CD Projekt says Cyberpunk 2077 copy sales reach 20M | Hacker News Reader

CD Projekt says Cyberpunk 2077 copy sales reach 20M

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29 pointsmfiguiere35 comments

One of my most unpopular opinions is that CP2077 was one of the best games of the last 10 years.

The _launch_ was a disaster, as far as a AAA game goes, I will 100% agree with that. However... if you had a decent PC and didn't have unlucky bugs, it was an amazing experience. You could go down any random street and it really felt like there was an adventure behind every corner... and not just any adventure, these things were incredibly detailed.

Hm, most adventures to stumble over are generic events like "kill those 10 guys" and nothing more. Sometimes they are bad guys, sometimes they are bad guys and you're helping the cops... but i think the variety of open world missions is quite low. The story missions on the other hand are quite nice.

>Hm, most adventures to stumble over are generic events like "kill those 10 guys" and nothing more.

I honestly just can't agree with that. Those do exist but I wouldn't consider them to be "most." Perhaps if you've done all the side-quests/gigs those will be all your run into? I haven't had a single side-quest/gig that doesn't at least have some associated exclusive lore or dialogue. They've all been on par with the quality of the main storyline missions, imo. I actually prefer them, as I think it really lets you explore more of the world vs just the main character.

In any case, sometimes certain games just don't click for people. I've never liked battle royales for example, despite seemingly everyone being obsessed with them there for awhile, lol.

Okay it depends what you define as a side mission. Those "real" story driven side missions, like the one with the self-thinking-car-service are well written and quite enjoyable, but I meant all those non-saying sude missions that are sprinkled over the map, where you have to fight against some gangsters, which are everytime the same. But that must not be annoying, you just don't have to clear all of them :D

I dont know how many people realize this but for an Eastern European studio playing in the same league like all the other studios from rich countries is kinda a big deal.

Sure cost of labor might be lower there but as you can see the total cost of producing a title like this is on par with whatever the West has to spend.

Congratulations to my polish bros.

> total cost of producing a title like this is on par with whatever the West has to spend.

well it looks like it was the most expensive game released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

still profitable though! Kind of want to buy a new gpu just to try it with rtx...

If you enjoy shallow gameplay and storyline, have at it.

They promised a rpg where decisions would matter/dictate play and story. They don't.

Present a city with flying vehicles. Can't use em without installing a PC mod.

Give options for "hacking" abilities. Abilities are limited, unimaginative, and essentially give player "god mode" if focused on.

Gun play is kinda fun, just wish they were more imaginative in terms of body customizations, abilities, story, decision making, immersion, among other things.

Played it here and there for a couple weeks after launch and haven't picked it up since because it got boring and felt par to subpar. Things became repetitive and uninteresting pretty quickly.

Seen that they've fixed bugs since, but haven't heard much in terms of gameplay or features outside of mods

not here to disagree necessarily but just the setting and artstyle can be enough to justify playing it. At least it was for me. And I am nearly as critical as you are :)

That's fair

Now contrast this with something with RDR2, where even though the possibilities were not quite as limitless, at every corner you would encounter a polished and thought through side story or character. By the end of the game it felt like a piece of literature, with an actual cohesive conclusion and ending.

The cyberpunk world is amazingly modeled, but to me it constantly felt like I was bumping into the “seams”.

Sadly this is often a feature of our modern Polish culture. We tend to go big on huge ambitious projects that over-promise everything. We have fantastic technical and artisan domestic talent to do it with. But then we crunch to deliver on all the promises at the same time. Only the end result misses that special something, the meaning, the message, whatever. We often will see it in other Polish industries as well, movies, tv shows, tech etc.

Our indie stuff is often awesome though - small teams with grit and determination to get one or several thing just right.

i have finished it already and I have kind of enjoyed it, just want to try it on rtx.. For me I was not disappointed but that is largely because I ignored the initial hype and then just played the game like i would any other.

In terms of shallow storyline.. Well I guess. I really enjoyed Fallout New Vegas, Outer worlds, Divinity 2 original sin and this did not seem that for off.

CD Projekt was considered a solid developer before Cyberpunk. However, Cyberpunk was (completely) broken during its initial release 2 years ago (and still is on some of the platforms). The industry is in shambles if this is what meets expectations.

You are mixing separate problems. People still bought 20M copies, that's a success in itself. That said people buying 20M copies of a "broken" game is certainly a depressing trend - same with people supporting games riddled with microtransactions.

I'm a release-day player and I can honestly count the number of "annoying" bugs on one hand. However, I had a decent PC and the state of the game on last-gen consoles was ridiculous and unjustifiable. That said, the game was incredible.

I can't think of a single high-profile launch in the last 5 years that wasn't riddled with bugs.

This comment is so full of stereotypes that i nearly spilled my coffee.

What stereotypes? It has been also my experience growing up in a country similar to Poland. Most of the traditional industries are owned by big corps from West. It's not easy to make it out there and build champions like CD Projekt.

They need to just get to work on a proper sequel that fulfills the game's potential. Bought the game a few days before the 1.6 release and was pulled in by the story and world, finishing the game a week later. The art production in this game is tops, but the world is just so shallowly designed, nothing emergent going on in a game world whose own lore doesn't stop reminding you that emergent behavior should be happening near constantly.

I think a sequel should focus on being a sandbox built entirely around this dynamic especially since making different builds is a strength of the game, but enemies and their AI are pretty predictable and similar except for a few psychos and the end boss. Criminals should be pro-active and you should have bounties placed on you that're pursued by other mercs when you go after any particular faction too much; likewise faction relations and your standing with them should've been an obvious part of the game. Just a lot of potential left on the table cause CDPR had terrible project management and a desperate executive suite that panicked and went all in on building the game around Keanu Reeves.

You should look into Deus Ex, both the 2000 original and the newer ones. Apparently, a sequel is in the works which will combine the newer games with Cyberpunk 2077.

Source on the sequel?

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/new-deus-ex-game-studio-cy...

Big fan of Mankind Divided, CP77 clearly descends from Watch Dogs and Deus Ex, with a bit of DOOM.

"A lot of potential" is, to be frank, a tragic understatement. Quite simply, if they had actually implemented everything they presented in their marketing it would have been game of the decade. Instead, they chopped features left, right, and center to reach an abritrary deadline. It was 90% of the way there, and that's the real killer.

> It was 90% of the way there, and that's the real killer.

Didn't know this

I agree.

I went from being unconvinced, to in love, to actively pissed off when you go through the beginning of the game and it basically does a bait and switch and ignores all your choices.

I enjoyed it, but I don't want to replay it because it's too linear.

The original paper RPG that the game was loosely based on, was a 100% imagination sandbox. It's unfortunate that everything has to turn into a linear movie instead of an exploration.

The mechanics lend themselves to a sandbox with no primary narrative

There is some good effort towards that kind of dynamism being done by the Cyberscript mod[1] team, using lua scripting. It's a new project, but they already have things like faction relations and inter-faction battles implemented.

[1] https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/1339

This makes me want to invest in a PC, but I'd have to buy a lower resolution monitor as apparently no GPU can run the game at 4K/60 with ray tracing

I don't think a sequel is the best course of action yet to course correct. CDPR got some of their Witcher reputation from their free and paid DLC support lifecycle. Some people's favorite parts of the Witcher series showed up in DLC.

They've been almost entirely focused on quality of life improvements since launch (1.1 through 1.6), which has delayed some of their promised DLC, some of which implied would add some of the "missing" things that people complain were "cut". Based on what I saw of particularly Witcher 2's lifecycle, I think CDPR expected to deliver a lot more, faster, in DLC than they've managed so far. But also I'm sure they expected to need a lot less quality of life improvement on the base game than they've needed to prioritize since launch.

I think that a big part of needing so much quality of life improvements and bug fixes was CDPR using a game engine that wasn't ready for this kind of game. A sequel is an excuse to switch game engines (CDPR has already announced that they expect future games to be Unreal and that after some of these issues their Red Engine, which they've been using since Witcher 1 may be dead and Cyberpunk 2077 the last game on it), and CDPR would risk repeating all the same quality of life problems in an engine switch. Even with an off the shelf engine like Unreal, there's a new learning curve and a lot of code (and some of the assets) won't directly transfer and a lot of starting from scratch.

I think CDPR has a chance with two or three DLC launches to fulfill a lot more of the game's potential. I would hope they swing through those promises to deliver strong DLC and give us something interesting.

Wonder how much is because of the sudden boost after the anime...

Multimedia franchises work wonders

It's been a HUGE impact - https://steamcharts.com/app/1091500#3m

This is a shame. They lied, they sold an unfinished product, they promised to implement all the missing features and they did not.

And people still accepts to buy it. That's why companies poop on consumers

There needs to be a case study on how this disaster of a product got redeemed by, out of all things, an animated web series. Strange times we live in.

I honestly think a decent chunk of it was the volatility in "hype" and passed time. It was way over-hyped (by CDPR, journalists, fans, etc). Then when it released, it was dog-piled an (IMO) unreasonable amount. [1]

It was then pretty easy to trend back up to where it is today. There was always an amazing game behind the disaster of the release. Plus, now many people have better hardware and a lot of bugs did get fixed.

But yes, the anime definitely was the catalyst, imo.

[1] I just remember seeing a lot of complaints over silly bugs. Yea, it sucks that its in a AAA game but as someone that's played these massive RPGs for over a decade now, it will always happen. I feel people really got hit with an availability bias. Not denying bugs existed but I never encountered any that truly ruined my experience.

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