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Comment by djhworld | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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)”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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