CD Projekt Red is under investigation
mcvuk.com
mcvuk.com
I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.
The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.
That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.
I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.
I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).
It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.
However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned.
While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build).
All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.
That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.
I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released.
Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.
We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice).
DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.
Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues?
On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.
Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline.
They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.
That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique.
It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.
If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.
This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype.
They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure.
EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.
From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.
This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:
Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds.
Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?
Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.
Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.
Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.
That's sort of what I'm alluding to. Personal responsibility doesn't work when you need collective action, so something else needs to step in to fix this. Reminding gamers to not pre-order is pointless.
What's curious, and I assume therefore legally-reasoned, is the consistent lack of preparation for blow-back by companies. Some part of CD Projekt Red knew the game was broken on older consoles.
It feels like the only real solution to this is to have legal QA documents, signed off on by QA (as factual) and executive leadership (as read and understood).
If there's a magically missing set of older console tests, someone in leadership goes to jail. If leadership publicly misrepresents the stability of the game despite knowing about substantial defects from QA reports, someone goes to jail.
Who cares about video games, but this is indicative of a broader social problem allowing executives to feign ignorance and create systems that deflect blame downward. Either you're running the company or not. And if you are... then the legal ramifications should ultimately land at your feet.
Now I realize I purchased a game that was reviewed on what it will eventually become a la No Man's Sky, not what it was on the day of review.
Sure, the crashing didn't affect me, my configuration was more or less normal I guess. Instead what I got was a hollow game that has a lot of hooks ready for eventual expansion sometime in future patches. That didn't deserve the 91% it had when I first bought the game.
I don't blame fellow gamers. I blame the reviewers.
Even for digital games, there's still approval processes where the first parties would have to test the game out. This process involves scheduling people for it; you can't just go to the front of the line as there are other games that have been scheduled for certain slots. (Which hilariously, it was rumored that CP2077 was given the 'don't test, push live ASAP' treatment.)
At lastly, all payments from the platforms and retailers are based on the actual release date. Unless there's a specific contract, games are not paid until months after release. Physical preorders don't pay the developers, they just help with preventing over/under stocking. (And digital preorders are... functionally worthless beyond the psychological value.) The release date starts the payment timer. When hurting for cash, releasing can start that timer.
The processes above can really benefit abusers who decide that "making street-date" is the most important thing above all other concerns.
Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.
From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they're a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an "early-beta" like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we're releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you're getting the beta now and we'll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I'm not sure if the game media would care.
The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".
If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.
Does pricing, pre-orders, or online play have anything to do with this? It feels weird that a sports game can change a few names and ship a $60 title, but a company like CDPR goes through absolute hell and still ships a dud -- what's the incentive for that?
The dynamic is the same in films, where all of the studio's profits come from a few blockbusters (sometimes called 'tentpoles'), and in publishing, where all of the profits come from relatively few bestsellers, and got that matter in venture capital, where all of the returns come from a few unicorns.
BTW, you might be interested to note that in film at least, the "work to the bone" component is largely missing (not that film crews don't work hard, they do), and that the film industry is unionized to the hilt (Screen Writers Guild, Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, etc. etc.), nor is pervasive unionization any sort of barrier to incorporating equity compensation (often in the form of residuals) for key talent.
This doesn't make sense. The game was announced 8 years ago, and it was delayed 8 months. The company said the product was ready and they published a product that was not ready. I've delayed my gratification 8 years for it.
But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates.
The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now.
I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.
CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.
I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.
CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.
The graphical details are amazing and the art direction great in cyberpunk (disregarding the bugs and stuff on console). But it's very much a high production value game, but without the singular vision that would've made it an excellent immersive sim game (ala Deux Ex). And this missing singular vision is due to the lost staff that had this element for TW3.
Same here. I bought it on PC via GOG, and while it was rough and unstable, I happily put about 100hrs of game play into it.
Honestly, they should have released it as under-development on platforms like Steam that support such designations. It's pretty common for studios to release games in an alpha/beta state. At least that way, gamers would know that they are getting a potentially buggy release.
For consoles, they straight up should not have released it until v1.07 at minimum. That's where they really screwed up. The game is in a much less playable state on the PS4, and console gamers in general are used to a much more polished gaming experience.
Look at me! Look at me, I got these awesome new pants and I also shat in them.
I bought the game a few days ago and, apart from the NVIDIA RTX timed-exclusive, I haven't run into any issues with it. It's already a touch above the usual Witcher release.
It's also worth noting that, at least from my perspective, there was a vocal crowd begging for the game on account of "something to do during the pandemic, assuming bugs warts and all". I'm not sure if this is why they released an objectively non-functional game to previous-gen consoles, but I would be inclined to believe the excuse.
People should have learned this lesson after No Man's Sky. If people are merely conjecturing about possible gameplay and features that they don't even know will be in the game, they're going to be dissatisfied with the game.
They made promises about work environment that weren't fulfilled.
They blatantly lied about previous gen consoles performance. PC gamers are used to games not running well, but main appeal is that games usually run within the baseline. CP2077 is unplayable on PS4 and XB1.
CP2077 isn't TW3 level of unfinished. I think CDPR has bitten off more than they can chew.
CYBERPUNK 2077: Lies, Excuses, & Sycophantic Fanboys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mKYZVtjgoY
CYBERPUNK 2077 - Early Reviews & CDPR TOTALLY Misrepresented the GAME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko33FH1IItI
CYBERPUNK 2077: INFLUENCERS & JOURNALISTS Are Also to BLAME
The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC.
It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.
You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.
Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.
From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam.
If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?
> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze...
Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.
Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.
Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.
Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.
tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools
I think the absolute worst bug I encountered was because of this, but I don't believe the story pathway that triggers it was uncommon. In fact, that condition apparently has a major effect on the story later.
Basically it was part of a main story quest where you have to wait a day for a character to call you before the quest can continue. But I never got a call. I saw a lot of threads on the issue, and it seems the bug happens if you did some optional dialogue right beforehand. But unlike other optional dialogue in the game, this optional dialogue was really hard to miss. I had to actively run past an NPC to avoid it.
I ended up losing about an hour of gameplay from that bug :/
I agree with you that it was likely because they changed something last minute and never checked it again; a QA failure for sure. And my theory is the COVID situation made QA testing a nightmare. Still ... that bug was brutal. Every "wait for X to call you" quest after made me anxious.
I bet it would have been met with less backlash if they delayed only the PS4/Xbox S versions. Players must expect some Day 0 bugs from games this large.
From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.
At the end it's always people fault. I don't say it's all ok with CP2077 game but people were so much depressed at the end of 2020 that even if this game worked they would be angry cause everyone demanded different things, probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems - all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas. If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great. I see that most of those who are angry wanted GTA in future and are now pissed that they can't play it like GTA and they're trying to make it GTA using various mods. You can just go and see what mods are most popular - those are mods that mimics GTA game. They're probably even not target group of this game and shouldn't play it but they're like junkies and even if you tell them that they don't have to play this game and they can refund they're be angry about it cause they want to play this game how they like it and they want to play it like GTA. That's insanity.
They also have all of the Batman Arkham games! Can you imagine if Warner Brothers released DRM-Free versions of the Batman movies? That would be practically unprecedented, and yet it's relatively common for video games, largely because GoG has been pushing for it.
It would really suck if GOG got caught up in the Cyberpunk fiasco.
People are also conformists so they believe new is better. Most of them don't want to wait for this better to arrive, if they wait, they imagine things how this new stuff will look like and create false dreams.
They didn't invested time, they wanted to have things they imagined to be good - nobody imagine bad stuff for themselves. They lived in this imaginary world for long time and created pyramids and flying cars and as always at the end reality hit them hard. The bigger your imaginary world grow the bigger slap you get at the end - that's simply called life.
The real problem is people don't have much freedom these days besides internet and games due to how other things outside looks like. And world looks like this cause of the same people who think they live in the world they imagined not in the real world. The insanity grows bigger and bigger and sometimes blows. When it blows people are angry and fight. After that there is peace cause they go back to their imaginary world full of borders they already created.
For consoles such the PS4, the game wasn’t just glitchy, it was unplayable. You couldn’t complete the main storyline if you so desired.
I also agree with you that there were insane expectations - however Vice City had a better AI than this and it was self damage - but they released a game for current gen consoles, charged people for it, and it turned out the game was unplayable. That is a big issue.
Now compare it with series about police / gangsters or war.
Although I appreciate the hard work of the developers and respect them for it as a developer, as a consumer I don't care if they paid 5 developers or 5000. I care about the final result, and the truth is I've never seen a game this broken (even though I played assassin's creed unity).
> probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems
Probably not, do you have any data to backup that statement? 41% of the sales are consoles[2] and the game is basically unplayable for xbox one, xbox one s, PS4 and PS4 slim. So broken that it was even retired from the play station store. So to get that 90% you would need 100% of the PC users happy and over 75% of the consoles users happy, which isn't very realistic if oyu ask me. And even on PC we can't assume 90% are happy, PC player base has shrunk 79% since launch[1] and those are the happiest users. The PC (again, the best one) has about 24.9 negative reviews in metacritic[3].
The story seems solid and I'm enjoying it so far, but saying that you can go through it without problems is simply laughable. I haven't had any crash so far but I needed to restart a few times because the game entered an unplayable state, such as being unable to pick a dialog, draw a weapon, or entering a location. And I've played less than 5 hours.
> all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas
I only opened it last week, the game is still unplayable.
> If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great
It's a videogame, not a novel, even though I appreciate a good story (and so far it seems REALLY good), and even if I think it's one of the most interesting cities of any videogame ever, I also expect proper gameplay. And even dialogs are kinda pointless, many times you have multiple choices that aren't actually choices and you end up in the same spot. The life paths so far seem useless and people who completed the game say they are useless. Which isn't necessarly bad because I also like linear games.
At least on xbox series X input is broken: sometimes after leaving a menu it keeps a previous state of the controller, sometimes some action cannot be performed god knows why, such as changing the camera in a vehicle, when a button can perform multiple actions instead of having a predictable order it seems to do a random thing (pressing B during a dialog sometimes skips ahead, sometimes crouches), etc.
Standing on some surfaces triggers weird behavior such as the character stuttering, the other day I stepped on an inclined surface and the character went projected at insane speed, etc.
Car physics are just bad, it's not a bug, it's simply poorly implemented, just do a slow turn, it's enough to be obvious how broken it is. A car doesn't turn like that. Driving at high speed is simply clumsy, it feels just bad.
NPCs do very stupid things even in missions where they're supposed to be scripted, etc.
No it's not insanity, the game is simply broken. I enjoyed The Witcher 3 a lot, way more than I enjoyed GTA V, and quite frankly I'm very disappointed. I believe it will be a great game if the fix it, but in the meantime I'm holding it for a few months until it's playable.
References: 1- https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/318890-cyberpunk-2077s-pc... 2- https://www.futuregamereleases.com/2020/12/cyberpunk-2077-so... 3- https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cyberpunk-2077/user-revie...
[1]: 350 in July 2018: https://wccftech.com/cyberpunk-2077-development/
[2]: 450 in June 2019: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/17/cyberpunk-2077-preview-and-in...
[3]: 500 in October 2019: https://www.ausgamers.com/features/read/3621721
rig:
- threadripper 1920X 12-core
- 2080ti
- 32gb ecc ram
I can deal with bugs, but the lack of depth constantly breaks immersion, and some of the writing is just really cringeworthy
Which games writing is not cringeworthy please?
That and the weird way that V rarely uses the pronoun "I" or "we"
It's not "I need help"
It's "Need help"
Not "We're going to have time."
"Gonna have a hard time."
Doing it sometimes is one thing, it's a manner of speaking after all, but for anyone who hasn't played it, it's more jarring than it sounds.
I get the sense they were going for a quick talker vibe, but it just doesn't fit at all in so many places where they do it.
It makes it feel like you're listening to the VA do a quick read through of each line before they actually record the line...
I may be biased as I picked it up after some time mindlessly grinding through Persona 5, which has an English translation that is perfectly functional but never amazing.
TBC, it physically stops you from playing, but it's told in small enough bursts with sufficiently fast text rendering/animations that it doesn't feel like a real interruption; where most games will happily sit you through unskippable cutscenes and long monologues because gameplay is largely the means to reach the next narrative checkpoint
Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.
But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.
I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...
I think that the issue isn't so much 'the audience' but the terrible work conditions associated with the gaming industry.
> It really holds the medium back as an art form
How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.
It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.
Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.
What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.
That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.
Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.
Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.
The game-hours-to-calendar-days translation won't be 1:1.
And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.
The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.
With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.
I think people just got way too excited about from having nothing to do during this pandemic and then ended up really disappointed. I empathize with that but I don’t know, it’s a $60 game. That’s like four movies. I’ve enjoyed it more than the last four movies I’ve watched for sure.
I also played it through Stadia, because Google was having really good deals on Stadia. The first month was free (through a Google Music promotion), and buying Cyberpunk for $50 got you a Chromecast Ultra. I have actually been pleasantly surprised by how good the Stadia experience is.
- The PC version is by far the most playable
- CDPR games haved worked well on Linux through proton in the past
- Stadia targets are very narrow set of hardware and I would assume Google added a couple of patches to make sure it plays well.
You probably still get the logic bugs that you see in all platforms but from everything I have seen it seems like once the games passes a "performance threshold" the graphics hold up pretty well.
Look in the comments here.
You should see games from The Elder Scrolls franchise. Even in the latest version of Skyrim there still are game-breaking bugs they have not fixed.
It’s a hard problem. Extremely large open world, thousands of scripts and triggers and things to test. I sympathize. Gamers are the hardest genre of users to please.
If you trigger the exit dialogue before picking up your stuff, the quest line gets stuck.
That's the only actual showstopper I encountered in 60 hours of gameplay.
There's so many differences between our savefiles and our system configurations that the bug could be a combinatorial explosion of things without access to source code.
This is super common in videogames. When some significant amount of people are experiencing bugs with a game and you're not, you should defer to the judgement of the ones who are having problems.
It does seem like there were some legitimate issues on consoles, but I don't even know how seriously to take that given the insane disproportionality of the criticism that even the PC version has been getting. I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?
Presumably if it does end up in court, the truth will come out and CDPR will be sanctioned appropriately. I don't mean to say the release couldn't have been better, but from where I'm sitting it feels like 75% just another case of insane "gamer entitlement".
I'm starting to think that some major players are capitalizing on the situation by bankrolling marketing and negative PR. CDPR stock has fallen dramatically and now they are facing punitive action from governments that on a level I've never heard of for a game studio.
I'm not apologizing for them. They should not have released what they did for the PS4. But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.
I guess we'll see if they get acquired at a deep discount by Ubisoft or something.
I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.
Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.
Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.
There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.
It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?
Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.
Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.
Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.
The real issue is what was promised and teased and what was delivered. Honestly might border on false advertising. There are countless videos breaking down what was advertised in their promotional feature walkthrough videos and what was actually delivered (not even withstanding pretty glaring bugs and performance issues).
Then look at Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2 on the same console.
I got a refund, bought the xbox version and played on xbox series s and it was actually pretty good even with graphics clearly "old gen"-level compared to the pc version.
Both games have worlds that are mostly empty, with few buildings here and there. As far as I remember, RDR2 dropped to ~25FPS in Saint Denis on my PS4 just after launch (not sure now), and Saint Denis is tiny comparing to Night City.
This game was not meant to be played on > 10 year old hardware. That's no excuse they shouldn't have released it at all on ps4, but still what did you expect ?
I don't think it's a stretch to say people expected it to at least look better than it does.
>It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube
surely you mean like watching 720p Youtube :)
All of these games are cross-platform. It's possible. I just think the management of CDPR let everyone's pet feature into the timeline and marketing material without regard for the impact of delivery time.
As a Linux gamer, I really don't get this whole drama and I appreciate that CDPR even provided the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance so they even added a whole new Vulkan extension to improve support for it.
From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.
People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.
> routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development
Come on, man.
> watched others and read a good number of reviews
What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT.
Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.
Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.
If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."
The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.
The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.
On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."
I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.
Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.
There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.
Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.
I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.
I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.
Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.
Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.
It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.
Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.
But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.
Then you are either not past the railroad stages of the very early game, or you have not been paying attention. Or both.
I stand by what I said. GP may not be lying, in which case I believe they have either only just started the game, or are not paying attention to its many readily reproducible, unavoidable glitches.
Baldur's Gate 3 did better PR by releasing an early release version first, so the impatient can jump on it.
My personal feeling is there is so much effort put into this game, it's sad to see it spun as a dismal failure by a greedy entity. It must be demoralizing for the devs and artists and other staff members that worked on it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but other than the day-1 patch hasn't there been only a single (quite minor) patch for this game so far?
You can't actually launch just for the PS4 Pro or the Xbox One X, you have to support all versions of the PS4 or the Xbox One.
Also the game doesn't run natively on the current gen consoles but through an emulation layer for previous console games.
Yes, we do have an agency here in Poland which, much as in many other first world countries, monitors consumer goods’ quality.
But all UOKiK did is signal that they are going to be looking into the matter. Not exactly an investigation - more of an inquiry. One made from complaints from dissatisfied customers.
If they were to find that the allegations are true, they would be entitled to taking 10%, but that is the maximum punishment and they would probably have to go to court to prove it all.
Other legal sources say this is would be an extreme sentence and that this almost never happens with UOKiK.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have no idea the merits of this investigation, but it is refreshing to see a potential punishment like this. Fines for bad behavior often end up as simple fees for rich people and businesses. If you want these financial penalties to serve as any type of deterrent, you need to make sure the perpetrators feel the financial repercussions.
Buyer beware, IMO. Wait 'til it's out, reviewed, etc., and then you'll know.
More companies should be punished this way.
By the same standard, Peter Jackson deceived me and stole 9h of my life with the turd which is "The Hobbit".
Though, I'm fairly certain shareholders and Board members are the first to blame in this mess, by pushing/forcing the company to release an unfinished/unpolished game.
From the business perspective if you want to make money you must target the lowest, most common, denominator. Game studios that do cross platform launches do the vast majority of their sales on console. It's not even close. Even with TW3, 70% of their sales were on console, and that was considered low by industry standards.
What CDPR has done here by shipping a broken game on last gen is to light a pallet of $100 bills on fire. It's possible they don't survive this as a studio, but it could very well be deserved.
scope creep.
That's the only answer. There are tons of other failures, but scope creep was the biggest.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-12-10-cyberpunk-...
People just need to relax, accept that things are imperfect, and enjoy the game once it is patched.
I think the main issue is the false marketing w.r.t. last-gen consoles. Hyping their product more than they could deliver seems to be the reason they are facing this backlash. But who could condemn them? Others are doing great with this strategy, see e.g. Tesla with their "Autopilot" (last-gen console are some older European roads here).
Even if publishers fix critical issues, the stores could have a system of fines for games that aren’t good enough initially. If I buy a $60 game and it’s not acceptably playable until after the first 2 weeks - that’s a 50% refund and I also keep the game.
No publisher should get away with pushing a half finished buggy game a few weeks to soon just because the holidays are close. Basically there should be financial incentives in the console stores that always makes it less expensive to slip the release and fix the bugs. L
I’d buy the console that did this.
I’d like what they did to be a formal promise with a proper process. A guarantee from Sony that “with our console you’ll never pay money for a broken game”. I don’t think they have a public “program” for it.
In the middle is government job (like, policeman, teacher, clerk at the government building) - you get poor pay, but you get normal employment (so, firing = severance package).
And the best of all (in most cases, there are exceptions) is a foreign company that does outsourcing - you get good pay + a normal employment contract.
I'm not sure if it is "most". In every company I worked those were outliers (e.g. max ~10%, and in current company it is only for HR/reception workers), but yeah, it is quite common.
But not all employers allow B2B contracts and if they do, it frequently involves some kind of worse benefits than the usual employee contract. And different employers have different way of handling vacation (some don't pay for it, some do), so it is another caveat to watch for.
And B2B people are always the first ones to let go (they are hired, because of that "perk"), so you can find another job fast, but not always the one you want (e.g. further from your place).
Generally if your employer allows you to select form of employment it is quite good sign.
If the employer allows only B2B it is usually a way to cut costs for the employer and I would watch out.
As you can see I prefer normal, cosy employment contract, but yeah I have children so that probably influences my view.
I think you might be mixing two different things here: contract type and job type.
Yes, sometimes companies have spikes in demand, for example a project that's delayed and they want to temporarily add some new people. Of course they will use contractors for that, and then those contractors will be let go. But that should be communicated clearly during your job interview, that the role is only temporary.
However, many companies seek people for a long term jobs, and B2B vs employment contract is simply the matter of tax optimization. I know contractors working for the same company for 10+ years. They are definitely not the first to be fired.
They let go of almost all contractors on one day.
This happens because most contracts (actually all that I know of) are hired by a intermediary company (think Luxoft etc.) that hires those people. And those people are viewed not as a permanent cost for the company, they are treated (by the stock market or financial institutions) as a short-term cost (like "leasing", not sure if that the same name in English) you can stop buying the service right away. And if company wants to look "fit", it cuts the "fat" (reduces the costs, but keeps the profits), and employees (both contract and job type) are a cost, the "job type" one have additional cost when firing (severance package) but contractual ones don't. So they are the easiest ones to let go in the process of "cutting the fat".
(And some of those contractors were later rehired as normal employees, after IPO).
Back in the day I would pay $50 and get a game like Tomb Raider 3 - I would play for hours and hours and no patch ever was needed because...ya know you can't patch something that's on a CD-rom as easily as when you're on Steam or some other launcher. Maybe there were some texture glitches but I never felt like I couldn't complete a game because of some missing feature, or major bug in the story/gameplay.
Well now - 23ish years later, games come out and they're full of bugs - when will it stop?
Seriously?? 10 percent annual income for just a game that is somewhat broken on some of the platforms? Can we get this kind of fine for other companies (eg Facebook) instead of a slap on the wrist? Did Boeing pay 10 percent of annual income for the 737 max "error"?(of course not.) Bonkers.
Despite this, I still enjoyed the game a lot. I wonder why the reaction is so different this time, as CDPR is not known for their "perfect" gameplay. That said, given their style of releasing, I'd prefer playing it later for patches and free additional content.
But, 10% is a maximum penalty posted. For the instance [1] shows that in 2018 maximum penalty was 931k PLN (~300k $). Another case [2] shows that penalty can be easily deceased if subject is cooperating (-50%) and further more decreased if subject takes penalty without court.
At the moment CDPR has done something extraordinary that is: extended refund policy for the title. Forcing that also on PlayStation (and taking ricochet by pulling title from the store). Providing a few hot fixes for very very fresh product and stating future work in next couple of months.
I do understand that players on base PS4 and XBOX are mad. And in my opinion UOKiK can help taking their side. But with such a complicated case, where lots of players do play and enjoy the game (even on these consoles). The 10% penalty is simply impossible. Also I don't know if it's is at all, as there is the refund policy in place.
[1] - https://www.uokik.gov.pl/download.php?plik=24030
[2] - https://www.wiadomoscihandlowe.pl/artykul/uokik-pol-miliona-...
TL;DR; UOKiK does that as requested and expected from them, but is very unlikely that 10% penalty will take place.
Pretty sure they’re embarrassed by the first version.
I think what happened here is that investors pushed the game to be out since it was xmas and the two console platforms were real hungry for a big title.