Cyberpunk 2077 Review First Impressions: A Brutally Honest Overview (Gameplay, Bugs, Worth)
Therefore, I'm pleasantly surprised, it's actually a playable game with a decent looking world.
So, that's me.
And since, I haven't been able to get my hands on one of the new GPUs at an acceptable price, I would probably wait for at least a few months before purchasing this.
Looking at the bad press coverage CDPR got for handling their staff, I am tempted to think that they haven't handled their success with the Witcher series very well. Video Games production, in general, seems to rely a lot on careful management and highly organized work. So mishandling developer issues, like they have seemingly done, is very short sighted.
I hope they learn their lessons, as far as management is concerned and settle in for the long haul on this. If they can demonstrate good faith as they fix this game's issues, the real Rockstar type money would come pouring in for the sequel of this game.
Or more to the point, were they violating Polish or EU labor laws?
Including, but not limited to, 6 day work weeks for over a year. Sounds like 966 and China.
https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re...
Combine that with the unoptimized, buggy state the game is in. Many streamers had the game crash, forcing them to redo the combat encounter because you can't save in combat.
Any bugs I've encountered have been minor.
Makes me wonder what people's "rigs" are actually like. It's no Doom Eternal but it plays about as well as GTA at launch going from memory.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/human-resources/workin...
https://bezprawnik.pl/crunch-cd-projekt-red/
Polish law adheres to EU guidelines and limits working hours to 8 hours/day 40 hours/week with no more than 8 hours/week of overtime - paid extra.
75% of Poles work overtime (2017): https://strefabiznesu.pl/czy-polacy-umieraja-z-przepracowani...
One fifth (20%) of those working overtime don't receive any compensation (2019): https://bezprawnik.pl/polacy-zmieniaja-prace/
Transport equipment and services is one of Poland's specialties, but even there it mostly competes on price: https://oko.press/polska-i-wegry-przegraly-spor-o-pracowniko...
(not to mention bus drivers in the capital driving under influence of metaamphetamine to keep up with the pressure)
Poland is the China of Europe. But in relations with the real China, Poland is like a colony: exporting raw resources(like copper), importing manufactured goods. And Polish president acts servile towards Xi Jinping. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yfjsZujQqc
So not true!
Greets from Poland!
The crunch is very real, but the silent part is that insane working hours and crunching are a staple of gaming industry. Pretty much every single project ends up in this state and the stories can get pretty horrifying (Blood, Sweat and Pixels is an interesting read on this topic - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34376766-blood-sweat-and... ).
The strange part of this story is the way how it's set to snipe at certain companies - CDProjekt and Rockstar were target of these stories, but other development studios for some reason weren't.
It seems to be cyclical that the company in the cross-hairs has a bad PR year and people talk about only the one company as if it isn't a systemic problem until memory gets blurry and people forget the last time it came up, and few people connect the dots to the systemic problem. (Almost every major publisher has been in the spotlight at some point in time or another. EA very famously had the "EA Spouse" cycle of bad press. Activision had one a few years later.)
If there is something interestingly strange here it's that CD Projekt Red tried to buck the system and do the right thing and its getting smeared so badly that it tried and failed. The takeaway for a lot of people is going to be subconsciously "it's better not to try at all to do better and stick with the status quo", which is hard not to assume is intentional this cycle from some of the members of the status quo. (It resembles other anti-union bullying tactics.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Hoffman#%22EA_Spouse%22_b...
There's always a market for indie-scale games, 2D platformers, simple but innovative 3D games, etc, where good, simple ideas are more important than huge amounts of effort. But there's also a market for complex games, and if they're well done, people will happily pay for them.
source: over a decade in the modding and gamedev community, never done it professionally (yet) but have made some popular mods/minigames, and a decent grasp of how much work goes into large-scale games and how much you have to want to make it happen for it to happen, and sometimes, you're willing to spend these long days, and sometimes it's even enjoyable before the money and fame start rolling in, or at least enjoyable enough to stick with it.
I hope, and suspect, nobody who is working on AAA games has zero interest or joy in making big, complicated games.
You get the job because you have skills at it. You have skills at it because you were interested enough to learn them. Those skills are worth money. All of the articles criticizing gamedev seem to miss this.
Even if you don't believe anonymous employee reports, the studio's chief Adam Badowski announced in September that working time will now involve Saturdays.
To me, too many pointers are highlighting a toxic crunch culture in that studio to be ignored. I will not play Cyberpunk because of that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-29/cyberpunk...
situation in this thread is a bit different, it's about choices of a single person.
Of course executives and investors will make much more off the release then the individuals who made the game.
Of course it would all be nicer without crunch in software, but I think many know how realistic that is with such a project. I hope employees get their deserved free time and compensation and I believe they will, even if there is still work to do.
So while CDPR might not be perfect, it behaves better than its competitors on user rights, which affects employees too. And this is not insignificantly better conduct.
This statement may still be true, but Cyberpunk 2077 actually did a great job at highlighting the gaming industry's horrible practices due to CD Projekt Red promising to keep away from the status quo of mandatory crunch time. Breaking that promise put mandatory crunch time in social media's limelight.
Ironically, the creators themselves at Bullfrog Productions got a very bitter tasting cookie [1] around that time selling to EA, cut from the same dough...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicate_(1993_video_game)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions#Acquisiti...
CD Projekt Red is a great example of why publicly owned companies and creating expectations for unreasonable deadlines for any software is going to cause your employees to deal with crunch and release something that doesn't work that great. Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.