It’s so crazy how this game continues to get significantly better and better but since they botched the release, these updates go mostly ignored
I eventually gave up after I’d keep getting random crashes that would force me to start the current quest over.
Maybe my issue was something less common, but I still have yet to experience the game that I’ve been more excited about than almost any other for quite a few years.
Other than that one large bug, the game has been great, little bit of jank but no worse than say, Skyrim without the community bug patch. I only purchased it in the last steam sale so missed all the rough stuff.
Playing on an XBox Series S.
I think that has been patched as of 1.2. The patch notes include:
> The game's infamously speedy police department have been told to take a chill pill, with an increase to their spawn radius for when a player commits a crime. Hopefully this means a whole squad will no longer appear behind your back.
And 1.21 had:
> It makes a long list of fixes, including for an issue where, after the player commits a crime on the roof of a building, NCPD officers would spawn behind the player's back.
Early on, the crashes were constant. Couldn’t get past the intro.
Eventually they became more occasional, but not until a few patches after the first “major” patch they released.
I’ll have to give this another try.
That being said, once you finish everything it really does feel empty. There's no repeatable content once the game is finished, unlike most other open world games. This is pretty unfortunate because I would sometimes just happen upon fun little notes and hiding spots. I'm sure there are tons of little details that will never be noticed because there's no drive to go out of your way and find them once all the other stuff is done.
I'm currently 40ish hours into a second playthrough (no more tertiary/secondary quest markers on the map, although I need to wait for a few more secondary quests to activate before completing the main quest line) of 1.61 and haven't had any freezes or crashes.
For the record, I highly recommend the game. It has great world building, gameplay, immersiveness, it feels alive in a way that I haven't felt about any game in a while.
I'm playing on Linux with an AMD GPU in Wayland. YMMV on Windows and/or nvidia and/or X.org.
Software stacks nowadays are such massive pieces of garbage that it is kind of surprising things are not falling apart repeatedly. Which also means having the "right" parts and pieces together you actually may see this happening, unfortunately.
Maybe 3-5 bugs, mostly small stuff. Only saw 1 dude randomly t-pose, and another (a civilian hiding from a shootout) slowly fade/sink into the earth. Maybe one hard crash, which isn't bad compared to the issues I'd see with FNV or Skyrim. In other words, played fine.
Cool setting, and the first half of the game is amazing -- blew me away -- but the gameplay is fairly repetitive otherwise; i.e. go here, kill people, collect loot, go here kill people, collect loot, go here don't kill people (stealth mission!), but then get in a shoot-out after you steal the thing and collect loot, etc.
Skyrim and FNV felt like you had more choices as to how you played, while GTA V had a lot more to do, like the silly Yoga minigames, or stock manipulation, or submarines and aircraft, etc. I played a bit of Shadowrun and CP2020 on the tabletop and I remember the old CP2020 Rulebook talking about "style over substance" and that's kinda how the game plays.
I'd grumble if I had paid full-price but am pretty satisfied at half, and I'd consider the DLC as long as it wasn't buggy as hell and got alright reviews.
Especially given how incentivized youtubers, news (basically blogs) sites, twitter, etc are all encouraged to be negative or at least drum up controversy for clicks.
I know for me I played Cyberpunk at launch and loved it, ran into a few bugs but it was nothing show stopping for me. But I was also playing on an Xbox Series X so I know I missed out on the issues with the old consoles and PC.
Edit: Just to be clear the game had major issues, it was enough to Playstation to delist it. But the actual state of reality and what it appears to be based on youtube and similar is not the same.
100% agreed on what you might call the youtube hate-sphere. So often it influences my friends and I have a really hard time convincing them to actually play things and see for themselves, instead of parroting negativity from YouTube. The gaming community has become really bad for mob mentality, and actively bullying based on bad information. It can be a very antagonistic environment.
The number of times I will be in a conversation about a game I have played and someone will confidently say the game sucked because of XYZ. But if you ask if they ever played it, of course not. They got their opinion from YouTube.
And I get it games are not cheap (however I will argue that even shorter single player games on a cost per hour is still one of the cheapest sources of entertainment out there). It is almost as if gamers view gaming as a winner take all situations. But for some reason gamers keep contributing to it and we have sites like IGN that just keeps fanning it with their “console wars” and other crap.
It's like that for everything, not just games. That's why most companies are very meticulous about managing their public image (and that of their products') - they know that "shit sticks" and that a negative slant to how the public perceives them can stay with them for years, and can hurt them a lot. Games is a peculiar industry, as multi-billion companies routinely release half-baked products full of bugs, get a ton of hate for it, and still manage to be profitable.
We get release dates sometimes a year or 2 in advance and yet maybe internally we (software engineers not in the games industry) have some idea of a release date but we sure don't share that publicly beyond maybe a month.
You could argue that there are pieces of this in movies, particularly in CGI and animated movies like Pixar. But from what I have seen a lot of that tends to be more finalized once we have a release date in that area. Maybe even at the rendering state.
I wish more games could follow a better software development pattern but it would be really hard to change the industry now it seems like. Gamers expect it and publishers expect it.
For me it feels alive but like a diorama. You can't really interact with much, so once you stray from quests you really haven't got much to do.
Obligatory mention to check if you have "HDD Mode" disabled, with it enabled it reduces the NPC and vehicle count and variety. The game is also huge with day/night cycles, so there are times and places that have few NPCs.
This is one of the things that Oblivion and Skyrim did really well. You're just walking around randomly in a forest, see a small cabin, go to investigate, oh hmm some notes mentions a basement, but where? Oh there's a hidden door? Wut? A giant cave system, full with backstory notes of some guys trying to revive some old monster?!
This happened to me like 15 minutes into the game, and I spent a good hour or more (lost track of time) exploring the caves and fought the monster at the end.
You'd just stumble over these non-trivial quest locations, and for me that's something I've not really felt in other games. Almost all just confine you to the narrow path.
Cyberpunk actually has a lot of good environmental storytelling moments just wandering the city, but they don't capitalize and turn them into self driven exploration, the stories don't go anywhere.
An example might be the homeless thief living under the underpass near North Oak, there are two story beats, you find the first note suggesting where they live, then you find the spot and there is a second note, and that's it.
One day I see GPT or the like running with this. Dream up a couple themes for the game, region, NPCs, all of which are unique to your game, and then let the AI take you for a ride based on those. Kinda like a DM of a D&D game running with a fun idea that wasn't planned but could be cool.
It seems to be a casualty of the ever increasing time and expense needed to create a modern AAA game. Bethesda themselves are clearly suffering from this trap; their games are taking longer and longer to get released and get further “dumbed down” in each new title. I suspect this is one of the bigger contributing reasons for all the AAA studios going “games as a service”.
One bright spot: the, uh, upcoming Zelda title will absolutely scratch some of this itch. Somebody at Big N really took that “huge beautiful world, but mostly empty” BotW criticism to heart and sunk six years into addressing it. It’s honestly unbelievable.
Now, about detail ... for example, you have various people playing guitar in that game and players looked at it more closely and they are really playing what you hear, i.e. it is just not random animation. The game is filled with this sort of detail that, unfortunately, quite a lot of players miss / don't recognize. Which also means a lot of work went into these things.
CP2077 just spent far too much money on marketing and not enough on actually developing the game. Compared to TW3, CP2077 feels empty; the story was obviously rushed, and they had to change a lot to fit in Johnny Silverhand and Keanu Reeves. There are a lot of empty spots, the story is still rather... pointless, and there's honestly nothing to do. The game has been patched, but these have been mostly to do with bugs, balancing, graphics, and performance. It is still fundamentally broken, in my opinion, and still offers very few of the promises initially made by CDPR.
The game failed to deliver on a lot of counts, and this is coming from someone who suffered through Witcher 3 at launch, running at 40 FPS on a tiny notebook with a GTX 860M. Even through these issues, that game was fun. CP 2077 just... wasn't.
But, they really did regain the trust of the public by adding all that was promised and more. For free. In my personal view they more than redeemed themselves. I still find it a bit boring but that's to be expected with so much RNG/Autogen. It's inherent to the type of game. But all the initial shortcuts taken have been fixed.
CP2077 never bothered to do this. I love the game and the story but some parts feel ridiculously hollow and short. Like the 3 starter paths. There's so little unique content in them that I'm sure they were so heavily cut that the only reason they were kept at all is that they had already been promised.
I really wish stuff like this would have been filled in after release.
The subway system someone else mentioned is another example. The fast travel option we got feels like a cop out.
CP2077 looked like something I'd enjoy. It definitely needs more content.
Think they could make a killing making it multiplayer, but doesn’t look like it’s happening.
Didn’t they announce they’re switching to UE5 for future games and not developing their own game engine further? Has that now changed?
Maybe the graphics and the technical side but it’s still not what it was promised. Sure I enjoyed it as a one off action game but it’s not the genre defining open world RPG they were hyping up for years. They can fix the technical problems, but “fixing” the story, characters, the quests, the world itself not gonna happen.
To be fair, I waited till it was stable enough and most the issued had been fixed (/r/patientgamer) but after that it has become the game of the decade for me that is as genredefining as half life or deus ex were.
the bigger issue is that a lot of guides and reviews and forum posts about issues are still from 2020 and its not even the same game
so even of people that like the game its this whole bifurcated community
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Source me plz.
The attackers had full access to version control servers and therefore the ability to directly modify the versioned code without going through a normal commit process, giving them effectively unrestricted commit access.
The source code for many CDPR properties was later sold by the attackers.