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Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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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.

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