This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of:
"CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1]
Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful.
CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases.
Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.
1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.
Something similar happened in NZ too under the "Hobbit Law" bought and paid for by Warner Brothers. Now everyone in the film and game industry is considered an independent contractor by default and aren't subject to the usual rights and legal protections afforded to company employees.
Indeed, when I worked at EA in BC we were promised comp time for working 'coverage' (overtime) and I even got into trouble for refusing to work on Labour Day! The comp time fizzled into nothing because they fired the Development Manager of our group on the DAY of shipping the game. He just disappeared along with all of his promises. I alone got paid for the overtime because I refused to work TFT (temporary full time - which they pressured me to do) and instead was a true contractor.
I dunno, my impression is that for a game company, CDPR is fairly employee friendly. Of course that's relative to the rest of the gaming industry, which is a well-known employee welfare shithole.
I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.
Never understood why they tried so hard to be the destination for offshoring instead of fostering home grown studios.
That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?
Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios.
Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.
> deny you overtime during the run up to a major release
This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.
EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.
I believe those rules only apply to companies that are primarily tech companies (like EA of course). Tech workers at non-tech companies can get overtime.
Making it less terrible after-the-fact, after tons of bad press and outside pressure, and when you desperately need the devs to stay on and fix the problems left after the launch they no doubt told you was not going to work… not sure that deserves much praise.
Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.
Probably need them to stay and fix the bugs instead of rage quitting when their bonuses are withheld likely because decisions made outside their control.
No reason to not give the bonuses when accomplishments are recognized then, instead of tying it to the team's success at a singular date (delivery). It forces everyone to work in overdrive. It's plainly not a personal contribution/performance bonus at all. If CDPR makes a bad hire that causes a delay (even outside of development, like marketing?), then everyone suffers for that from a lack of a bonus.
This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.
Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.
I think the hardest part about running such "experiments" is ever knowing whether they were success or failures. Even here, we (and I doubt CDPR) don't know enough to really judge whether the tokens things helped or hurt. Or if it helped, whether it helped as much as a more traditional system. Except for small experiments that can be run many times (or in many similar departments in parallel), circumstances just change too much to ever compare apples to apples. (Here, devs may have loved this game's concept so much that they worked hard in spite of the tokens. Or didn't love the game concept but loved the tokens.)
Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US.
All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.
There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.
Changing the terms post-hoc is pretty scummy. Logically you would assume having something is better than nothing, as I assume most would - simple math. The reality is anticipating more than you actually receive can be more detrimental. You make sacrifices you normally wouldn't if you are lead to believe there is a reward. Perhaps you turned down another job offer since you had been factoring those extra projektbucks and then they suddenly devalue at the end of the race. Maybe you treated yourself or your loved ones to a gift as a small token of appreciation for the effort spent on this rather than them. That $2000 in fairy-bucks turns out to be $500 and those extra hours amount to less-than-legal-minimum-wage.
Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short.
The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.
-if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later.
I worked for a game studio that did this. Tokens could be used for a raffle. It was kind of a silly thing though and wouldn't be considered compensation, there were normal bonuses and stock grants. It also (usually) wasn't tied to crunch. The tokens were handed out by peers
That seems far more like being paid for the windfall of hard work than most (eg) executive bonus schemes, where you're disproportionately rewarded for the work of others.
This is well-trod ground, but it's common with any job where the supply/demand ratio is severely in the employers favor.
Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.
Wasn't it obvious to anyone who play-tested on last-gen consoles that the game is nearly unplayable and so will receive horrendous reviews? Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year?
After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions.
"Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors.
"We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.
Don't think for a second that employees 'are not afraid to convey such bad news'. Between the massive years-long hype, delays and bad press about crunch time around the title, not to mention being the most lucrative time of year for a game release, it's very likely that management egos were fully engaged in this release. When that happens reality is no longer driving, or even on, the bus. There may have been one or two brave souls who spoke up and when no good came as a result of speaking up (at best they were disregarded, at worst it was a career limiting move), everyone else tends to fall in line. So when management holds their various last minute go/no go meetings, people tend to nod their heads in agreement recognizing the futility of trying to point out the obvious.
I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.
Not just game companies where this happens - I've worked at more than a few places in normal software development where management ego rather than cold hard reality drives the bus and yeah, speaking up is definitely a career limiting move.
>They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4
If by "they" you mean investors, I'm not sure if that's correct.
>CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński has praised Cyberpunk 2077's performance on PS4 and Xbox One in an investor call.
>Speaking earlier this week on Wednesday (and transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Kaciński said that Cyberpunk 2077's performance on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles is "surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world." The CEO went on to say that although the performance on these base consoles is lower than their "pro" counterparts (the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X), it's still surprisingly good.
Blaming investors underplays how much CDPR messed up. Basically all AAA games are funded by investors, so it's not an excuse for a bad release.
Investors were told that the game would release in April, which is why many of them invested in the company in the first place. It's reasonable to expect them to finish 7 months later.
I don't know how the Polish corporation works, but at least in my country, nebulous "investors" would have a lot of difficulty pushing through random product decisions in a public company.
Management may very well have had little or no choice in the matter. The game had already been pushed multiple times and there was half a $Billion in pre-orders alone waiting to be collected.
Estimates put the dev budget a little over $300 million [0]. After retailers & Steam take their cut and given that a lot of sales were full-cut direct through GOG, that puts the game around break-even status before it even hits normal retail sales.
Given this picture, it is highly likely that investors forced through this decision to go forward as much or more than management did. Push the game again and you'll really start losing pre-orders, and the next time a release date comes around people will be even more hesitant to drop $60 before release.
(As a side note, I'm playing the game on low-end gaming hardware and it works fine. Occasional graphical glitches, 1 crash. It's hard to live up to the hype, but it's still a great game. Feels like a mashup of GTA V with heavy RPG elements set in a future dystopia. Small hints of Assassin's Creed stealth, maybe more if you build your character in that direction.)
I saw someone post a synopsis on Reddit (forgot the sub) of the actual recorded phone call and these were the points mentioned:
- QA was limited and done in-house, thus remotely by people working on the game
- Overestimated their ability to fix the problems before launch
- Reviewers didn't have access to last-gen console versions because they were still working on the last-gen versions through the certification process up until launch day
Of course, I don't put much weight on any of these. However, I'm sure there was a fair bit of pressure from investors to release during the holidays considering some of the questions asked during the call, like how "sticky" the game was despite the problems and whether they would still receive their full cut regardless of the refunds.
It has been years since I worked for an AAA game company, but at least at that time (and probably still) the pressure from publishers to release in time for Christmas season is beyond intense.
The revenue difference between selling at Christmas (even if reviews are awful) vs selling around Easter, the next available "good" retail holiday, is huge.
And since these days, patches are the standard - as in, release with known deficiencies and patch your way to "OK" - it is very likely that from an overall financial perspective, releasing now was the right answer.
If a game studio wants to maintain a very high level of quality, they have to be willing to lose a publisher by rejecting this. Unless that studio is already so well established that they are in demand, they just cannot afford to fight their publisher.
I'm playing on a PS4 slim and the game is fine, I really don't understand all the negativity (v 1.0.4). I had 2-3 crashes and saw some bugs like objects hanging in the air or the weapon not being visible.
Performance is fine. Bought the game a couple of days after launch and after reading the reports about horrible performance while downloading, I disabled everything under graphics, but then after a crash it reset its settings (yeah, I know) and it seems to work fine even with all settings on.
I find it interesting but maybe not entirely surprising that games can actually crash on consoles. It still surprises me when it happens on my Nintendo Switch.
Though my last console experience before that was on a Nintendo 64 and I don't think any game ever crashed on it.
Yeah it reads to me more like they were pressured to release it quickly before the holidays by investors, and the decision makers didn't listen to those below saying that it just couldn't be done (to the quality everyone expected).
I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.
> Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management.
it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers, so if anything I would assume the opposite is true: that it's an environment where the QA staff is chronically underpaid, lives in perpetual fear of dismissal, and is told that working on the biggest game ever is the honor of a lifetime.
> it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers
How so? They changed the revenue based bonuses to be paid out regardless of review averages [0]. They at least tried to make a commitment to less crunch, while over at Rockstar the amount of crunch for RDR2 was something the co-founder publicly bragged about [1].
Now people on forums are citing RDR2 as an example for "How to make a great open world game!", while at the same time lynching CDPR for not living up to their attempt to minimize crunch, after several delays.
The double standards at play here are mind-boggling.
Yeah I don't get it, TW3 was unplayable for quite a while on base consoles, sub 30 fps throughout most of the game, and CB2077 is a game with much bigger scope the base consoles couldn't handle the NPC rich areas in TW3 so no matter how much optimization they would do I don't understand who thought that this game will ever be playable on the base previous gen consoles.
Besides other reasons I think management thought they could get away with it.
Reviewers were given the PC version, so I imagine it was a calculation of “how many reviewers are willing to wait on traffic, just to review old consoles?”
I'm shocked nobody else has pointed out the responsibility of Microsoft and Sony here - the whole job of a console maker is to keep crap like this off their box so you never have to stress about whether it runs properly or not. It's supposed to be the whole advantage over having a PC.
It was their job to refuse certification and say "Nope, come back when the game runs properly" and they failed. That's part of what they get their money for when we pay more for console games than PC.
My assumption is that all of this doesn't matter when the share holders and investors pressure the company... it's not an easy to decision whether to delay the product again, especially when there is already a negative public reaction to the multiple delays.
Don't underestimate the ability for people to dilute the impact of bad-news as it moves up the chain. I'm sure people play-tested it and tried to raise alarms, but bad news regularly get's softened, maybe to accept less blame/responsibility?
There may have been contract issues, but more likely the cost of an additional year of development vs getting holiday profit made a lot of the decision.
I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now.
It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†.
The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it.
† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?
You're not seeing the issues because you're not playing the affected versions. Notice how all of the positive anecdotes are coming from PC players?
IGN went so far as to split their Cyberpunk 2077 review into two separate reviews: One for consoles, and one for PC. Quote from the console review:
> The Xbox One/PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.
The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.
They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible. I suspect console gamers are requesting refunds in droves due to the issues, which is surely going to impact their long-term sales projections.
I'm playing on the PS4 slim and yes, there were some crashes and some graphics bugs, but so far the game's at least a solid 8 for me. I was actually worried while downloading and reading all the comments from the doomsayers on reddit, but I figured that they will eventually fix the bugs and I do like Deus Ex-style games so I don't really have much to lose by getting it now.
If one liked Deus Ex: Mankind divided they will like Cyberpunk 2077.
I’ve been playing on PS4, and while not particularly pretty (not that I expected it to be) it’s been surprisingly fine, especially after the 1.0.4 patch.
> The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.
CD Projekt games historically have been PC with console ports after launch. They probably would have done the same here if not being pushed to be a launch title for "next gen" consoles.
I think Sony/Microsoft are just as much to blame. They also had to QA the game and sign off on it.
>They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible.
Refunds are actually up to the seller in question. They clarified how there's no refund arrangement with CDPR and Microsoft/Sony and that all refunds are subject to normal Microsoft/Sony refund policies. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are failing to get their games refunded.
It has been working well for me as well (on a PC). I love the story and the visual. However the combat system is simply broken. Police spawns out of nowhere when a crime is reported[1]. Really bad reticle drifting behavior[2]. Enemy sniper can 1-hit kill you even when they are far away enough for the game to not render them. Enemy spamming Overheat from behind a wall (even with all cameras disabled, which is game-breaking on Very Hard), and much, much more.
I wasn't even looking for them, but they managed to find me. I still enjoy the game a lot, but combat has been nothing but frustration.
The overheat thing is absolutely the most annoying thing in the game for me. It's way to hard to tell where its coming from, and with everything else going on it's just too much. And there doesn't seem to be a cooldown so the moment the effect wears off you're hit again.
Theres a part where you're upstairs and you can hear the ai trying to attack you from the floor below. The game is fun but only barely and I think the novelty is going to wear off quite quickly.
I mean, that's great for you, but people are bashing CDPR for a good reason: the last-gen console versions are unfinished buggy messes. In a few hours of playing I've had multiple crashes, constant bugs, drops to 15 FPS, just generally terrible performance. I've literally never played such a buggy game before. For a game that had 8 years of dev time the state of the game is pretty egregious
I actually think the bugs/performance issues are helping CDPR right now. Everybody is talking about them rather than how bad the game actually is.
The combat is simplistic. The AI opponents are basically broken. The quickhack system does indeed feel like a quickly hacked together game mechanic. V is stuck in a weird state between existing background (a la witcher) and player action defined: I didn't get the feeling of any player agency in what my character is, but neither did I get the warm feeling of learning/experiencing Geralt's(Witcher series MC) life. Life paths, also, are basically devoid of any meaningful relevancy to the storyline.
I've literally never played such a buggy game before
Pff. You kids. When I was your age, I once played a game so buggy that when my character walked back & forth to school he had to do in the snow & up hill both ways. Now get off my lawn.
Not wrong about the bugs and crashes, I've been experiencing a lot of them on my Xbox. But despite that, the storytelling and game play is so compelling that I'm just ignoring the crash every 1.5 hours etc
I think that huge testament to quality of the story and game in general. Even if it's sorely missing a decent final polish, I'll be excited to play it second time in 6 months time once all the patches are out.
So far on PC I’ve had a crash right after the character editor that caused the game to crash every time I open it. The next day a patch was pushed that fixed it. I could’ve even play on Day 1.
Dum Dum followed me around until I met Keanu’s character. He would move in front of people during cutscenes and I couldn’t even tell what was going on. Sometimes he would attack Jackie during combat and other times help us.
The first scene with the ripper doc was scrambled. Cutscenes played out of ordered or repeated.
Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.
I got it on Stadia and it’s blowing my mind. I can play it on my
Tv or projector thru chromecast ultras, or on my pc seamlessly and it looks great. I got to try it on the iPad Pro next. I love it. This is the breakout game for cloud computing.
Thanks I was wondering about what hardware stadia is running the game on and if they would have the same console issues. Im planning to buy stadia for this game.
I'm playing on a Ryzen 3800x, a GTX 2060 Super with 32GB of 3600 MHz Ram. I think the game looks bad (with playable settings) and hasn't been compelling enough for me to sink that much time into it, while the missions are pretty grindy.
I'd say play GTA V and the Witcher 3 for a comparison in immersive open world story telling and high caliber graphics. I haven't played Spiderman (2018, 2020) but in gameplay footage (which is only on console) it looks much better as well.
I feel like I'm crazy when I say that the graphics are incredibly underwhelming. It looks good, and there's neat stuff. But I don't care how pretty a shadow looks when the hundreds of NPCs walking around look so rough.
Playing on a RTX 2070, I have to decide between having a very low framerate, a blurry picture, but good graphics thanks to raytracing, or low framerate and very normal but disapointing graphics.
I think it may really depend on what settings you have going. The developer really needs to optimize this game for older hardware, but I'd think there's a set of settings that'll get it to look good on your actually very recent machine. Could be wrong of course, but have you seen how good it can look at the top end? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZp8fXLXgqg (Digital foundry's visual tech tour of the game)
I disagree on the gameplay/grindy part, but yeah the game isn't pretty. I've heard it justified as deliberate: It's a futuristic dystopian city overrun by constant advertising, corporatism, and crime. That doesn't make for a pretty environment. Of course if that was a deliberate artistic decision then maybe they should have gone a different way.
My experience on a mid range PC has been good in terms of performance and bugs.
The game has some truly amazing aspects such as writing, characters, music, etc, but IMO it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, open world mechanics, driving... it's all very mediocre even poor at times.
I felt the same but after spending more time, things are starting to click.
Stealth for example is not nearly as good as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or The Metal Gear Solid series. The tutorial seemed alright but when it came to real gameplay I felt like stealth just didn’t work and I just resorted to guns blazing. But after more effort and getting a better hang of quick hacking I have found stealth to be viable actually. You really do need to make heavy use of quick hacking though. Also that game is very visually busy which makes it easy to miss a camera.
Driving feels pretty good, but not as good as GTA. So far driving really seems to be a way to get from point A to point B and not a core gameplay mechanic like it is with GTA. The NPC driving AI and Cop AI is downright bad compared to GTA but besides being a little immersion breaking it doesn’t seem to affect the actual gameplay much. GTA is very focused around driving and avoiding police, most of the missions involve it in some way. Cyberpunk doesn’t really rely on driving so I can give it a pass on those faults.
Gunplay really bothered me at first. It felt chaotic and a bit clunky. Other FPS/RPG hybrid games have suffered the same issues. Shooting powerful or higher level enemies will just feel bullet spongy. Some of that just needs to be accepted as “this is an RPG, not a shooter”. The cover system isn’t very sophisticated or obvious either. However the more I play the more I get the hang of it and I have found the gunplay to actually be quite satisfying.
If you don't game much you made be blind to the fact that the gameplay is a poor, and the AI is about 15 years behind the cutting edge (GTA SA was more advanced)
I personally haven't seen a single FPS beating the AI of FEAR back in the day. I honestly don't expect anything anymore. It's been so long. Cyberpunk 2077 is a bit worse than other FPS of our time. But all are worse than FEAR anyway.
This comment doesn't include things like traffic AI. Only combat.
I don't know if that's entirely fair (or maybe I haven't played long enough to realize how bad it is). the combat model is pretty different from GTA; it's more of a shooter/rpg hybrid (similar to mass effect 1) than a straight-up shooter. it's not perfect; but I'm five hours in and already consider it the best AAA title I've played recently.
the most annoying thing I've encountered so far is the way doors work. there are a lot of points where the door is supposed to automatically open. I feel like it always opens about 100 ms after I expect it to, making me wonder if I'm supposed to open it myself. maybe this is "working as designed", I dunno.
"Cutting edge" isn't a very good role model these days tbh. Also I don't remember SA having an AI. It looked like "if (enemy visible) { shoot; } else { run towards enemy; }". Everything else was scripted.
I'm generally in the same place as you but I gotta say combat is pretty shit. The AI is bonehead stupid, I've killed a guy (not using a silencer) that was standing three feet from another guy and his partner didn't alert. Meanwhile 5 guys from outside the building did, rushed in the building then stopped dead and didn't ever shoot.
I found the following bugs which are very likely not related to the platform:
1. Friendly NPC left behind in mission area which was scripted to become inaccessible. Couldn't reach the NPC to finish the mission.
2. Killed an NPC two times: once in a side mission and once in a main mission
3. The player goes to sleep perpendicular to the bed and with the bottom half side of the body outside the bed.
4. Friendly NPCs start to shout randomly during stealth missions.
5. There's no driving AI, all machines follow predefined paths sometimes going through one another as if there's no collision.
And probably lots more I didn't remember. And these exclude the physics and rendering bugs and I encounter every 5 minutes.
I've had Geforce Now for over a year now and have completed The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and Death Stranding on it. I use an Nvidia Shield to play it on my TV. I've never had any problems with the streaming quality or latency. I could see that depending on location though, I'm playing in West Coast Canada. Some of the games I've been disappointed with the performance, Assassin's Creed Odyssey for instance couldn't hit 60 fps even after lowering the graphic settings. Cyberpunk 2077 has been amazing though, high fps and maxed settings, including ray tracing.
A few other things of note. 1080p is the max resolution. Unlimited Internet is probably a requirement as its about 10gb per hour. After 6 hours the session ends and you need to save and relaunch the game. Your entire Steam library is not available, its up to publishers to allow their games on it.
FWIW, I signed up for both GeForce Now and Stadia, and find Stadia to be both easier to use and better-looking. For comparison, I ran Cyberpunk side-by-side and killed the GeForce Now version after a few minutes.
I've also had zero crashes but I do notice quite a few minor bugs. They're a little annoying but I've still sunk 30 hours in. I also can't remember the last open world game that didn't have similar bugs.
Take away the bugs and cosmetic performance problems; the game is just lousy. Every mechanic it implements is lousy and half-baked. From the driving, to the shooting, to the looting, to the AI, it's just mediocre.
Try this tonight: make sure you're absolutely alone and shoot someone. A cop will spawn behind you. No AI, no chase, no nothing, just bloop here's a cop.
The game has destroyed the reputation of this company overnight.
I mean I'm pretty sure the cop spawning itself is a placeholder mechanism they just never got around to. If you think about, the crime-notification probably calls a "spawn law enforcement" handler which basically just runs the spawn economy and drops them in, with a comment along the lines of "TODO: waiting on NPC driving mechanics" (which are also missing).
Combat absolutely sucks, and it's the one thing I loathe about the game. You have to empty two magazine clips in any given opponent to take him down. I've never seen a game with such weak weaponry. It feels unrealistic.
Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance. You can't even customize anything past the creation screen, no car paint jobs no hair cuts and no body modification, no transmog system..
They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...
Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen.
Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game.
They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
So fortunately I've never played any open-world game except for Skyrim, which just didn't really hold my interest... or maybe it was the fact I lost my save game due to a faulty SSD, I dunno.
At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SNES game and Shadowrun Returns. However, I've talked with hardcore Cyberpunk pen & paper players, and they say its un-fucking-believable how well CDPR has brought to life the Cyberpunk universe in this game.
Yes, there are bugs. I have every confidence though that CDPR will iron all this shit out like they did with The Witcher III. This will be a great game by mid-to-late 2021, in every sense of the word.
I genuinely hope in Cyberpunk 2077 II that they'll be able to flesh out the game world, because I really love this game and this world.
I played the pen and paper way back in the day, and I agree. They have absolutely nailed the aesthetic: a dusting of kitsch and campiness that isn’t over the top. I’m also enjoying the story and game mechanics. It’s my first open world AAA title, so I don’t have much to compare it with, but I’m having fun!
There seem to be two factions:
Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed.
But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.
Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.
PC here, agree it's fun and I think some people are definitely expecting GTA from a developer that has absolutely no experience making something like GTA.
GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.
But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.
There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.
Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
These were the expectations set by CDPR and their marketing team. Open world mechanics are a joke in this game. Pedestrians look same. Driving mechanics are janky.
> Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed
I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.
Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad
The game has an overwhelming amount of very detailed content in the main job and side jobs, and also provides plenty of flexibility in combat if you explore the various upgrade systems. It's an evolution of the Witcher 3, not Grand Theft Auto. Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.
> Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.
The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.
> Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance.
That really depends on individual expectations. With many people treating the game like the second coming of gaming Jesus a lot of the disappointment was pretty much guaranteed.
Personally I didn't expect anything like that, I was hoping for an open world Deus Ex like, with a more "colorful" setting, and that's pretty much what I got.
> not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
AMD has been the "current gaming king" only since Zen 3 desktop release, which happened just last month, most of these CPUs are still completely impossible to buy at actual MSRP.
Regardless of that even Zen 2 is mostly performing very well with the game [0], which the HEXedit fix will only improve once it's patched in officially.
In that context this complaint sounds very much like still complaining about the lack of an epilepsy warning; Sure it's not great to overlook something like that, but it's inane to act as if these are unfixable and nonredeemable issues, particularly in an industry where "games a service", releasing early access products, has become the new low-key norm even for much bigger publishers.
AMD has been very popular in gaming PCs for the last 3 years now. The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip at a fraction of the cost and it completely blows away intel in non gaming workloads so its what most people picked unless spending an extra $300 for 2fps is your thing.
> that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...
EA gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it's important to recognize their behavior is typical of all major players in the games industry. The whole thing is rotten and you shouldn't trust any of them. They certainly haven't earned it. Always wait for reviews.
I'm not saying it's all bad. The art style is amazing, the sound track is awesome. The lips sync, facial expressions and body movement are pretty damn good. Yes there some nice side missions and the main story line is ok I guess but it's not really cyberpunk or really engaging.
They advertised it as a cyber punk open world RPG and promised so many things and then literally changed the marketing of the game to an action shooter after the game came out...
Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.
The game has a different take on the cyberpunk universe and I think that is okay.
Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.
I’m playing on first gen threadripper and a 580rx card with no major issues, the game is gorgeous and I am having a blast.
I agree that the AI is horrible and the UI is a pain, especially when you want to do things like sell a lot of items
I've seen it summarised as maybe a mile wide and an inch deep, that there aren't particularly interesting systems at play, there isn't actually much meat to the pretty bones.
> we’ve actually shown console footage, but never on the last-gen consoles. The reason is that we were updating the game on last-gen consoles until the very last minute, and we thought we’d make it in time. [...] That was not intended; we were just fixing the game until the very last moment.
This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.
I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment- and my biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. It feels like a throwback to the dumbest action games of the 90s: here's a main story and a bunch of quests that you'll be completing on railtracks.
Your choices don't really matter, the world is empty and soulless, the writing is lazy and you can't stop but keep thinking how superficial everything feels.
There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account.
Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.
Wait a second... how did you "complete" the game twice in less than a week?
I've put more than 40 hours in and I'm nowhere close to completing it even once. I'm pretty sure all the dialogue alone adds up to that much.
Even completing the main story, gigs and side-missions is probably going to take me around 100 hours. Maybe someone faster could do it in 40, or maybe 20 if you skipped all of the dialogue and played on a low difficulty. I spend/wasted a lot of time just exploring the city and surrounding areas, doing 'bounties' or climbing on random places to see if there's something interesting/loot to be found.
I suppose you mostly played the main story line on a low difficulty, ignoring all the side activities (which do impact the main story and vice-versa) and likely rushed through or past everything else.
If you were looking to have a good time you didn't exactly set yourself up for success. A bit like reading a book and skipping all of the chapters that follow minor characters for world-building purposes.
I agree that the life paths don't have major consequence, which is a bit disappointing, but saying "choices don't matter" as a blanket statement is just factually incorrect, considering there's a long list of choices that have a lasting effect on the game world, and there are at least 3-5 different endings depending on the choices you made earlier in the game.
Honestly thank you for saying that. I felt like I'm going crazy, I can't figure out how people are enjoying this game, I tried to find a redeeming quality and "pretty lights" is all I can think of.
Edit: Scrolled down and found great r3view that put what felt into words better then I can.
It really feels like a mashup of GTA 5 and Deus Ex, except without GTA's sense of humor and Deus Ex's feeling of personal agency. That said, I am really enjoying it, I mean a mashup of those two things is very compelling even if it doesn't quite manage to borrow the charm of either.
The main story is short and as I said, you're on railtracks. It's not like you can get lost in the world like in GTA or RDR, there is no world for you to get lost in. It's all smoke & mirrors. Also, pandemic lockdown in my country has left me with plenty of free time.
The game offers you three "life paths" at the beginning so after I finished it once I had to see if a different path would be better.
Well it turns out life paths change nothing besides the introduction. It's still the same dumb game with the same railtracks and the same story. Your choices don't matter and you realize that you've been swindled since the promises and descriptions of the immersive and emergent open-world nature of the game turned out to be a bunch of lies.
Hearing all the stories about refunds being hard or impossible to execute, one has to wonder if legal action is justifiable here. The CP2077 that CDPR framed and advertised gameplay-wise has very little to do with the end result that they delivered. And I'm not even talking about the bugs, but the game itself.
It goes without saying that I'm done with them and my intuition tells me that the CDPR brand will be poisonous to a lot of gamers out there after this fiasco. Bugs are one thing, but blatant lies quite another.
It doesn't sound like you gave it much of a chance tbh. If you only play the main quests it might be possible to do 2 playthroughs since launch. I'm at 43h in and haven't finished the first playthrough yet, on normal difficulty.
The gameplay is pretty much identical to w3, which is what I expected going in. If you expected more than that you were bound to be disappointed.
It took me around 20 hours to finish it the first time. Second time was a lot faster since I was essentially playing the same game and I could fly through the same situations and dialogs. It's a hollow experience, pretty but zero substance.
I know there are additional endings and side quests, but the problem is that game has no depth whatsoever so I'm not exactly motivated to spend more time. It's mindless action with a few variations on the quests that keep repeating themselves. After playing the game for a few hours, the shallowness and superficiality of it all starts weighing on you.
> My biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined.
What are some modern games that are like this?
I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.
If you watch game footage, it's obvious it's half-baked. However, so many people violated the number one rule: no preorders. This is literally the only thing gamers can do to incentivise developers to not release buggy games. But here we are again.
Eh, I always appreciate the early adopters who provide feedback and pressure on devs to fix the games so that I can play a much better game 6 months or a year later.
Larian does a great job with their early access releases, soliciting the community to report bugs, play testing etc. I put like 70 hours into the new Baldur’s Gate on different builds and it’s only like a third of the game. There were a lot of bugs and some crashes I reported, but has otherwise been a blast. Don’t understand why CDPR couldn’t have done the same.
is the inverted side of "no preorders" also "No epic games"? Something has to fund development and at a certain point investors will not risk the lack of sales. Versus a preorder is an actual sale.
Not really, I'm going to give the worst example of all - Star Citizen (aka Scope Creep The Video Game) - which was IIRC crowdfunded, and according to the wiki page below remains the most expensive game in terms of development cost.
These games rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Games are bigger and fancier than ever because they have reached mainstream appeal and accessability. It has nothing to do with preorders.
Preorders just allow them to release buggy games in a beta state and patch it later.
The whole project feels terribly mismanaged. Even from the character editor it is obvious the game had to be scaled down in the last year to even ship. Considering the amount of crunch, it is heartbreaking it ended like this for every interested party.
I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.
I do get a sense of mismanagement as well, however the platform situation is a bit complicated.
Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK.
The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360.
The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne.
It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either.
--
I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.
I mean, they could ideally go PC and Stadia (since it is basically PC with fixed specs) -> Xbox One/PS4 -> Xbox Series/PS5. It wouldn't hurt the contract with Google and it would help with the terrible technical state on consoles.
I've personally tried the game on Xbox One X and only problems I've found were graphical glitches but it still is not a great experience. It's honestly pretty sad it ended like this with the amount of crunch and the token system the developers had.
release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first
It is only released on last gen consoles. There's no native PS5 or Xbox series X/S version you can buy. You buy the PS4/Xbox One version and play it via backwards compatibility. Apart from video resolution or low FPS, have there been significant problems on the last gen consoles in terms of bugs that aren't on the new gen?
Readit News
"CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1]
Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-...
Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.
1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.
That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?
[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...
Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.
This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.
EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...
Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.
This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.
This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.
Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.
Many companies around here do experiments like this one hoping to see improvements. Most of such attempts fail miserably.
I've seen my share of weird, counterproductive ideas from grades like in school to work logged down to the second.
My last company, even though it was over 500 people strong, was basically winging it.
Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US.
All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.
One of the people I served with aboard the USS Honolulu is a game designer for Darkpaw Games. They have nothing like this. Not even close.
Another person is a high-level executive at Activision-Blizzard. He has compensation that is generous, but it took him 17 years to get there.
Yet another personal friend is a junior developer at Obsidian Entertainment. They don't have anything like this, at his level.
Maybe their system isn't perfect, but its a hell of a better than nothing.
Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short.
The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.
source: three people I know who worked there
don't game the game devs man...
-if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later.
If not, then it literally doesn’t matter.
But no, they should absolutely also pay overtime.
Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.
Of the places I've worked that promise some form of bonus, I have only been paid a single one - $172.
In my experience, bonuses are almost solely a carrot to hang over people's head. They rarely actually get paid out even if the company is doing well.
Stock and options have there downfalls, but at least their terms are in writing.
After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions.
"Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors.
"We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.
Deleted Comment
They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4 and released it either way because “money>everything”.
Its really that simple.
If by "they" you mean investors, I'm not sure if that's correct.
>CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński has praised Cyberpunk 2077's performance on PS4 and Xbox One in an investor call.
>Speaking earlier this week on Wednesday (and transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Kaciński said that Cyberpunk 2077's performance on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles is "surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world." The CEO went on to say that although the performance on these base consoles is lower than their "pro" counterparts (the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X), it's still surprisingly good.
https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-runs-surprisingly-...
Investors were told that the game would release in April, which is why many of them invested in the company in the first place. It's reasonable to expect them to finish 7 months later.
I'm thinking Valve (still is!) and Microsoft. Wonder if there's a correlation.
Estimates put the dev budget a little over $300 million [0]. After retailers & Steam take their cut and given that a lot of sales were full-cut direct through GOG, that puts the game around break-even status before it even hits normal retail sales.
Given this picture, it is highly likely that investors forced through this decision to go forward as much or more than management did. Push the game again and you'll really start losing pre-orders, and the next time a release date comes around people will be even more hesitant to drop $60 before release.
(As a side note, I'm playing the game on low-end gaming hardware and it works fine. Occasional graphical glitches, 1 crash. It's hard to live up to the hype, but it's still a great game. Feels like a mashup of GTA V with heavy RPG elements set in a future dystopia. Small hints of Assassin's Creed stealth, maybe more if you build your character in that direction.)
[0] https://www.altchar.com/game-news/cyberpunk-2077-set-to-beco...
- QA was limited and done in-house, thus remotely by people working on the game
- Overestimated their ability to fix the problems before launch
- Reviewers didn't have access to last-gen console versions because they were still working on the last-gen versions through the certification process up until launch day
Of course, I don't put much weight on any of these. However, I'm sure there was a fair bit of pressure from investors to release during the holidays considering some of the questions asked during the call, like how "sticky" the game was despite the problems and whether they would still receive their full cut regardless of the refunds.
The revenue difference between selling at Christmas (even if reviews are awful) vs selling around Easter, the next available "good" retail holiday, is huge.
And since these days, patches are the standard - as in, release with known deficiencies and patch your way to "OK" - it is very likely that from an overall financial perspective, releasing now was the right answer.
If a game studio wants to maintain a very high level of quality, they have to be willing to lose a publisher by rejecting this. Unless that studio is already so well established that they are in demand, they just cannot afford to fight their publisher.
Performance is fine. Bought the game a couple of days after launch and after reading the reports about horrible performance while downloading, I disabled everything under graphics, but then after a crash it reset its settings (yeah, I know) and it seems to work fine even with all settings on.
Though my last console experience before that was on a Nintendo 64 and I don't think any game ever crashed on it.
I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.
it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers, so if anything I would assume the opposite is true: that it's an environment where the QA staff is chronically underpaid, lives in perpetual fear of dismissal, and is told that working on the biggest game ever is the honor of a lifetime.
How so? They changed the revenue based bonuses to be paid out regardless of review averages [0]. They at least tried to make a commitment to less crunch, while over at Rockstar the amount of crunch for RDR2 was something the co-founder publicly bragged about [1].
Now people on forums are citing RDR2 as an example for "How to make a great open world game!", while at the same time lynching CDPR for not living up to their attempt to minimize crunch, after several delays.
The double standards at play here are mind-boggling.
[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-developers-will-be-pa...
[1] https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games...
I don't understand who tries to complicate that with sentiments like "they should have known better"
The more you delay, the more it costs and you have to restart the marketing machine to drum up the hype.
I do not think this is a safe assumption to make. You're assuming each person passes this higher and higher up in the chain for a decision to be made.
Reviewers were given the PC version, so I imagine it was a calculation of “how many reviewers are willing to wait on traffic, just to review old consoles?”
It just didn’t work out for them.
It was their job to refuse certification and say "Nope, come back when the game runs properly" and they failed. That's part of what they get their money for when we pay more for console games than PC.
Deleted Comment
Probably they knew what is up: investors told them to publish, so they published.
The game should have been delayed until Xmas 2021 but CDPR probably had contracts they couldn't break with Sony, Xbox, or maybe even Nvidia.
Because there isn't a single other major December release.
Dead Comment
It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†.
The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it.
† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?
IGN went so far as to split their Cyberpunk 2077 review into two separate reviews: One for consoles, and one for PC. Quote from the console review:
> The Xbox One/PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.
The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.
They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible. I suspect console gamers are requesting refunds in droves due to the issues, which is surely going to impact their long-term sales projections.
If one liked Deus Ex: Mankind divided they will like Cyberpunk 2077.
CD Projekt games historically have been PC with console ports after launch. They probably would have done the same here if not being pushed to be a launch title for "next gen" consoles.
I think Sony/Microsoft are just as much to blame. They also had to QA the game and sign off on it.
Refunds are actually up to the seller in question. They clarified how there's no refund arrangement with CDPR and Microsoft/Sony and that all refunds are subject to normal Microsoft/Sony refund policies. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are failing to get their games refunded.
I wasn't even looking for them, but they managed to find me. I still enjoy the game a lot, but combat has been nothing but frustration.
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/10/22167436/cyberpunk-2077-w...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kbwpps/retic...
Theres a part where you're upstairs and you can hear the ai trying to attack you from the floor below. The game is fun but only barely and I think the novelty is going to wear off quite quickly.
The combat is simplistic. The AI opponents are basically broken. The quickhack system does indeed feel like a quickly hacked together game mechanic. V is stuck in a weird state between existing background (a la witcher) and player action defined: I didn't get the feeling of any player agency in what my character is, but neither did I get the warm feeling of learning/experiencing Geralt's(Witcher series MC) life. Life paths, also, are basically devoid of any meaningful relevancy to the storyline.
Pff. You kids. When I was your age, I once played a game so buggy that when my character walked back & forth to school he had to do in the snow & up hill both ways. Now get off my lawn.
I think that huge testament to quality of the story and game in general. Even if it's sorely missing a decent final polish, I'll be excited to play it second time in 6 months time once all the patches are out.
I'm going to guess that they released on all platforms at once because of contractual obligations.
Dum Dum followed me around until I met Keanu’s character. He would move in front of people during cutscenes and I couldn’t even tell what was going on. Sometimes he would attack Jackie during combat and other times help us.
The first scene with the ripper doc was scrambled. Cutscenes played out of ordered or repeated.
Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.
Totally agree with you.
In terms of gunplay, there are ancient PS3/Xbox 360 era games that are so much better. Deus Ex HR, Far Cry 3, MGS IV, Bioshock, etc.
Edit:
This gameplay from almost 10 years ago is way better than Cyberpunk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3eszAJWHKY
And removed any semblance of a working cover system.
I'd say play GTA V and the Witcher 3 for a comparison in immersive open world story telling and high caliber graphics. I haven't played Spiderman (2018, 2020) but in gameplay footage (which is only on console) it looks much better as well.
I feel like I'm crazy when I say that the graphics are incredibly underwhelming. It looks good, and there's neat stuff. But I don't care how pretty a shadow looks when the hundreds of NPCs walking around look so rough.
The game has some truly amazing aspects such as writing, characters, music, etc, but IMO it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, open world mechanics, driving... it's all very mediocre even poor at times.
Stealth for example is not nearly as good as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or The Metal Gear Solid series. The tutorial seemed alright but when it came to real gameplay I felt like stealth just didn’t work and I just resorted to guns blazing. But after more effort and getting a better hang of quick hacking I have found stealth to be viable actually. You really do need to make heavy use of quick hacking though. Also that game is very visually busy which makes it easy to miss a camera.
Driving feels pretty good, but not as good as GTA. So far driving really seems to be a way to get from point A to point B and not a core gameplay mechanic like it is with GTA. The NPC driving AI and Cop AI is downright bad compared to GTA but besides being a little immersion breaking it doesn’t seem to affect the actual gameplay much. GTA is very focused around driving and avoiding police, most of the missions involve it in some way. Cyberpunk doesn’t really rely on driving so I can give it a pass on those faults.
Gunplay really bothered me at first. It felt chaotic and a bit clunky. Other FPS/RPG hybrid games have suffered the same issues. Shooting powerful or higher level enemies will just feel bullet spongy. Some of that just needs to be accepted as “this is an RPG, not a shooter”. The cover system isn’t very sophisticated or obvious either. However the more I play the more I get the hang of it and I have found the gunplay to actually be quite satisfying.
Great art, great story, great character/music.
I hated the gameplay. I don't know why, but it felt horrendously clunky, even after the rework.
This comment doesn't include things like traffic AI. Only combat.
the most annoying thing I've encountered so far is the way doors work. there are a lot of points where the door is supposed to automatically open. I feel like it always opens about 100 ms after I expect it to, making me wonder if I'm supposed to open it myself. maybe this is "working as designed", I dunno.
1. Friendly NPC left behind in mission area which was scripted to become inaccessible. Couldn't reach the NPC to finish the mission. 2. Killed an NPC two times: once in a side mission and once in a main mission 3. The player goes to sleep perpendicular to the bed and with the bottom half side of the body outside the bed. 4. Friendly NPCs start to shout randomly during stealth missions. 5. There's no driving AI, all machines follow predefined paths sometimes going through one another as if there's no collision.
And probably lots more I didn't remember. And these exclude the physics and rendering bugs and I encounter every 5 minutes.
A few other things of note. 1080p is the max resolution. Unlimited Internet is probably a requirement as its about 10gb per hour. After 6 hours the session ends and you need to save and relaunch the game. Your entire Steam library is not available, its up to publishers to allow their games on it.
;)
I've also had zero crashes but I do notice quite a few minor bugs. They're a little annoying but I've still sunk 30 hours in. I also can't remember the last open world game that didn't have similar bugs.
Try this tonight: make sure you're absolutely alone and shoot someone. A cop will spawn behind you. No AI, no chase, no nothing, just bloop here's a cop.
The game has destroyed the reputation of this company overnight.
They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...
Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen.
Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game.
They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SNES game and Shadowrun Returns. However, I've talked with hardcore Cyberpunk pen & paper players, and they say its un-fucking-believable how well CDPR has brought to life the Cyberpunk universe in this game.
Yes, there are bugs. I have every confidence though that CDPR will iron all this shit out like they did with The Witcher III. This will be a great game by mid-to-late 2021, in every sense of the word.
I genuinely hope in Cyberpunk 2077 II that they'll be able to flesh out the game world, because I really love this game and this world.
But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car" - you have expectations when you put the money down...
There seem to be two factions: Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed. But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.
Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.
GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.
But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.
There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.
Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.
I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.
Gamers are so cranky.
I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.
Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad
The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.
Deleted Comment
That really depends on individual expectations. With many people treating the game like the second coming of gaming Jesus a lot of the disappointment was pretty much guaranteed.
Personally I didn't expect anything like that, I was hoping for an open world Deus Ex like, with a more "colorful" setting, and that's pretty much what I got.
> not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
AMD has been the "current gaming king" only since Zen 3 desktop release, which happened just last month, most of these CPUs are still completely impossible to buy at actual MSRP.
Regardless of that even Zen 2 is mostly performing very well with the game [0], which the HEXedit fix will only improve once it's patched in officially.
In that context this complaint sounds very much like still complaining about the lack of an epilepsy warning; Sure it's not great to overlook something like that, but it's inane to act as if these are unfixable and nonredeemable issues, particularly in an industry where "games a service", releasing early access products, has become the new low-key norm even for much bigger publishers.
[0] https://youtu.be/-pRI7vXh0JU
EA gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it's important to recognize their behavior is typical of all major players in the games industry. The whole thing is rotten and you shouldn't trust any of them. They certainly haven't earned it. Always wait for reviews.
Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.
Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.
This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.
There is also the lesser known axiom: it's better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.
There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account.
Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.
I've put more than 40 hours in and I'm nowhere close to completing it even once. I'm pretty sure all the dialogue alone adds up to that much.
Even completing the main story, gigs and side-missions is probably going to take me around 100 hours. Maybe someone faster could do it in 40, or maybe 20 if you skipped all of the dialogue and played on a low difficulty. I spend/wasted a lot of time just exploring the city and surrounding areas, doing 'bounties' or climbing on random places to see if there's something interesting/loot to be found.
I suppose you mostly played the main story line on a low difficulty, ignoring all the side activities (which do impact the main story and vice-versa) and likely rushed through or past everything else.
If you were looking to have a good time you didn't exactly set yourself up for success. A bit like reading a book and skipping all of the chapters that follow minor characters for world-building purposes.
I agree that the life paths don't have major consequence, which is a bit disappointing, but saying "choices don't matter" as a blanket statement is just factually incorrect, considering there's a long list of choices that have a lasting effect on the game world, and there are at least 3-5 different endings depending on the choices you made earlier in the game.
There's a list of (so far known) major choices here if you want to spoil yourself: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/Choices_and_Consequ...
Here's the most recent google-cached version I could find, archived via archive.is: https://archive.is/DFb7d
Edit: Scrolled down and found great r3view that put what felt into words better then I can.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436061
At a surface level it is very reminiscent of the Deus Ex games, but if you go in expecting something profound you will be disappointed
The game offers you three "life paths" at the beginning so after I finished it once I had to see if a different path would be better.
Well it turns out life paths change nothing besides the introduction. It's still the same dumb game with the same railtracks and the same story. Your choices don't matter and you realize that you've been swindled since the promises and descriptions of the immersive and emergent open-world nature of the game turned out to be a bunch of lies.
Hearing all the stories about refunds being hard or impossible to execute, one has to wonder if legal action is justifiable here. The CP2077 that CDPR framed and advertised gameplay-wise has very little to do with the end result that they delivered. And I'm not even talking about the bugs, but the game itself.
It goes without saying that I'm done with them and my intuition tells me that the CDPR brand will be poisonous to a lot of gamers out there after this fiasco. Bugs are one thing, but blatant lies quite another.
The gameplay is pretty much identical to w3, which is what I expected going in. If you expected more than that you were bound to be disappointed.
I know there are additional endings and side quests, but the problem is that game has no depth whatsoever so I'm not exactly motivated to spend more time. It's mindless action with a few variations on the quests that keep repeating themselves. After playing the game for a few hours, the shallowness and superficiality of it all starts weighing on you.
What are some modern games that are like this?
I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.
SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.
getting some really mixed signals here
Dead Comment
You should familiarize yourself with the concept of a "sunk cost"[0]. You'll probably be happier for it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect
Fantastic game with maybe 2-3 bugs
I don't mean the performance, it's clearly just had so much stuff ripped out
You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
Preorders just allow them to release buggy games in a beta state and patch it later.
I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.
Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK.
The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360.
The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne.
It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either.
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I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.
I've personally tried the game on Xbox One X and only problems I've found were graphical glitches but it still is not a great experience. It's honestly pretty sad it ended like this with the amount of crunch and the token system the developers had.
It is only released on last gen consoles. There's no native PS5 or Xbox series X/S version you can buy. You buy the PS4/Xbox One version and play it via backwards compatibility. Apart from video resolution or low FPS, have there been significant problems on the last gen consoles in terms of bugs that aren't on the new gen?