending the next year at least fixing this up before working on the MP.

If it's like Witcher 3 they will sell expansion packs to further monetize CP2077.

I wouldn't hate this. I loved Witcher 3.

No Man's Sky has actually won a bunch of awards for an "ongoing game" now, most recently winning Best Ongoing Game at the Game Awards 2020, so maybe there's hope for Cyberpunk 2077 if they follow the same trajectory.

First time looking at Cyberpunk 2077 stuff online, after having just beaten the game at ~50 hrs.

Super surprised it's not being praised, it's certainly the best game singe-player I've ever played.

I can't believe the reaction I am seeing.

Part of the reason is that it wasn't supposed to be a "beat the game" (linear) game in the first place. It was marketed as primarily "open world" with a largely optional main quest line.

The problem is, if you play it that way (ignoring the main quests) it's pretty boring and repetitive real quick.

Skyrim, GTA V, and Breath of the Wild set the bar for open world games and CP2077 was marketed as pushing the bar. It did not.

You can't fix this game like you can NMS though.

I’m playing it on PC (3900x and 1080ti) and it’s really detailed and beautiful. The plot is a bit confusing and the NPC stuff pretty rigid. This game would be amazing as an online multiplayer game, and possibly with VR support for full immersion. It’s really beautiful

The game is great on PC, and sure there are some bugs, but nothing catastrophic. I've been playing the game on GeForce Now and I was pretty amazed with how much game streaming tech has progressed since it was first introduced. There's something amazing about playing Cyberpunk on my mac mini with ultra settings and ray tracing on. Latency's not even noticeable if you have a good connection!

This. Was an early adopter of GeForce now and now on stadia because of the free controller with a cyberpunk purchase. Can say streaming is the future. Looking forward to Mighty and other cool companies doing something awesome

maybe for single player games only

Doubt it. It's hard to tell the difference between console and streaming (I'll believe harder core gamers can still tell, but I can't). As streaming grows the servers will be closer and closer to the user. Already the main source of latency is not in the networking, and definitely not in the speed of light.

Interesting to contrast the outcome with discussions under the Unity S-1[1] and similar threads. Some engineers outside of AAA game dev complain that certain core tenets of software engineering are hard to come by in Unity & Unreal projects, while insiders claim that the kinds of stringent quality controls being proposed are untenable, and in themselves demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of how things work in the industry. Could a launch-flop like Cyberpunk 2077 cause the pendulum to swing the other way?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559

In that vein, keybindings are again a trouble point in CB2077 like it was for Witcher 3. And I wonder that can be ? From a complete ignoramus to VG programming, but not to programming in general, that seems like a really easy already solved problem, and certainly it is compared to the really hard problems VG run into. No hard coded values, swapable config objects, that seems like easy good practices ?

I'd really appreciate some perspective on this from someone who knows ?

Does anyone know what kind of sales revenue this game has generated?

I'm not a gamer but this is the only game I've heard off recently that has not only taken over my news feeds, hn, reddit, youtube and it was also on TV last night. I haven't seen so much media coverage (good or bad) for a game like this before personally.

Is all this bad publicity actually working out for them eventually? I know they are apologizng and everything but at the end of the day it's just a business and so is synonymous with sales.. when the dust settles was it a winner or a loser?

Revenue is kinda hard to estimate at this point when CD Projekt, Sony and Microsoft have opened up pretty generous refund policies for the game and with Sony stopping the digital sales entirely. CD Projekt said in an investor call that they would probably not disclose how much they lost in refunds.

I listened to it and ai clearly remember this second or third question, which they answered to by saying they couldn't just tell yet, because it was too early – they only had begun issuing refunds a few days before the call and didn't actually see the numbers. This also isn't something they can withhold as a publicly traded company.

>Q7: Thanks for that and regarding refunds – there’s no chance that the market will receive an update on the volume or number of refunds before the sales report around Christmas, yes?

>AK: We don’t know yet. Before Christmas we will release sales numbers, but in terms of refunds – we’re not sure if we’ll share this information outside of the company.

"Cyberpunk 2077 has likely already paid for itself. In a memo issued Friday [Dec 11], CD Projekt — the parent company of developer CD Projekt Red — said that its revenue from digital pre-order sales alone exceeds all of Cyberpunk 2077’s production costs and all of the company’s marketing and promotional costs for the game this year."

https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/11/22170468/cyberpunk-2077-s...

CDPR said they had 8 million preorders, and Steamspy is saying 10-20 million copies sold on Steam alone. The game industry has been growing quite quickly the past decade so it maybe isn't that surprising that they are certainly in the top 50 best selling games of all time already and could be in the top 20. It seems likely they will make quite a lot of money even with issues. Sony has a new more capable system to sell anyone disappointed with the performance of the old one so I'm thinking they will do quite well also and both of them are just playing up the issues for free media attention.

The game industry is strange, buy at release and you usually get a low quality product. Wait a year and not only will it work much better but you have a good chance of getting it 50% off as well.

It's interesting that it's getting so much media attention, considering many other AAA titles had a much worse release.

Even when Assassin's Creed Unity was released, there were some seriously game-breaking bugs in that game and unlike CyberPunk it wasn't removed from stores (so far as I was aware), but now stores are actively removing the game and refunding purchases.

I won't defend the game, but it's interesting to see the correlation with how hyped people were for a game, and the magnified reception when issues were encountered.

Maybe trying to hide the poor state of the game on consoles before launch has something to do with it.

And Ubisoft didn't? I'm not excusing either company, but it seems the reaction this time has scaled in proportion to how hyped people were for the game.

This is the first time I've heard of vendors pulling a big AAA game from their stores and offering refunds immediately.

> And Ubisoft didn't?

I don't think so. Unless I missed something.

Still waiting it to turn in a No Man's Sky, I hope?

I guess agile methods are just leaking into game development, and it means games cannot really have a release date anymore.

Anyway as always, ambitious game visuals must die and leave room for creative gameplay. Of course there is a market for visuals, but the AAA game market with their burned-out crunch time developers, high costs etc, will keep having trouble, to the joy of the many independent game developers who want to get the money blockbusters are getting.

>it means games cannot really have a release date anymore.

Well, if Cyberpunk 2077 is proving anything, it's that release dates matter. Especially if it's too soon.

When I was working with agile I would hear about “minimum viable product”. If Cyberpunk is the victim of bad management a la agile, then the stakeholders clearly don’t understand what a “minimum viable product” looks like. MBAs can’t bend reality.

I think culture plays a huge factor in the way we develop software in general, not just games. Things like how acceptable we see overpromising features in software, or cutting corners or delivering unfinished products, etc.

Take the contrast between AAA Japanese games and western games for example. Japanese games are often less ambitious and the scope is smaller but the final product is generally way more polished. The shitshow that is currently going on with Cyberpunk (or back in the day with the mentioned No Man's Sky) would be unthinkable in a FromSoftware or Nintendo game for example. The people at these studios probably go through a good amount of crap as well, but the end product is just so remarkably different. I remember playing Persona 5 on PS3 and the experience was just great. There were obvious visual differences with the PS4 version, but I think the game was just as enjoyable from day one.

In the end, some companies have a minimum standard for quality and adhere to it, while others just straight up lie and deceive and have this toxic "anything goes" culture. It's unfortunate that we as consumers still reward the latter kind.

Not going to lie, I feel pretty vindicated about avoiding the hypetrain. I had a feeling something like this would happen. I still want to play the game, but I'll wait for a few patches before I purchase it.

The “launch disaster” is possibly more overblown than the game was overhyped. I guess probably avoid it on base last gen consoles. Everyone I know in real life is enjoying this game despite occasional bugs. Cyberpunk is about as buggy now as Fallout 4 is after years of patches. People on the internet get way more enjoyment being overly dramatic about games than actually playing them.

Ironically there's something pretty cyberpunk about all this, from the angry reactions to the development hiccups to the description of the bugs themselves

The game is not nearly as broken as the butthurt "community" on Reddit and other sites would have you believe.

I've played this game for about 80 hours on a PC, it hasn't crashed once and I haven't encountered a single game-breaking bug.

Sure, there are T-posing NPCs here and there and the vehicle AI could use some work but it's really not that bad...

Skyrim has been out for almost 10 years now and at times it still feels more broken than Cyberpunk...

What really drives me up the wall however is people blaming CDPR for this. It's 100% the investors' fault. They pushed CDPR to release the game ASAP and immediately after the release started bitching about how the game is broken... The Investor Call transcripts on the CDPR website make for some... interesting reading.

And if I may offer a personal opinion, they should've focused on PC and next-gen consoles and left the last-gen port to an external company who specialize in this kind of thing...

I have been playing this game in Google Stadia since last week and it has been mostly a joy. It has crashed 2 times, but that's all the bugs I have encounter. My only complain about the game is the npc AI is pretty low, but then you can always treat it as an arcade rpg fps kinda game. In any case I have been enjoying it a lot.

Works very well on Stadia. Didn't expect this game would make a case for Google's streaming platform.

Now if Google were so kind to add ray tracing to make it look as good as on a RTX 3080 :)

The mere fact that CP2077 is still called 2020's biggest game launch is a testament to how much overhyped the game was. Biggest by what measure? Nah. Most marketed.

I really do feel bad for CDPR in a sense, because people have been waiting on this game for 7 years now. Hell, I actually forgot the Announcement Trailer released in 2013, a full two years before The Witcher III.

That said, they probably needed either another 30-50 people working on the game from the start, or they needed another 2-3 years to totally flesh the game out, which in reality is what happened with The Witcher III. The last patch for that game was released in 2018.

To build a huge city from the ground up is a monumental task. Rockstar already has a lot of assets from earlier GTA games available. CDPR had to do this all from scratch. I think a Cyberpunk 2077 II will be a fantastic game in 5 or 6 years.

> I think a Cyberpunk 2077 II will be a fantastic game in 5 or 6 years.

Assuming you can patch the missing systems back without disrupting the game balance and stuff. Will the voice actors hang around forever to modify plot lines? The game doesn't react much to your actions. Assuming unfinished systems even make sense in broader context and will interact nicely when fleshed out. If you make civilians properly panic and run away, or call police, won't that break some quests? How many cases do you have to handle in a quest if NPCs start wandering around?

Eh, I'll buy it from a discount sale in two to four years if they've fixed all the bugs.

Don't do this, though, I need you to buy it fresh so that new games continue to be made.

Eh I played about 100h on pc and it's great. Bugs were very minor for me.

Ai really sucks though and netrunner build is absurdly OP. Once you get suicide and cyberpsychosis + deck that spreads ultimate hacks to two enemies, you turn into a death god, remotely forcing people to kill themselves. Every fight turns into breach->suicide->suicide->suicide at which point all nearby enemies are likely to be dead. Suicide hack really shouldn't be in the game, or at least make it so that netrunners can protect allies and can't be suicided. At first it's fun but gets boring.

Technical issues aside, the story has also been criticized as being shallow and of little substance. The most critically acclaimed open world games e.g. RDR2, Horizon Zero Dawn etc. have very deep and intriguing stories while maintaining the world as “open” as possible. Even the Witcher is another example. Cyberpunk sounds like a case of massive overhyping and under delivering. Some fanboys here and there are unwilling to face the reality, but most reviews I’ve read seem to be sober and corroborate the above point.

Really? I've heard nothing but good stuff story wise though I've deliberately avoided spoilers.

So far to me this game is a slightly better than average shooter with some shallow RPG and stealth elements.

I’ve been a gamer most of my life, learned my lesson about hype a long time ago, but also just don’t assign as much importance to games in general as much anymore.

I hope they continue to improve the game, now that it’s just out there it will be easier to fix? Or maybe CDPR should just give up and hand over mod tools so at least the PC community can create the game they wanted for themselves.

Sorry, not a spicy take, but there are enough of those :P

Two words: Overpromised, Underdelivered

Underbaked, underproved.

I saw a stream today where they were sponsored to play Cyberpunk. It reminded me to refund the game.

I have been playing on the PS4 Pro (approx. 10 hours) and so far my experience has been good. Yes, there were one or two glitches - a character walking into the elevator through closed doors, one or two disappearing cars - which can break immersion, I get it, but I have seen such things in a lot of other games at launch. I wonder as a developer myself, why aren't these obvious things not fixed by the studios? Is it so that they are just at the bottom of the "todo" pile? There is a LOT in the game just from the point of view of skills, perks, cybermods and whatnot. And the second patch (another ~18GB one) just arrived last night for the EU region. I hope this will be a great game in a few months and attract new players. I did read some articles about "lack of depth" and "wonky AI" and the way these pieces were written did make me feel uncomfortable - I'll see how I feel myself before judging the game too harshly.

I went through this, as I tried the game first on my Windows 7 PC (it had stated support for Win7). Crashfest. After I upgraded to the latest Windows 10, latest Nvidia drivers etc. I've played 40 hours without a single crash or bug. Its an amazing game, so incredibly detailed. I guess they should have done a lot more testing on consoles though before releasing on them.

I liked the game at first, despite not being able to play it on high settings with my 1070, but today I couldn't launch the game no matter what I tried.I made a copy of my save files, took advantage of their return offer, and will get it again once it's fixed. But I'm not letting them keep my $60 until then.

"adolescent tone and its eagerness to objectify women’s bodies", "or the game was crashing so often that it was barely playable. Several scenes were reported to have caused epileptic seizures"

This is why we can't have nice things. Stuck up snides, sub-par hardware and a small subset of people with a terrible disability.

I'm not blaming epileptics, but is it really fair that _EVERYONE ALWAYS_ must adapt? Sure, an option to turn off those effects would be nice, but I'm sure we will just all have to do without them.

I am blaming last-gen support, and probably current-gen too, actually, I'm blaming CDPR for trying to support it in the first place. Just concentrate on making an awesome game on PC, and no, it does not have to run on a 2 year old potato, be cutting edge, set system requirements for tomorrows most high-end gear, if that's what it takes to realize the vision, hardware will catch up.

Back in the day, DOS games were released that didn't run well on anything when they came out, but they turned out to be among the absolute best games of their time! (Carmageddon as an example, came out in 1997, but you needed a computer from 2000 before you could run it smoothly in high-res mode at a good framerate).

Now we got this 1.05 update, which is clearly meant for the consoles, sure, there were some story-progression edge-cases fixed, but they also seem to have included the console performance fixes, so now the game looks like crap. View-distance is short, everything fades in and pops up.. Distant car traffic is now clearly 2d sprites, and if you go there, there is not even car.. It seems they introduced the road-population algorithm from "sim city 2000", so you will now have a section of road fully backed up, and the cars just dissapear when driving into the next section.. You have npc characters that look so much worse now. They basically sacrificed the good game to make it run on the bad hardware.

I'd really like a "Not running on a potato" option, even with every setting at its max, the game looks worse with this patch than before.

"A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time" - Shigeru Miyamoto

What I'm really looking forward to is the modding community. A game about cyberpunk hacking and bodymods can only be enhanced by customization. What the communities have done with Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout series is amazing and I am sure we'll see some very good mods for 2077.

Before the dawn of the DLC/ patching, a release like this wouldn’t even be possible no matter how hyped it was. Games would be delayed, but releasing a broken mess would be a cardinal sin since nothing could patch it once it was on disc.

People who preorder games aren’t the brightest, and may not have the best self-control. Remember those death threats?

Part of the reason for the review bombings of the recent past is that those same people will write the first user “reviews”.

Almost none of the user “reviews” I’ve seen in the beginning seemed to have any thought about the writing, which is the main mission of CDPR. It was all complaints about graphics and bugs.

It is like a backlash for the industry that started to milk people who would preorder.

(Not trying to excuse CDPRs action to push this game out on base consoles no matter what of course.)

This doesn't seem to explain how this happened at all, just a rundown of what has happened so far.

One thing I'm curious about is how much possible shelter in place / remote working could have impacted this launch. I know on my job, a lot of decisions are made due to inertia and processes that were built when we all could collaborate in person. Feels like there's a degredation in performance but it is not perceptible fully and without in person collaboration we are unable to course correct when absolutely necessary.

Note I have no idea what it was like to work on this game post COVID and i'm merely speculating!

Don’t preorder games. In fact don’t even order games, until they are a few months old. Now is when you should be eyeing the releases from the holiday 2019 season.

Right?!? There’s no scarcity at all, now that we have digital distribution. No reason at all to preorder.

Except for Nintendo 1st party games. The stache has never let me down.

I think [these][0] two [guys][1] pretty much nailed both sides of the same coin.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws9nljEbBhs [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eymHKA7vncc

The game lacks smooth open-world interaction. My immersion was instantly ruined when I realized how static the world is when you drive around. Likewise, AI is completely underdeveloped and I was under the impression that it would be more interactive.

Other than that, the graphics are good. Story is somewhat good but lacks in general progression for each life path.

This is still a game with typical 9/10 scores. The PC release doesn’t seem buggier than comparable titles.

The last-gen console version obviously wasn’t finished but someone on some level of management still decided that a Christmas release of a buggy game on ps4 was still more important than a release of it in spring and just a pc/ps5 release of a decent game for Christmas.

>This is still a game with typical 9/10 scores.

This says far more about the games industry and journalist incest than it does the game itself.

Let's not forget about Anthem in that same club. Billboards and ads everywhere followed by massive disappointment.

It's nothing like Anthem. CP is a good game that was rushed out, Anthem was just bad.

Agreed. Youtubers talk about the bad stuff in CP because that generates the most clicks, and people who haven’t played the game get the idea that it’s like Anthem. Meanwhile, most PC players are 20+ hours in (On average! In a week!) and having a blast.

This feels like a Reverse Streisand Effect. I've heard more about this game than any other game launch because of the bugs + people on HN and Twitter saying it's cool, and now I want to play it.

So Sony removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store because it ran like crap and CD Projekt Red did not give refunds to players.

THIS is why curated stores are a good thing. You'll almost never see actual users whining about the App Store; usually the complaints about "walled gardens" are from the companies and devs who prey upon users and would love to have a free reign.

Too many times I had a shitty experience with an app or service I paid for and Apple refunded me without question, but I've almost always had to fight an uphill battle to get a refund directly from developers/publishers (currently against Couchsurfing, whose app bypasses the standard In-App Purchase system).

I hope they treat it like No Man's Sky and not like Anthem. They promised a multiplayer next year so that makes me hope they keep updating it the next couple of years.

Cyberpunk without cyberspace is not cyberpunk. It's just punk.

I'm having a great time with the game, the bugs weren't such a big issue for me as they are explained everywhere.

I guess people are way too sensitive

Night City is beautiful, it just deserves much better AI.

Makes me wonder about the link between critical acclaim, commercial success, and production time.

Apparently, Avatar 2 has been in production for 13 years..

I hope CD Project Red devs are reading HN today. I want them to hear: if you feel that the whole world is against you - it's not true.

Many people are silently enjoying the game and you will not hear as much from them as from the whiners exactly because of this - they have nothing to whine about.

For me, this game already took the place in my personal Hall of Fame: next to Oblivion, Red Dead Redemption 2, and GTA SA.

Thank you! And you should know: you’ve proved that you are professionals. Don't let your managers make you answer for their promises. Don't feel guilty, you should be proud actually.

The main issue is not that people aren't enjoying the game, but that CDPR outright lied with their marketing videos.

I still don't think that marketing videos is the developers’ fault.

CDPR didn't produce and publish those videos?

CDPR is made up of developers, artists, QA staff, managers, marketers, a board of executives and other roles. Journalism reports and publicly available call transcripts are painting a picture of internal conflict between the creators and leadership. In this context, “developers” means the creative roles within CDPR.

Developers as in the people writing code? Sure. Developers as in the company developing the game? Absolutely.

Is it HN? Developers as fucking developers, who are writing the code.

That's how the gaming industry works, and has at least since the 90s.

The PlayStaion 2's CPU was called the "Emotion Engine" supposedly because it had the power to emulate the human mind.

Don't listen to any direct marketing, and certainly not from the games industry.

There’s a special brand of “clearly bullshit” marketing. The CP2077 marketing campaign was properly deceptive. Features were stated matter-of-factly and we all technically feasible.

I bought CP2077 after watching this video. I returned it the next morning.

https://youtu.be/BO8lX3hDU30

There was similar backlash with Fable 1. Peter Molyneux talked a big game and didn’t deliver. I’d argue that Fable 1 at least made a genuine significant effort to have “actions affect the game”. Mechanics changed from behavior. That was considered a AAA disappointment in 2004. Now I long for the quality and depth in 16 year old AAA disappointments.

There was similar backlash against every open world game, particularly RPGs.

Skyrim and GTA for instance were just as bad with the progression breaking bugs on launch. Part of me wonders if that's why both those companies seem more focused on releasing the same games with their decade or so of bug fixes rather than take another stab at the PR gauntlet of managing expectations of an open world game.

The crashing bugs in the low end consoles is unacceptable (and Sony and Microsoft are just as much to blame. You shouldn't be able to pass TCRs with crashing bugs, so they knew what was coming and allowed it anyway), but the progression bugs on launch like this is par for the course for the past couple decades of gaming.

I don’t remember a similar backlash against Assassin’s Creed (specifically: lying about features). I don’t remember any hype for that game, but it delivered fun, new gameplay.

I do remember the launch version of AC being rather buggy. Perhaps that was a signal of things to come.

There was absolutely huge amounts of backlash against AC, as well as hype.

People complained that it was a shallow facade of an open world game, with at best a handful of formulas for encounters, where you could beat the whole game with dodge then attack, and escape any situation by running a hundred feet.

It was billed in pretty much the same way as Cyberpunk with the idea of AI cities that lived and breathed.

They set themselves up for failure when they teased a release date for the game of when it would be "ready" 7 years ago.

The game is incredibly good. It must have some serious issues on consoles to get this bad press.

Working rather nicely on Stadia.

Seems like overworking your developers to meet a deadline is not such a good idea after all. What a surprise!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-29/cyberpunk...

Not much of a “how” here in this article; little attempt at insight.

Incumbent consoles are really holding the whole industry back.

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I hope someone makes an open-world demake of Cyberpunk 2077.

This is the best game I have played in perhaps a decade. There is dozens of bugs, but nothing big enough to break my enjoyment.

PC users, wheat from chaff

Hoist up roger high and laugh!

Never more than ten bucks pay, for

Same damn game as yesterday

Keyword: Wait.

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