100% agree, the game has been really fun to play for me on PS4. I think the issue here came from the PR strategy of CD Projekt Red, they were getting some negative coverage and they came out and told everyone to just ask for a refund if they were unhappy. It seems like Sony didn't want to do that at first and with the shitstorm that it created, they decided great get a refund and we'll just remove the game from our store. Everyone loses.

I think a better strategy would have been saying, "We hear you and we are working hard on it, we're confident we can get this experience in great shape soon. If anyone is considering buying now, please understand that the current version is a buggy and you might want to consider waiting." Instead they made promises of refunds they couldn't afford, hurt their distribution partners and might have created a death spiral for the game and their studio. How miserable it must be to be an employee who worked so hard on this game.

My brother is pretty upset that he didn't buy it in time and when I tried to let him play on mine over shareplay, it doesn't let him because "the game is not released in our region" (the US).

It's more than just botched PR. The leadership of CD Projekt Red was saying the game was done and playable in January and only needed polish. Employees inside the company knew that was a lie.

> Now, CD Projekt Red employees want to know why management led them down the wrong path and whether all that work was worth it. On the call, one employee reportedly asked why leadership said the game was "complete and playable" in January, even though that wasn't true. The company said it would "take responsibility," without elaborating. Another employee allegedly asked whether it's hypocritical for CD Projekt Red to make a game about corporations exploiting human beings while the company itself was pushing its employees well past their limits.

https://www.svg.com/298958/cyberpunk-2077-devs-take-manageme...

> Another employee allegedly asked whether it's hypocritical for CD Projekt Red to make a game about corporations exploiting human beings while the company itself was pushing its employees well past their limits.

Or, they only just realized we already live in the early stages of a Dystopic Corporate Cyberpunk existence, and that the people who are asked to make mainstream mediums of it for mass consumption entertainment are not immune from that. I was a fan of things like Bladerunner/Judge Dread/5 Element since the 90s, and read my first Cyberpunk book in the early 2000s (Cryptonomicon) in HS but even then I could see the parallels back then. When I launched my fintech startup I spent a summer (2015) in Sunnyvale and felt we are already there, but people were far too distracted to see it.

As a Californian I soon made my exit out SV and CA a priority for my own mental health and sanity and left for Boulder. Which which was always the plan but then it soon had the same issues after a few years.

What I heard was that Sony does not want to both sell a game and allow it to be refunded on their platform. That combination invites people to play the game for free by just buying it and returning it later. So when CD Projekt Red announced that dissatisfied people could return the game for a refund, Sony stopped allowing further sales of the game.

As soon as a delay was announced after final master, I knew the game was being delayed because it failed validation with either MS or Sony (or both).

I suspect a title like 2077 failing validation could get some wiggle room, likely what happened was Sony went back to CDPR with a laundry list of failures and gave them X amount of time to tackle them.

It's possible the game went on sale despite not fully passing. But the moment it became clear that it was harming the image of a console they're still selling... that was that. After all, that's the point of validation. Usually the requirements are things that would reflect badly on the console like locking up and crashing vs "not being a fun game" or something.

I doubt it went on sale without fully passing the console manufacturer's certification process.

As someone who has gone through the certification process a few times with these companies, they're not really testing 'does your game have bugs that kind of suck for the player', it's more technical, like 'do the names of controller buttons match our provided excel sheet that tells you what they need to say' and 'did we catch it crashing at certain spots' and 'did the game have periods when it looked like it crashed because there's no animation for X seconds but it's really just loading something and you didn't include a loading animation' or 'can i leave the game on pause for 24 hours and it hasn't crashed during that time', stuff like that. I don't think they try to 'beat the game' or anything either.

And it's usually a standard checklist that can apply to every game.

So something can pass certification but still be a buggy mess in spots, like have objects fall through the ground and stuff, or have crappy jaggy graphics with big dips in framerates like the PS4 and Xbox One versions of this game had.

Although it's been a while since I've gone through the process, so I may not be remembering everything (they are pretty long checklists). Also when we got rejected it was usually just a few small things that we had fixed in a few days (but it took much longer to get queued up to go back through the process, that's what took so long for us). But we also made much smaller games.

Well, I say that, but we did have a game that completely passed certification but the multiplayer networking ended up being super laggy on release and we got dinged pretty hard for that in reviews. The system had a multiplayer test zone where you could simulate low latency, but while we never had problems when testing, it didn't fully emulate what the production environment would be (or at least it didn't seem to for us). We weren't the only game that had that issue either, some high profile games had the same problem on that system and required a patch to fix it.

I've worked on titles going through LotCheck and TCR (now known as XR if I'm not mistaken), I'm perfectly aware of how verification goes.

I never implied that it's about bugs that suck for the player, in fact I said the opposite: "Usually the requirements are things that would reflect badly on the console like locking up and crashing vs "not being a fun game" or something."

---

What I'm saying is I'm aware of what Cyberpunk 2077 means to these companies, especially with the timing in relation to new consoles and the holidays. 2077 is the kind of game that moves units.

I'm very specific in the wording of my comment, it's not that games normally ever get a pass, and it is a standard checklist... but I also know Sony and MS giving CDPR wiggle room not out of selflessness, but out of "psuedo-necessity", doesn't sound impossible.

I'm not saying it's common just because you have a AAA title, but 2077 comes across as the "perfect storm" to see this happen.

Here you go actually, straight from the horse's mouth:

https://www.mcvuk.com/business-news/for-the-good-of-the-indu...

> [Update] It looks as though CDPR bypassed some of the TRC process, promising the platforms it would be fixed for launch, but that doesn’t change the fact that both platforms have a legal responsibility to their consumers to provide a usable product. “In terms of the certification process and the third parties – this is definitely on our side. I can only assume that they trusted that we’re going to fix things upon release, and that obviously did not come together exactly as we had planned,” said Michał Nowakowski at CDPR in a conference call.

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/c...

The rules are different if you're important enough, I think that is just be expected at this point.

Fair enough. We were never very big, but I assumed it was the bare minimum of what was needed in order to pass and the manufacturers wouldn't give out exceptions that easily, if at all.

That's pretty annoying that they secured a pass but then didn't do as they promised (I realize it's not always that easy when it comes to programming, but still). I'm glad CDPR are getting punished for their rash decision in the marketplace and their stock price, at least, even though they're still probably going to end up making a ton of money off the game and their developers are still going to be crunched to death for little reward.

I think it reflects badly on Sony as well, but less so.

Sony may have assumed based on past success they could make it work.

A whole lot of business is simply not blinking or being seen as weak, and simply fixing it later.

You can still buy the physical version of the game no?

OTOH, they just got themselves a cash infusion ... proving the interest and the potential future ... found a lot of bugs ... and got a -whole lot- of free advertising. Rather like Librem, innit?

20-30 hours on a regular (launch model) Xbox One and the game completely crashes frequently, probably 20 times so far. This means you have to relaunch the game, get through to the main menu, then load your game. So at 3-5 minutes each time, that's an hour of my playtime just recovering from crashes.

Maybe 4-5 times I've run into a bug where my character can't move and I have to load a save, or the person I'm supposed to talk to or follow in a quest won't move onto the next action. This takes 5+ minutes to figure out that it's not going to happen and I need to reload.

A lot of the time it's clear that the game has a lot of things queued for loading and it's trying to catch up. You have to wait 30 seconds or so for it to load everything before you can trigger then next event. These are also the moments that usually trigger the crashes.

> Playing on Series X fwiw.

Most of the comments I've read that share your opinion, the person is inevitably playing on the pro version of the console. It feels really like they built the game for high end machines, and then did everything they could to get it working on the lower end machines. I don't know what the equivalent of building a 'mobile-first' website is in game development or if it's possible, but they clearly didn't do that.

But I'm pretty patient and forgiving of bugs, so I've still been enjoying the game despite the issues.

> I don't know what the equivalent of building a 'mobile-first' website is in game development or if it's possible [...]

Sounds like the old 'progressive enhancement' (at least I think that phrase was 'replaced' by mobile-first, based upon personal experience).

While I first heard it used for web development, where you would build up your content and then add JavaScript and (enhanced) styling, there's no reason that can't be applied to game development as well.

In fact, I think you can look at PS4 Pro Enhanced games for how it was done well.

We had this when game consoles were very dominant: PS3/Xbox360 era, start of the PS4/Xbox One era. Games were developed for consoles and then "touched up" for PC. It sucked. Starting from good machines and pushing them is far better imho. They should have cut off the base versions of both last gen consoles, but Sony/MS don't allow that afaik (e.g. either you don't deliver for PS4 at all or you deliver for PS4 and PS4 pro). At some point you have to realize that hardware is too old for something and accept it.

Agreed. I think the PS4 Pro and equivalent Xbox model really muddied the water when it came to the newest consoles, especially since both the PS5 and related Xbox version are at least backward compatible with the previous gen.

Target PC, make a version for the latest console gen.

ymmv of course, depending on the platform and what you consider "game breaking". I haven't given up on the game yet, but I am growing more frustrated.

five hours in, I killed a security guard and his body (which carried a key needed to advance the mission) fell through the floor. I had to load a previous save and be extra careful about where the body landed. honestly this kind of thing isn't so bad. it's obviously a bug and I know how to fix it.

the worst are the cases where I can't tell if it's a bug, a stupid dev choice "working as designed", or simply me being an idiot. I just finished playing the clouds mission, which is a club with a main area, a VIP area, and offices behind the VIP area. once I got in, I just started wandering around. I saw a guard telling some other NPC that he wasn't allowed in the VIP area, but I tried going in anyway, since he didn't say anything to me. no warning, all the guards open fire on me and I have to reload the checkpoint. okay, guess I'm not allowed in the VIP area. I talk to someone in the main area who sends me to sneak into the VIP area to talk to someone else. this time, the guards don't react, although nothing in the dialogue indicated I had permission to be there. maybe the areas just get unlocked when you have a reason to be there? anyway, I talk to my next contact who sends me to talk to the manager in the back office. since it's now fine for me to be in the VIP area, I assume it's fine to also go in the back office area. the next guard I run into shoots me. what the fuck?

Yes the security guard that comes out of the elevator with the card you have to loot, can fall down the elevator shaft (800m down actually!). Classic! :)

This is one of the (relatively few) documented bugs that I'm sure they've already fixed. Doing continuous level-saves is needless to say a necessity in any game you invest dozens of playhours in..

Still, to manage to have as few bugs like that in comparision to the sheer size of the game is amazing. Once you play a bit longer than this, you'll see the game opening up in so many ways and with so detailed side-jobs and side-plots that it's just jawdropping. That they actually pulled this off at all is a benchmark effort for future mega-games I'm sure.

> Doing continuous level-saves is needless to say a necessity in any game you invest dozens of playhours in..

Clawing at true straws much here? This is literally not how you are expected to play modern AAA games at all.

I'm not sure how it works right now, but nobody has time for Sierra type BS anymore (things like the game lets you go a long time without a needed item and oh now you need to replay half of it because you didn't get that tiny key hidden somewhere at the beginning)

"Welcome to the grittier future" - Sierra's ghost

(I hadn't realized just how much modern users would freak out at * Quest-style hoops to jump through)

doesnt make it not a necessity xP

If it's a necessity, then the game should inform you that you should save every 5 minutes to recover from game-breaking bugs.

Ironically, it has "autosaves" that seem to happen (in theory) each time you use a drop point, and at various other triggers. Finishing a quest seems to be one in some situations at least.

Not that it always works though. Grrrr. :(

My guess is the group of people they have designing missions and scenarios are manhandling the game world for their use-case without any care for the overall consistency. Just think about how many developers "fix" bugs by addressing the symptoms instead of the foundational issues in the code.

Probably goes something like this: we can make these easy-to-use mission designer tools and hire a bunch of interns to crank out content.

Then such a huge mess gets created it takes over a year for the more senior developers and designers to untangle it. Your VIP mission absurdness is buried under a list of 10k other issues.

Hitman level design is probably at the other end of this spectrum.

I had the same VIP area issue, on reload I watched the guard conversation and then another guard goes to the bathroom where you can jump him for his keycard. There were a few different ways to do it I think.

I had a weird “is it a bug?” moment yesterday, later on there’s a mission where you hack a parade float. I stole a delivery van to drive in.

Once inside nobody saw me as a threat though which was odd. I was wearing an arasaka vest so maybe that’s why?

I was able to just walk past everyone and do the mission easily.

> I had the same VIP area issue, on reload I watched the guard conversation and then another guard goes to the bathroom where you can jump him for his keycard. There were a few different ways to do it I think.

yeah I ended up playing through it a few times. part of why it was so confusing was that I actually went straight to the manager the first time I went in the back hallway area. he seemed a little surprised to see me, but wasn't too upset. I had to reload because I threatened to fight him if he didn't spill the beans and I lost the fight. the next time through, I ran into someone else who just shot me on sight.

> Once inside nobody saw me as a threat though which was odd. I was wearing an arosaka vest so maybe that’s why?

if that's the actual reason, that would be pretty cool! I'd actually love a more implicit/nuanced system for "where am I allowed to be". the thing that really breaks the immersion is wondering whether I am solving a puzzle or troubleshooting a bug. in general, I only do the latter for pay :)

>I was wearing an arosaka vest so maybe that’s why?

Unfortunately I don't think any such logic is in the game. For whatever reason that game just automatically flags you as non-hostile if you drove the van through the gate. From that point on the guards will just ignore you, no matter what you're wearing (I was wearing some random shirt and no arasaka gear and got the same result).

I get constant audio issues where dialog from one NPC is either not coming through or sounds like it's from 100ft away. I've also had problems getting the next part of a mission to trigger when you're supposed to wait a day for the NPC to call you back (one particular one, I waited an in-game week with 2 game reboots to trigger it). I randomly get stuck in the zoomed view. When I'm being passed a shard by an NPC, it's randomly replaced with a gun. Multiple areas at ground level throughout the map with gaps in collision resulting in you falling through the world. I've been stuck in rooms multiple times where the input prompt to open a door simply never triggers and I'm unable to open the door, requiring me to reload from checkpoint. Texts from NPCs come in the wrong order. Forced NPC calls in the middle of dialog during a separate mission. Sometimes unable to choose dialogue options when driving, requiring me to stop in the middle of the road to get out to give the response I want. Sometimes unable to do absolutely any blunt melee damage, which has resulted in a stuck loop requiring a reload (like the boxing robot near the beginning of the game)

The list goes on and on. With that said, I'm playing on PC with pretty decent performance all things considered, I've tolerated them because I'm still enjoying the game, and I wouldn't classify any of the bugs as necessarily "game breaking", but they're significantly detracting from the enjoyable game and narrative underneath.

It's almost as if not a single gameplay aspect has any sense of polish whatsoever and that sucks.

This has been roughly my experience and reaction on PC as well. Save and load is annoying but not a blocker at 5-10 seconds, but I would probably be pretty miserable at 3-5 minutes per restart.

A large part of the backlash is around unfinished systems. Without reeling off an exhaustive list the resulting world feels pretty soulless and shallow, it certainly feels like they released it far from being finished.

I've taken the liberty to reel off said list in the past

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25468522 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25471233

Well said. I simply don’t understand the amount of people defending the gameplay/story/“open world” here on HN while it’s receiving scathing reviews on Steam and Metacritic. Maybe game players actually more casual here than on those game-centric platforms?

I'm not a casual gamer and perceive the main and large side quests as some of the best I have played over the last 20 years.

But that doesn't mean the terrible AI (in all aspects of the game) or the lackluster attempt at an interactive open world don't bother me.

How is it so hard for people to distinguish the good parts of the game from the bad parts? The biggest offender is the combat AI because that impacts gameplay but issues like "not being able to get a haircut" don't deserve the mountains of hate threads and death threats by the children on r/cyberpunkgame.

> ... main and large side quests as some of the best I have played over the last 20 years.

On that note, if you haven't already played Horizon: Zero Dawn it's very much worth trying out.

I'd just finished a marathon multi-day session start->finish with that, and it's easily the best I've come across so far.

It's not as huge and sprawling as Cyberpunk 2077, but it's a fairly big open world and the writing is tight. The side quests and story are probably the best I've (personally) yet seen. :)

I'm going to come right out and say calling people children for not liking what you like is pretty childish...

After all, I don't see any death threats here so maybe keep that commentary on Reddit?

-

Now to me there's no distinguishing needed. The story was poorly written. The combat is lack luster. The environment is expansive but hollow. What's left?

Maybe you felt differently, but for me Act 1 was insultingly rushed. The fact that the terrible corny VR tutorial (in the future you can learn to fight in the blink of an eye sitting in a car, not missing a beat... well that's great for V but for the player, you just ruined the pacing of the rising action. I missed the beat. The Brain Dances are similar) is followed by a montage of events that could have taught you game mechanics while actually letting you start to care about your partner instead of having it drilled into you over the next hour that the guy who just robbed you while you stole a car, getting you arrested in the process is your bestie ... truly awful

Act 2 is just as painfully rough. The dialog choices still don't really matter, there are two choices in all those hours that change things meaningfully down the line (save a certain person and get close to a certain person) a lot of the writing is just cringe worthy ("Ghost Off!" and Keanu Reeves referring to his impressive c--- is not something anyone has ever asked for, and he doesn't pull it off)

Act 3 is one of the first places where dialog decisions matter... except the game is already pretty much over. It's like a choose your own ending instead of a choose your own adventure, and there's clearly a canonical choice the game guides you towards, every other ending is half fleshed out, the same way every beginning but Nomad is barely implemented...

-

Now all that being said, to me if a game has such uninspiring combat and such a hollow environment, and lets down it's promises of focusing on customization, and has such an awful bloated UI, and has such a bloated corpse of a skill tree...

It's a bad game. Story or no story, it doesn't save that.

I have books I read where I want a great story that's not interactive and well written.

If the story is interactive, the interaction should add something. Having to slog through a poorly made game for a story in a game of this scale is pretty inexcusable...

There are some middling games as far as gameplay depth and smoothness goes that have get carried by their story, but it needs to be a truly exceptional story, and usually there's a good reason why they couldn't do more with the game play. Games like Hellblade where all their budget went into story telling and the team just wasn't big enough to have some incredibly complex gameplay on top of the intricate storytelling and animation and deep lore... they're able to justify it to some degree. But CP2077 was an almost decade long journey with the kind of resources the Hellblade team wouldn't have in their sweetest dreams. And it's all squandered on what was clearly a lack of direction and focus.

Whenever I see people defending the game it’s basically like “I’ve got x hours in and I’m having a blast” and they seem to ignore or not care how obvious it is that huge swathes of the game were clearly cut or left unfinished. The story particularly has signs of some very last minute changes.

I just checked Metacritic. The reviews seem great on some platforms.

Skimming the bad reviews for last gen consoles. Some complaints aren’t about issues relating to weaker machines. It seems like there’s some group think or hive mind stuff going on.

https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/cyberpunk-2077 Metascore: 87 User score: 7.1

I have seen all this backslash and does not fit my experience with the game in any possible way. But your criticism fits a pattern I have seen, it criticises without knowing and sometimes even lying on easy verifiable facts.

I do not get the campaign against this game in particular, and it seems that neither many people in this forum.

Honestly, with both CP and TW1/2/3, I feel that if they scrapped the “numbers RPG” elements, they would’ve had significantly better games on their hands.

> looking at the online reaction you'd get the idea that this game is a non-stop bugfest.

It kind of is though. Super common to have dropped objects (eg guns from dead thugs) be stuck in the ground and unable to be picked up. :/

Personally, I installed it yesterday about midday, then played for around 8 hours. Today, played around 6 more hours, finally getting up to the Keanu Reeves piece (after doing many side quests).

Got stuck in a location between objects, 1/2 way between floors. Had to revert to my last checkpoint save... only to discover the game hadn't been saving for the last 4 hours of play time. WTF! :( :( :(

No autosaves when it should, no quick saves either. Even though it clearly showed the saving icon each time I triggered a quick save, prior to getting close to a mission start location.

Uninstalled it instead.

Losing 1/4 of my play time like that, when it explicitly showed the icon to indicate saving was happening.. and not actually doing it, is so far beyond taking the piss. :(

Not sure if I'll try again in a few months. Plenty of other, better things to put time into instead.

Yes I can second this. I'm a big fan of other similar-ish games like Deus Ex, Fallout, and Borderlands, and I can say Cyberpunk has done a great job of delivering some of the best components of each of those. There are a few bugs, the worst of which caused me to lose 10 min of progress, having to load back a save. But there were plenty of bugs in Fallout New Vegas and that is easily one of my favorite RPGs.

I'm also enjoying the game, and I love going around in the city, it's amazingly beautiful and quite detailed. But on the other hand, it feels absolutely dead at times, during the missions the city comes alive, but outside of missions it feels empty and soulless.

I've encountered quite a few bugs, but nothing game breaking yet. Usually it's NPCs acting strange, or people just spawning in right in front of me. I definitely feel it under delivers, but I'm hoping it turns into a No Man's Sky type story, where the game actually becomes super fun to play.

> during the missions the city comes alive, but outside of missions it feels empty and soulless.

I don't think that is a bug. This is cyberpunk after all.

:'( ... I'm... Trying man..

An example of the games beauty https://youtu.be/oVKl9e3gSAE

That's impressive.

I finished it on PC with little issues in a little over 50 hours.

But despite the time put in I didnt really love it. The whole game was an illusion of choice. The side quests and fights gave you some cool Deus Ex like freedom, but the main quest was an interactive movie with some meaningless options for you to engage in.

And given those cutscenes, and scripted parts are so plenty, I really dont see myself replaying this game with a different build.

Its 7/10 for me, nothing like the Witcher.

Agreed. It felt like a 2010 remake to me, even on a rig with all the bells and whistles.

Stunningly beautiful when you went looking for a shot, but otherwise, there wasn't much to invest into. Especially once I realized there wasn't any consequence for the way I completed an objective, the illusion really fell apart.

the main path is a lot more subtle about how your choices affect it. You can reach or lock yourself out of certain quests and endings depending on some early game decisions and which sidequests you complete

No, you can't. That was a feature that got cut. The entirety of the "branching path" system is a series of 3 questions at the end of the game.

There is several endings to the game that require you to complete side missions in certain ways. The "secret ending" is only achievable if a certain NPC is a lot in the positive area, even more than is necessary to unlock that NPCs normal ending. If you don't follow up on two NPC's side missions, those endings are respectively locked out too, or if you don't side with them at the end. If you simply go through the main mission, there is only two endings available to you, if you go through everything in a decent manner you have 8 endings available to you.

Side missions also affect eachother and some have hidden timers, if you don't complete an objective in time or don't check in with the NPC, things will happen out of your control.

Hell, if you manage to play the nomad side missions well and a particular NPC likes how you do things, you can get their gun. But if they don't like you, that doesn't lock you from the rest of the nomad options, you just don't get that gun.

For all the bugs that the game has, side missions and choices do affect things and the game makes a good effort on making you feel like it has more impact than it has (after all, a lot of it is simply a like/dislike score, but a lot of games operate on that scale), like some meaningless inquiry option (ie, blue dialog option) can lead you to a completely new dialog tree that can open up a small side mission in a different way.

Where are you getting 8 from? Even being generous about what counts as a difference I'm counting 6.

I was already counting the "secret" ending. Two of the "choices" you can make without meeting the criteria are really the same ending with slightly different dialogue options. Mass Effect did not have multiple endings.

Side missions may have subtle differences but the entirety of the mission is in a vacuum; there's no difference between whether or not that trigger exists outside of that single event.

It led me to feel like a county fair more than a living world. "Next up, head to the torture booth! Ignore the wood scaffolding along the way".

Then a lot of RGPs must feel like county fair to you if "you only get X endings". The ending mission certainly doesn't exist in a vacuum unless you deliberately look away from the choices you can make there. Personally, the only objection I have is that it railroads a bit, but that is understandable since it's the finale for the story, I've done that for TTRPGs campaigns too, when it came for their finale's.

Yes you can. One side quest with a companion expires in 24 hours upon receiving. If you don’t complete it, you can’t access that ending.

I think it's had too much hype and too many expectations. Marketing did too good a job. I didn't watch much of the hype just a few trailer videos, and it's meeting my expectations. But I imagine someone who was really into the hype might feel its not up to what was promised.

I like it. The world visually is like nothing else I've seen. Absolutely amazing. Missions are entertaining. Fighting isn't that good but hey. Few bugs of floating things in the air, but I can live with that. And they'll prob be fixed in a few weeks.

Marketing did a bad job if they overdone it, because they're doing a disservice to everyone, both to the clients and to the developers because of the backlash.

I'm usually quite good as keeping my expectations in check, and I avoid preordering because it's usually not a gamble that gives a good return.

It’s a victim of the Witcher 3’s success. Even the Witcher 3 wasn’t all this great at launch. CDPR didn’t become a beloved company just because they released a great game. They listened to feedback, corrected a lot of bugs and introduced quality of life improvements and they put out a couple of very high quality DLCs for free. This coupled with their work in GOG restoring classic titles is what earned them their reputation.

There have been so many buggy video game launches, that I suspect Sony removing it from the store is not as straightforward as it appears to be. CDPR must have done something silly to annoy Sony. Either way these are dark days for the company.

Eh, I have to disagree that Witcher 3 wasn't great at launch. And it definitely wasn't nearly as buggy as Cyberpunk. CDPR already had a great reputation before launch as a beloved company, all that changed was they went mainstream.

> Performance on last gen aside

I think there's your problem, because the majority of people are playing on last gen, as advertised that it would work there.

It's like if you play Witcher 3 on the Nintendo Switch-- it technically works, but it's also a predictably blurry mess. Anyone who's read up on Cyberpunk knows that it's going to strain even the best gaming PCs, so it should be no surprise that it barely runs on last gen consoles.

It's not fair to compare home console ports to Nintendo Switch ports, a mobile console with a mobile-grade Soc. Some graphics and performance losses are expected and excusable, depending on whether it's still worth it to you.

Every trailer labeled "Nintendo Switch" shows footage taken from an actual Switch; you can at least gauge how well it runs or whether visuals are good or not. (And there's tech reviewers like Digital Foundry)

Comparably, Cyberpunk's most recent gameplay demo was purely next-gen (and "mid-gen" like PS4 Pro), and reviewers were playing on PC and not allowed to show footage. You couldn't know about X1/PS4 experience until it was too late.

> Anyone who's read up on Cyberpunk knows that it's going to strain even the best gaming PCs, so it should be no surprise that it barely runs on last gen consoles.

This game was announced when PS4/X1 just came out, even if you account for development starting years later that's still within the peak of their cycle. If it weren't for the last 3 delays (only 7 months combined), Cyberpunk would be releasing on those same consoles before PS5 was even announced. 15-24FPS, 540p gameplay would not be acceptable then and it should not be acceptable now.

You make some good points, so let me try to better explain where I was coming from.

There are certain games-- the ones that get all the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards when it's about to come out. When there's a game like that coming out soon, I just know it's going to run like shit on console and everyone's going to complain. This was true when Crysis came out in 2007: all the PC gamers upgraded their graphics cards to play it, and the guys on Xbox360 just had to put up with a blurry mess running at 20fps. Same thing happened with Just Cause 3 in 2015. A bunch of others, too.

I don't mean to say that it's okay; if you sell the game on a certain console, one would hope that it'd run well there. I just think it's entirely predictable which games are going to have this problem (it's the ones that got the PC gamers to buy new graphics cards so it would even run), and then I'll hop online and everyone's talking like it took them by surprise.

I got your point, and I agree a few generation-defining games are notoriously more demanding and one shouldn't expect a great experience on console, but there's a limit to that downgrade. 540p 15FPS is below the bare minimum something ought to run, if it gets that bad, maybe it's better to just outright say "you need a PS4 Pro / Xbox One X or newer to play, sorry". I say this as a PC gamer with no current-gen (PS4/X1) or next-gen console at all (except the Switch if that counts in this context).

And IIRC Just Cause 3 was just bad all around, the PC port was extremely buggy as well.

The game had several release dates _this year_ that were before the current round of consoles were out. Considering those were the only consoles it was going to be on at release if it hit one of it's many slated release dates this year it's totally inexcusable that this is the state the game is on on that hardware.

PC gaming culture (you can play it on that rig but it'll barely run) Vs console gaming culture (it should work and performance shouldn't be a thing you think about)

They've actually added a ton of settings for the switch to run the Witcher 3 very well: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-the-w...

I basically played it with everything on max and had no slowdowns which is impressive frankly. Obviously rendering on a Switch doesn't compare with a PC - an obvious statement if anyone takes a look a the HW specs.

Except that's not true and I don't know where the assumption comes from. CDPR clearly said that majority of sales so far have been on PC.

And then they repeated that they have no way of knowing which platform you're actually playing that last-gen version on - so people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales.

> so people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales

The PS5 version has some crisp visuals and better frame-rate but it still has floating people, vehicles that forget about collision detection, crappy AI, cars that drive on rails, horrible pop-in effect, and gunfights where you can't take down some pissed off guy on the street without 50 direct headshots.

As for the story; I chose the corpo path and within 15 minutes of cutscenes and limited movement "gameplay" I'm on the street as some punk, never getting to experience anything close to what was marketed as the corpo path.

A few hours in I began to get lost in the world and enjoyed the advanced gameplay mechanics. They really went all-out with what you can do in the game, but then once the cinema-quality quest is finished I'm thrown back into the sloppy unfinished open-world.

> people playing the PS4 game on the PS5(where the game runs absolutely fine) still count as PS4 sales.

Because it's a PS4 game. There isn't a PS5 release.

I assume software I buy runs on the hardware it's designed for.

It's really unbelievable that in today's time of data collection they are incapable of knowing the freaking platform name on which the game runs on. Don't they have any ingame online services or just straight up get the data from Sony. This cannot be true.

Edit: what could be is that they just didn't build a data collection pipeline for this seeing as how they didn't do half of the planned stuff

Last-gen Xbox owner here. Lots of us were hyped about this game, and expected it to be the last major must-have game of the generation, because that's what CDPR has implied all along for the last half-decade.

Now, it seems to end up in the same category as Dragon Age: Inquisition on the Xbox 360; possibly playable after a few patches, but nowhere near a state which makes the game justice.

I remember trying to play DA:I on 360 and how much better it was on PS4. As soon as I heard the Cyberpunk PS4 reviews I took the money I had aside for Cyberpunk and got Miles Morales instead. I'll be playing Cyberpunk in new years/spring when there's more PS5 stock, an official version and a few patches.

When I looked at the videos, I haven't even thought that it's possible to get so many light effects out of 7 year old cards. It turns out it isn't.

There are some huge, amazing looking games on PS4 and Xbox One. It is less an issue of capability and more an issue of Cyberpunk 2077 not being sufficiently optimized for them. The game was delayed multiple times. If it was released earlier the console version would have only been played on the previous gen. Makes me wonder if the delays were in large part to wait on new gen to come out in order to lower the need for optimization of older gen. I guess they should have waited another year.

They should have made a better deal with PS5 and the new Xbox, as many gamers want to buy the new consoles just to be able to play Cyberpunk (I'm getting a PS5 for my friend for Christmas to play it, though it will take more time to get it of course)

I've always wondered, don't Sony/Microsoft do their own QA before releasing a title on their platforms?

They do, but it's not "qa" in the sense of are there any bugs in the game, there's a checklist you have to adhere to and as long as you adhere to it, you're good. It mostly checks stuff like if you've got voice chat, do you respect parental controls,or are you using any undocumented APIs, or does the game crash under "normal use". An unstable game can pass these was checks, and there are no guarantees of quality from this process.

(Disclaimer: I work on Fortnite, have ample experience with making sure the rules are followed)

That makes sense, thanks.

"Performance on last gen aside"

The way I understand all of this, Sony is pulling the game from the PS4 store but promoting that it's available on PS5 with additional patches.

CD Projekt Red also already said that getting the PS5 port ready for launch will take all of their capabilities. So it might be a deliberate move to sacrifice the PS4 version in order to improve the PS5 one.

I mean Sony clearly has a financial incentive to push the PS5 onto the market and to make players abandon the PS4.

I don’t object or argue against your point, but I find it interesting to note that as far as I understand, it’s near impossible to buy a PS5 right now, whereas Sony can sell tens of millions of copies of a software on the PS4-copying software is practically free, after all.

Agreed, this is definitely no worse than any other AAA release in recent memory. I wonder if people remember that on its release day, Skyrim's main quest could not be completed due to a bug.

Anyways, I'm 50 hours in and it's awesome.

Glad it’s awesome! I’ve primarily owned Nintendo consoles, and at least first-party Nintendo games - which I would consider AAA - never seem to have any major bugs.

Maybe many people don’t consider Nintendo AAA though?

It depends on the games. Zelda is definitely a AAA, Super Mario Party not so much.

I agree that Nintendo is not the kind of company to release a game with obvious bugs and hope to fix them later.

Miyamoto has this famous saying about releasing a broken game: "A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever.". Although it doesn't hold true anymore (thanks to patching), their mantra hasn't changed. He reflected in recent years about his quote, saying: "“I didn’t mean to say a bad game is always bad, what I meant to say is if you release a game in a bad state you will always regret it,". Yes, indeed.

It’s not so much about the bugs, but how much overpromised it was compared to what they delivered. Even the 48mins gameplay trailers has many scripted segments and is not representative for the game.

https://reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kcve8s/promised_...

Maybe but the game is still tons of fun and .... that's what I want a game to be. CDPR deserves some backlash and the situation on last gen consoles is terrible.

But they delivered an amazing game on higher end platforms which suffers from bugs that are mainly silly and rarely game breaking. The truth is that communities like r/cyberpunkgame are just the gaming equivalent for hateful Facebook groups.

How sad do you have to be as a person if you send death threats to CDPR devs because of a fucking game?

This is like developer saying "it works on my PC" ... except if you're shipping a half finished game to millions of preorder customers you can see how this could lead to situation that it's now. I'm still interested in this game but I'll probably wait for it to go on sale and for them to iron out the bugs.

Calling a game's bugs to be of the "Bethesda" type only tells me that its a mess of a game.

But is it Obsidian type?

Sony pulled the game from the PS store. So, it's a not just a little deal.

Yeah, it definitely seems like the "big deal" bugs are confined to last-gen consoles; however, the online reaction would make you think it's the game as a whole.

I'm ~30 hours into the PC version (on Stadia) and the only bugs I've seen have been things like food/drinks floating in the air when you knock tables away. Nothing game-breaking, no matter how hard I try to break it.

It is a big deal because both the PS5 and XSX are at risk of going into a death spiral right now. Because most people have only been able to buy units at double the normal price via scalpers, people have been buying way less games than normal. Which means that if this continues, developers just won't make games for these consoles and people won't buy them. The enormous failure of Cyberpunk is only further increasing this risk, by preventing people from spending money on actual finished games.

On PC. Bugs are in line with other games. Not nearly as bad as the original Fable or Watch Dogs (and Watch Dogs Legion), for examples. I do seem to get stuck in “can’t save” or “can’t run/crouch” mode occasionally, but a quick reload fixes it. Visually the game is stunning, it’s a lot of fun. Great voice acting and story development.

Combat is a little better than gta but pretty vanilla outside of hacks (not nearly as good as combat-focused games like dishonored, rage, doom, arkham, or more recent titles like Star Wars fallen order, not really as good as as borderlands et al either).

The game tries to do a lot, and some of it is great - it’s a long, beautiful story with an intricate world. There’s a lot of untapped potential.

Playing on a 4 year old gaming PC with a 1080. Have had no real problems in the 50ish hours I have in. A little sluggish through some of the open world parts until I dialed the graphics back to "high".

I think part of the problem here is they are trying to include beautiful effects like ray tracing for the newest machines, but have to also support 7 year old previous gen consoles as well. With the new Series X and PS5 consoles only recently on the market, this is a tough time to release a big title - because the player base is overwhelmingly not on those new consoles, and that's too much of a market to lose.

Under the original plan, it would've launched before the new consoles, much earlier this year

Strongly agree with this. I’ve been playing on Nvidia GeForce Now (so essentially a high-end PC), and haven’t encountered any major issues. I’d say the game sets a new standard in terms of the level of detail in the environment. The first time you leave your apartment in Night City is simply stunning, probably the only comparison would be the Uncharted series (which was much more linear).

Cyberpunk was perhaps the most hyped game of the last year, so no matter what CD released, I expected a strong and polarizing reaction. I agree with their decision to offer refunds, but I think they don’t need to be as apologetic about what was released. The same issues came up years ago with publishers who targeted the PS4/Xbox One — Cyberpunk just drew a lot more attention this time around.

I'm playing on a PC with a 4-5 year old i7, a very fast M2 SSD and an RTX2080. Performance is overall good at relatively high presets and the majority of normal gameplay is ok in terms of bugs. However, every time I get into a car, after about 30 seconds of driving, the game hard crashes to the desktop with a memory access violation. That makes it sort of unplayable once you advance from the beginning and need to travel longer distances. No other game I play has these problems. It's very frustrating because I actually like the game so far.

Playing on PC and absolutely loving it. It is like a very ambitious Deus Ex.

I haven't figured out a way to word this that doesn't sound smarmy, but I feel like this style of game is not what your everyday gamer was expecting. It is reasonably complex, has morale choices and the combat is frankly lack lustre and more about the numbers. It plays much more like a 90s/2000s RPG than a more simplified modern action RPG, clunkiness included.

For the reasons above I quickly forgive the clunkiness and bugs because what the game is offering is rare in AAA games these days.

I have to strongly disagree. To me it feels like a very luke-warm copy of Deus Ex, where your choices don't matter and all dialogs are written for 14 year olds. Since I'm playing on a PC, I also don't suffer from actual bugs, but more like "second order bugs" which aren't technical but design/writing related: it's clear that the developers had to constantly plaster over the fact that they didn't have enough time to properly fix (or finish) their designs.

Maybe it's just that deus ex is 20 years old and we were younger than, so that its dialogs and story felt better [than it maybe actually were - not saying it's bad, just maybe a little rose-tinted]. I have a similar inclination as you regarding the story/dialogs of cyberpunk thus far (stereotype-ridden, many dialogs/texts are a waste of time etc.) and I also wouldn't really compare the two games gameplaywise too much (Cyberpunk is a hybrid of open world and structured levels). However, what I really adore about cyberpunk and what makes it very likable to me is the artstyle and world and feeling graphically. It's just so beautiful with these vibrant colors and different parts of the city, especially when it rainS ;) Also, the characters' believable facial expressions really add to the feeling of being in this cyberpunk world. That makes the game worthwhile to me.

I'm surprised we've had such a different experience. Have you been doing the side quests?

I want to add that Deus Ex is hands down my favourite franchise, I've played every installment multiple times (except Invisible War). So I didn't make the comparison lightly. I'm not suggesting it's exactly like Deus Ex, but I think calling it a luke warm copy isn't doing Cyberpunk any justice either. It's got elements from Deus Ex, but it is a very unique game with it's own approach to the genre.

Same experience for me, no game breaking bugs so far. However I am worried (a lot) about save files getting corrupted once they reach 8mb [0] . Hope that gets addressed sooner than later

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kfpwt5/psa_s...

Yeah, they said the same thing about No Man's Sky, too. I guess I'll just wait for this one to ripen a bit, and not play it on eighth-gen. Cyberpunk, No Man's Sky, Windows XP, Big Sur... some software is still green when it goes to market.

I'm playing on the older Xbox One X (series X still impossible to find), but my experience is roughly the same.

It's buggy, there are sometimes crashes/game breaking bugs, but the autosave makes recovery easy. The world and story are really good and make up for it.

i felt the same way 25 hours in... don't worry you'll start hitting really bad bugs. especially in the last few mainline missions

I noticed that too. The first 25 hours or so were flawless, until after you acquire the biochip. Then things start to get dodgy. I hope it wasn't some deliberate meta-art game development, where the player encounters real life bugs as V acquires them as the story progresses.

Just goes to show how easily the public is swayed by a media blitz.

Same. 50 hours in on pc.