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Comment by tetrisgm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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

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

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.

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