I played ~80 hours and enjoyed it more than any RPG I've played since the original Mass Effect trilogy. It looked great too, at medium settings on my 4 year old gaming PC.

It does seem like there were some legitimate issues on consoles, but I don't even know how seriously to take that given the insane disproportionality of the criticism that even the PC version has been getting. I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?

Presumably if it does end up in court, the truth will come out and CDPR will be sanctioned appropriately. I don't mean to say the release couldn't have been better, but from where I'm sitting it feels like 75% just another case of insane "gamer entitlement".

> I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?

I'm starting to think that some major players are capitalizing on the situation by bankrolling marketing and negative PR. CDPR stock has fallen dramatically and now they are facing punitive action from governments that on a level I've never heard of for a game studio.

I'm not apologizing for them. They should not have released what they did for the PS4. But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.

I guess we'll see if they get acquired at a deep discount by Ubisoft or something.

> But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X%

I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.

Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.

I had the same experience. Open world games should have emergent gameplay or fun side content. 2077 doesn't really have either. You can't lead the law on a merry car chase, like GTA. You can't steal into people's homes to find goodies or start a battle with the town folk like Skyrim. You can't play a chill game of Gwent with a nearby NPC. You can't build a neat base like in Fallout 4. You can't go fishing or pelt hunting like in RDR2.

There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.

It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?

Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.

I wouldn’t argue with much of this on the face of it but I think people forget that this is a single-player RPG, not some game-as-a-service designed to support an endless grind. The fact that people are working through the content (of which 80+ hours is plenty, IMO) and then setting it aside to wait for DLC is perfectly in line with my expectations of how people engage with a game like this. Maybe they invited the comparison with grindy looter-shooters by having looter-shooter-style loot, but at its heart it really isn’t that kind of game.

Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.

I would agree with you with the caveat of their PS4 (console in generaly really) release. It's one thing to release something buggy and promise to fix it later... but that console release was more akin to a bait-and-switch. It was not playable and any product released that like deserves regulatory action. You can't sell something for $120 that does not work out of the box and take a "we'll fix it later" attitude.

>But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.

Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.

Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.

IMO the real issue is less that it’s unfinished and more that the product at its best doesn’t seem to live up to its lofty expectations (disclaimer: have not played it and don’t intend to until it goes on sale, just watched others and read a good number of reviews).

From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.

People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.

> disclaimer: have not played it

> routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development

Come on, man.

You left something out:

> watched others and read a good number of reviews

What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?

First-hand reviews play an important role in the ecosystem, yes.

When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.

I am not coming out swinging - my comment was very much about the reaction to the game and I never tried to pretend otherwise. I said my impression is that it's a B+ game at it's best, which means that its horrible technical failures and unscrupulous marketing are particularly glaring.

It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.

Well I've played it and is has routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development. I was most disappointed that crafting is useless because I wanted to roleplay that skill tree. The game is so boring I've been playing Far Cry instead and Far Cry is trash. Coming from a Deus Ex background there is nothing there to Cyberpunk. However most people liked the game so what's the big deal, it works and the audience is mostly happy.

> Far Cry is trash

Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.

Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.

I should have said trashy, though it is also super buggy and with poor quests/dialogue/etc. It's definitely a guilty pleasure of mine and something about the light RPG elements pull me in to completing the challenges.

Well I've played it and I love it.

I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.

If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."

The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.

The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.

On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."

I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.

I had trouble getting into the characters, especially Jackie. Outer Worlds characters drew me in much more but the gameplay was dry. I'll definitely go back to Cyberpunk when they turn on PS5 ray tracing.

Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.

There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.

Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.

I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.

> I was most disappointed that crafting is useless

Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc

I agree it is a viable combat path. I meant economically, it's a lousy way to make money. That's what my character was turning into a tech weapon build, but I wanted to get rich from making things.

> lofty expectations

Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.

Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.

OK - I didn't buy into the lofty expectations and I don't think you're understanding my point. My point was that even a platonic ideal of Cyberpunk wouldn't have lived up to expectations - I was surprised by how mediocre the reviews of the plot and quests were - which is a major part of why the blowback about the technical deficiencies has been particularly intense.

> and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game

I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.

I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.

I didn’t mean aesthetically so much as how vibrant the city feels (and again, I’ve only read about and watched the game). But traffic and pedestrians are far more brainless than even Vice City, the city itself is far less interactive or dynamic, and there’s way less opportunity for exciting emergent gameplay.

> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.

That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.

But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.

you can check it out in motion here, does it really look like ps3 game to you?

https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...

I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and felt like Panam is up there on the list of top NPCs in gaming. Like, you genuinely feel like you're becoming friends throughout the missions.

I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.

Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.

Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.

> And every NCPD job was identical.

I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.

It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.

A whole lot of those NCPD missions amount to "kill these three-five bad guys." Yeah, they are in interesting spots, but I've cleared several of them in under a minute. Some of the "Assault in progress" can be done in <5 seconds late game.

I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.

Not really the issue, also anecdotal. Clearly a large enough base complained for Sony to pull it from their Playstation store, and they've never done that before.

The real issue is what was promised and teased and what was delivered. Honestly might border on false advertising. There are countless videos breaking down what was advertised in their promotional feature walkthrough videos and what was actually delivered (not even withstanding pretty glaring bugs and performance issues).

IMO The fact that they chose not to deliver review copies of the last-gen version until after the PC reviews were already in is the worst part of it. It seems pretty clear that they wanted to buy the game based on the PC reviews, when the last-gen version is clearly inferior.

Another pretty underhanded move. They definitely knew the console versions had major issues and didn't want reviewers to see it.

At its core it’s a decent game. The issue is with so many bugs (many of which preventing a player from finishing a story quest) it’s hard to focus on the game when your copy keeps crashing, glitching, frustrating you.

Do you have an example of a bug that prevents quest completion? I've been lucky enough to not run into a single one during my 100+ hours so far and I've been trying to do every quest. I worry that these things keep getting said without people actually experiencing them. I have several friends playing on PS4 without the reported crashes. Not saying you haven't, I just don't have any direct knowledge of the issues that have been reported and when it is, it's very hand-wavy.

On PS4 I ran into a bug near the end of "The Pickup" mission where Jackie gets stuck inside the All Foods building. The next objective is to talk to him, but once you exit the building you can't re-enter or call him. I had to go back to a previous save a few times. Sometimes the game just crashes and I have to restart the console. There have been some other bugs that I just found funny, like once I was driving and all of a sudden the car was stuck hundreds of feet in the air and I fell and died when I got out. I've been enjoying the game though and the bugs haven't really bothered me too much, but I see how they could.

The crashes seem like the worst problem. I imagine that is really frustrating on console. Thanks for sharing.

Games like this tend to have bugs that I can't understand. I recently played through an identical mission a friend of mine was having problems completing. In his game, on a different PC, the game crashes every time he initiated the quest. In mine, it worked without a hitch.

There's so many differences between our savefiles and our system configurations that the bug could be a combinatorial explosion of things without access to source code.

This is super common in videogames. When some significant amount of people are experiencing bugs with a game and you're not, you should defer to the judgement of the ones who are having problems.

I only ran into one bug that prevented quest completion. Near the beginning of the game, there is a quest where you and Jackie have to pick up some equipment then fight your way out of the building. On my first attempt, Jackie got stuck in combat because he didn't recognize a dead as enemy as being dead, so he wouldn't leave the building for me to talk to him and finish the quest.

Here’s one right off the top of Google search: https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/game-break...

Ah, that Disasterpiece one sounds unfortunate. As both a QA tester and quest scripter I can imagine how that cases was potentially missed though.

Is that one you've experienced gabereiser?

Once but a refresh from an older save (and doing things in proper order) worked the second time.

I viewed such a bug on a Twitch stream. Avoiding spoiler details... The streamer was completing the Delemain (sp) questline and had to roll back to a save just before the decision at the end due to a softlock that happened in the scripted sequence after.

There's one quest line which makes you wake up naked without your stuff.

If you trigger the exit dialogue before picking up your stuff, the quest line gets stuck.

That's the only actual showstopper I encountered in 60 hours of gameplay.

I've had a few bugs where scripted events fail to trigger. Nothing game breaking, it's usually solved by loading the last save.

>The issue is with so many bugs (many of which preventing a player from finishing a story quest)

You should see games from The Elder Scrolls franchise. Even in the latest version of Skyrim there still are game-breaking bugs they have not fixed.

I’m familiar. I think ES franchise is prone to this, so was GTA and RDR2. The issue is gamers expect an entire world of simulation and effect. Ambitious large open world games suffer from this as dev teams don’t have enough QA to test everything and dev’s have to test it themselves. This ends up with a “works good under these circumstances” which circumstances are different when players play it at launch.

It’s a hard problem. Extremely large open world, thousands of scripts and triggers and things to test. I sympathize. Gamers are the hardest genre of users to please.

I understand you. I have not played Cyberpunk but games from the TES family are extremely complex. It would be impossible for them not to have scripting bugs.

I've ran into a couple of quest bugs, however most of them are about finishing things in certain order of operations, generally it will unlock the next task anyway, and then you can switch the target from the Journal.

Yeah I'm worried it'll just frustrate me. I got it for Christmas but I'm hoping for a patch before I install. Apparently there's one due in a week or two and another next month.

Seems like everyone I talk to likes the game even if its not bug free and the combat isn't perfect.

Yeah, I like it. I've seen some bugs, like NPCs walking 10 feet above ground, or vehicles clipping into each other. Nothing seriously immersion-breaking though, and definitely nothing game-breaking.

The writing and depth were way too lacking for me.

I can deal with bugs, but the lack of depth constantly breaks immersion, and some of the writing is just really cringeworthy

I agree that the writing for the main quest was underwhelming, but there were a couple side quests that really stood out enough to redeem the writing in my eyes. Specifically, the Peralez and the Sinnerman quest chains felt really memorable, interesting, and engaging. It's a shame the main story wasn't up to the same the level.

> e writing is just really cringeworthy

Which games writing is not cringeworthy please?

Supergiant’s Hades is a delight in this respect.

I may be biased as I picked it up after some time mindlessly grinding through Persona 5, which has an English translation that is perfectly functional but never amazing.

Not bias; it's fairly solid writing. Hardly a landmark or anything, but the characters actually have character, the plotline has sufficient depth to actually pay attention to (though by no means amazing), and perhaps most importantly of all, it doesn't try to stop you from playing the fucking game because it has a narrative to tell -- a feat accomplished very rarely in non-sandbox games..

TBC, it physically stops you from playing, but it's told in small enough bursts with sufficiently fast text rendering/animations that it doesn't feel like a real interruption; where most games will happily sit you through unskippable cutscenes and long monologues because gameplay is largely the means to reach the next narrative checkpoint

Sleeping Dogs, wonderful writing even if the plot wasn't philosophically deep or anything

Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.

But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.

I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...

well it depends on your definition of cringeworthy but there's for example a huge difference between new vegas (good, from Obsidian Entertainment) vs. Fallout 3 (well, could be worse actually, from Bethesda). Cyberpunk feels quite mainstreamy in that regard (meaning its writing is not up to par to less mainstreamy RPGs). Well, if we're on the topic: The writing actually is pretty bad. There's a lot of talking without saying shit. I mean how difficult must it be to put some real character into the characters? Meaning some semblance of real backstories and not just blips about how bad everything is without really saying anything. argh.

The talking without saying anything killed me.

That and the weird way that V rarely uses the pronoun "I" or "we"

It's not "I need help"

It's "Need help"

Not "We're going to have time."

"Gonna have a hard time."

Doing it sometimes is one thing, it's a manner of speaking after all, but for anyone who hasn't played it, it's more jarring than it sounds.

I get the sense they were going for a quick talker vibe, but it just doesn't fit at all in so many places where they do it.

It makes it feel like you're listening to the VA do a quick read through of each line before they actually record the line...

I have the PS4 version (yes, base not Pro) and it's 900p-720p dynamically switching and 25fps, maybe 30 in better cases. Which is utter trash. It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube. Or listening to music in 64kbsp. On top of that the story doesn't save the game either which is mediocre at best especially compared to what was promised.

Then look at Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2 on the same console.

I don’t think it is fair to compare it to Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2.

Both games have worlds that are mostly empty, with few buildings here and there. As far as I remember, RDR2 dropped to ~25FPS in Saint Denis on my PS4 just after launch (not sure now), and Saint Denis is tiny comparing to Night City.

I remember walking out of your apartment complex for the first time, and being really amazed at the number of NPCs walking and driving around. It's the first game I've played that actually made me feel like I was in a major city.

Exactly. The game supposedly looks beautiful, but I haven't seen that due to textures not loading well, general low resolution, and choppy FPS. And then I decide to switch to Red Dead Redemption 2, or a FromSoft game, or Battlefront 2 and see games that maintain decent FPS and graphical fidelity at a good resolution.

All of these games are cross-platform. It's possible. I just think the management of CDPR let everyone's pet feature into the timeline and marketing material without regard for the impact of delivery time.

Same experience for me. It caused so much migraines, eyes pain and nausea that I had to stop playing it. Never had a game capable of switching so fast and erratically in the range 900p-700p and 28-15 fps to actually cause physical symptoms on my body.

I got a refund, bought the xbox version and played on xbox series s and it was actually pretty good even with graphics clearly "old gen"-level compared to the pc version.

>900p-720p dynamically switching and 25fps, maybe 30

>It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube

surely you mean like watching 720p Youtube :)

> I have the PS4 version (yes, base not Pro)

This game was not meant to be played on > 10 year old hardware. That's no excuse they shouldn't have released it at all on ps4, but still what did you expect ?

The Last of Us 2, RDR 2 and many other games run on that same hardware and look significantly better than the PS4 version of the game.

I don't think it's a stretch to say people expected it to at least look better than it does.

It's mostly that the loudest, angriest voices tend to drown out everyone else.

Active steam users for this game dropped much faster than that of Witcher 3 (which was similarly/less flawed at launch) based on public steam data. So, there's lot of evidence behind the message.

Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.

Probably because most of the pre-orders had enough time to beat the game.

The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.

With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.

W3 was released in May of a non-pandemic year. CP2077 was released in December in a pandemic year.

The game-hours-to-calendar-days translation won't be 1:1.

Well, it was quite obvious becasue of two reasons: 1. W3 players count was in few thousands (maybe 10 thousands) - so it had mostly hard core fans of the franchise 2. W3 main campain is ~51 hours, and CP2077 has campaing for 25 hours.

And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.

Yep, gamers especially are a particularly tough crowd, and quite a few of them have large audiences.

Sony itself removed that game from the playstation store and still has not put it back yet, because it doesn't meet Sony's playstation certification requirements. I don't think 'gamers' are the issue here.

They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...

> They offered it in their store so it obviously met their certification requirements at one point in the past. Perhaps they don't really have certification requirements...

Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.

I considered going into the gaming industry years ago, but the audience is such a turnoff. It really holds the medium back as an art form.

> I considered going into the gaming industry years ago, but the audience is such a turnoff.

I think that the issue isn't so much 'the audience' but the terrible work conditions associated with the gaming industry.

> It really holds the medium back as an art form

How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.

The audience of gamers strikes me as perhaps the most immature, needlessly difficult group of art consumers in the world today. Even movies don’t get the same kind of petulant obsession and hostility that games do. I’m not sure if it’s just a consequence of gamers being younger or what, but it’s a major turnoff to me. The fact that CDPR devs got death threats because of game delays just says it all. Can you imagine something similar happening to a filmmaker?

> The audience of gamers strikes me as perhaps the most immature, needlessly difficult group of art consumers in the world today. Even movies don’t get the same kind of petulant obsession and hostility that games do. I’m not sure if it’s just a consequence of gamers being younger or what, but it’s a major turnoff to me.

It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.

Virtually all of the jobs in gaming will be for bigger budget games at large companies. The amount of revenue that COD or CDPR makes is vastly greater than any indie games.

> How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.

Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.

> Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.

Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.

I don’t think you have much knowledge of film if you say “professional produced movies are not experimental.”

This doesn't make sense. What are the rules of music? Sure if you want something on the radio it's wise to follow some guidelines, but obviously that's not where the diversity is. You can make a song with no defined key or time signature, it can be hours long or seconds long, it can have no vocals, only vocals, or controversially, no sound at all. You could go on and on. Video games have not pushed the limits in this way.

I have to strongly disagree with this.

What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.

That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.

I started playing it on Linux (Wine+vkd3d-proton), but I paused the playthrough - I'm waiting for some patches for spatial audio to land and also for a newer AMD GPU, they are pretty hard to get now. By that time the game will also accumulate some good amount of patches.

As a Linux gamer, I really don't get this whole drama and I appreciate that CDPR even provided the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance so they even added a whole new Vulkan extension to improve support for it.

I’ve been playing it through Stadia (wanted to try out Stadia and Cyberpunk at the same time) and I agree people are hating on the game seemingly way out of proportion. It’s definitely buggy, I had to restart at one point because the game refused to allow me to reload in the middle of a fight, but claiming it’s fraud or “unplayable” is hyperbole.

I think people just got way too excited about from having nothing to do during this pandemic and then ended up really disappointed. I empathize with that but I don’t know, it’s a $60 game. That’s like four movies. I’ve enjoyed it more than the last four movies I’ve watched for sure.

I think one could randomly choose a Betheseda or Ubisoft release, and have a similar level of bugs.

I also played it through Stadia, because Google was having really good deals on Stadia. The first month was free (through a Google Music promotion), and buying Cyberpunk for $50 got you a Chromecast Ultra. I have actually been pleasantly surprised by how good the Stadia experience is.

You're playing on literally the most playable platform there is (the game is even less buggy on Stadia than on latest-gen consoles).

That's very curious given that on Stadia it's a Linux port.

I don't think it's all that surprising:

- The PC version is by far the most playable

- CDPR games haved worked well on Linux through proton in the past

- Stadia targets are very narrow set of hardware and I would assume Google added a couple of patches to make sure it plays well.

You probably still get the logic bugs that you see in all platforms but from everything I have seen it seems like once the games passes a "performance threshold" the graphics hold up pretty well.

Have you seen the game played on a base PS4? [0] is a timestamp to skip the beginning of a digital foundry video. It's really not in a good place.

[0] https://youtu.be/C5pHpQqhmR4?t=160

So why there are so many PS4 players that play and enjoy it?

Look in the comments here.

Also I spent more time on it than on four movies already, and I'm far from finished.

Its fashionable right now to pile up hate on CDPR. Probably generates a lot of clicks.

Yeah I'm with you on this. I installed it to see what all of the fuss was about and have been loving it. I haven't run into a single glitch or problem of any kind.

To restate: You "haven't run into a single glitch or problem of any kind." Emphasis mine.

Then you are either not past the railroad stages of the very early game, or you have not been paying attention. Or both.

Easy there. A lot of people are having problems with this game, but not exactly everyone. There's just no way for you to know why you're having bugs and others aren't. That doesn't mean you get to just straight up claim someone else is lying about their experience.

I understand where you're coming from, but I reserve the right the call out an extraordinarily strong claim as questionable.

I stand by what I said. GP may not be lying, in which case I believe they have either only just started the game, or are not paying attention to its many readily reproducible, unavoidable glitches.

Okay, that's fair actually. There are definitely enough bugs in the game that aren't necessarily game-breaking but are absolutely frequent enough to see at least once throughout say, 50 hours of gameplay. I was arguing in bad faith by assuming you were accusing people of lying. My bad.

I don't know i'm like 10+ hours into it and haven't had any glitches. What sort of glitches SHOULD I have been running into?

The specific issue is CDPR promised X and delivered X - 20. Objectively speaking, cyberpunk is a mediocre linear FPS with some light RPG elements. Your life path basically doesn't matter. You basically have little control over the story. The AI is worse than a game from 2005. The game otherwise is incredibly buggy. You are welcome to enjoy it, but most people did not.

Objectively speaking, you're being subjective. Most people actually did enjoy it (SteamDB rating: 77.65%)[1]. Also, a month after release, Cyberpunk 2077 is still the most active single-player game on Steam[2].

[1] https://steamdb.info/app/1091500/info/

[2] https://steamcharts.com/top

I think game companies underestimate how much the game will be explored in detail even in the first week by the community, and mistakenly release incomplete content thinking it will be fixed without notice. I don't know but hopefully they patch and it keeps improving.

the game is absolutely great. I love every second of it. It never crashed on me, and I also havent encountered many glitches..

rig:

- threadripper 1920X 12-core

- 2080ti

- 32gb ecc ram