Comment by IanNorris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IanNorris | Hacker News Reader

As a game dev myself I truly sympathise with the devs and the situation they found themselves in. I've been down to the wire with bug fixes and had to balance the remaining bugs vs potentially missing our ship dates that would mean breaking contracts with major retailers and other partners.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a technical marvel and on high end hardware the loading times are stunning - something I aim to push for with future titles I work on. With so much data being loaded and unloaded, bandwidth limited hardware was always going to struggle, and generational leaps in hardware are always hard to navigate even if you aren't on the bleeding edge.

I've been having a lot of fun with the game on PC and I've hit relatively few bugs. I believe a lot of the bugs people are seeing may be streaming perf related. Delayed physics lod loading could cause results like objects being catapulted around as seen in videos.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find out one of the more interesting side characters is transgender, and this is communicated very respectfully as you get to know them through their side quests. Some of the marketing material was quite tasteless so I'm glad to see this inclusion, as some other characters you encounter in the game did not come across well.

In my experience, a 3080 and PCI-E 4 NVMe is not enough to mitigate all bugs, it's certainly better than console videos I've seen on YouTube but many bugs seem to stem from the game engine itself.

In no particular order: - cars drive on rails with no AI, this leads to an amusing bug on one of the highways where cars clip through a railing and destroy themselves, repeatedly - NPC's often get stuck in t-pose, the game either cannot work out what to do with them or animations were not completed - the game rarely maintains state of cars and NPC's if they're not visible (e.g. turn around 180 degrees), this can result in cars spawning where your car is while in motion - unbalanced perks such as the body perk which stops enemies from knocking you over has the unintended side affect that a minimal hit and run by an NPC vehicle on the player character results in instant death because you cannot be knocked over - enemy characters path finding failing and clipping through walls, I had to restart a section of the Panam ending 3 times because of this - delayed physics calculations resulting in the player either moving at superhuman speeds or being catapulted through the environment - the number of times my player became naked

There are many more bugs I encountered which I do not imagine to be related to loading times. In addition to the bugs, the game is simply incomplete, the lack of police AI (they instantly spawn behind you and are never seen driving vehicles) being the easiest example to provide.

This is not to say the game cannot be fun, I've put nearly 100 hours into it, but even after the 1.06 patch, I feel cheated by CDPR. The game is so full of bugs, glitches and missing game mechanics (compare what we got compared to their 2018 45 minute gameplay teaser) that it should have been delayed.

As it is, I feel that I've paid £50 to be an alpha tester for what I believed to be a completed retail game.

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