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While I wish CDPR had pulled the band-aid and canceled (with refund or free upgrade to next gen) the PS4 and Xbox Series platforms, my controversial opinion is that this game has been GoTY on PC since day one. Plenty of my favorite games had rough launches (Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, No Man's Sky, Witcher 3, Skyrim - hell, I even lost an hour to the cross-save bug in Baldurs Gate 3), but it became a meme to hate on CP2077, and I understand why the devs claim to this day that the game deserves more credit.
I understand that players are tired of broken launches, and I agree that devs should be more cautious about what features they show in alpha/beta stages to manage hype, but I think the oversized backlash this game received stopped or delayed a large swathe of gamers from experiencing a truly great game and gave the devs way more stress than they had earned.
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Yes, it was far far more than just a buggy release. Even if the game was originally released in the state it's in now people would still have been pissed. The bugs were just a distraction.
I could have lived with the bugs and poor performance, but the game was shallow af and very much different from what we were sold for years.
It was basically the we have X at home meme, but with a meta twist.
Yeah, the only other game that was so brazenly lied about before launch was No Man's Sky and to their credit Hello Games actually implemented everything that was promised back then now and then some, for free.
Did you somehow get a different game? Or maybe you somehow avoided all the bugs everyone else experienced. Still even if worked perfectly, game of the year seems a bit much.
Even now, years later, there are still unfixed bugs. I have a game where there's one mission showing up in a building that is impossible to enter. I even started the game clean from the beginning a year ago and hit the same damn bug again.
Others have reported it too, so I'm not the only one.
I didn't have any gamebreaking bugs, but had soooo so many "how the fuck did this pass quality control?" bugs. Most of them were pretty funny, like the time I didn't understand how the cyberpsycho quests worked, and tried to take the unconscious body with me.
The game system did not like having that body in the trunk of my car, with hilarious Dali-esque consequences.
Aside from that, the deep systems that were promised were extremely shallow; the onscreen map was fucked, too small to see turns coming (pathing too CPU-intensive when zoomed out?); the onscreen HUD still last time I played was too small to read on a 4k screen; the car handling / driving is still atrocious (at least, last time I played). It is a fun game, especially for those picking it up now. Mods make it much more fun.
If by rough launch you mean pretty much omitted majority of things they said will be in the game, then yes. Rough launch. And here I am worrying when indie devs don't have enough time to fix minor bug in their games.
Damn, a lot to unpack here.
- Broken launches aren't something to be tired of, imagine if everytime you bought a car it has to be recalled. Every Sandwich you ate gave you food poisoning. All of the tools you buy snap the first time they undergo a few foot pounds of torque.
This market runs on money, and the only way to combine them to put out functional games is to refuse to pay for sub par products. Anything less and they'll go "oh shit, we're still making money. I guess we don't need to provide anything beyond a tech demo to rake in 70 bucks + cosmetics, etc."
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They absolutely lied about their systems. Fully functional crowds and AI? Bullshit. A cop system that actually works? Bullshit. They pop out of a hole in the ground and insta-gank you. If they can't even replicate decade old police technology that games like GTA IV managed to get right, then they should have just given you the "DONT KILL CIVILIANS" with a game over screen instead of some half-baked system of having police that spawn behind and instantly kill you. A total waste of a mechanic that they couldn't even fully implement or commit to.
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While the game was mostly broken on last gen consoles, I have a fairly powerful desktop and still got game breaking bugs on occasion with only mildly infuriating ones fairly frequently. To say the game was GOTY on day one is absolutely mind-boggling. Your standards for games are clearly through the floor on this one if you really consider it GOTY on release lol I wouldn't even consider it that good NOW and I've just recently 100%'ed the damn game.
I'll agree that it got more hate than it deserves, but let's not swing the pendulum the other way and pretend this is some nugget of gold that people just didn't see. It was broken and got treated as such.
What about it makes it GOTY for you? It was a broken, hollow shell of what they had been promising for years.
Honestly you're not wrong, the launch of the game was actually horrible. The game was good in theory but was halfway executed and shoved into our faces as something great when it obviously wasn't when they shipped it.
I've been a huge fan of CDPR since the witcher 2. I love the world of cyberpunk. The combination seemed like a dream come true. So, I deliberately held out on absolutely any and all spoilers. It was not easy.
I bought a new computer for the game. I booked a two week vacation to play the game.
And, I mostly enjoyed it. It was a little bit underwhelming, and some systems seemed a bit contrived. But, it was still fun, with some amazing city design. Definitely not something that I would call GoTY.
Then, I looked at all the outrage, and I looked at the promotional material. And, oh boy, did that seem fraudulent. Like, "how come no one went to jail"-fraud. Pretty straight up lying about every part of the game. And why? I don't know, but it seriously stained my view of CDPR.
Not only did it have all the bugs and missing features, the game was disappointingly mediocre even if it had been working perfectly. The only thing I thought was excellently done was the layout of the city itself.
That's my thing. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I could not call it GOTY. The police were barely implemented, the best gear at any point did not have any kind of theme so you were punished if you tried to get outfits that matched, and the shallow cybernetic system alone made me put it down before I could finish it.
I went in cautiously hoping for a RPG and what I got felt more akin to a baseline action adventure title with some numbers added in so they could pretend it was an RPG.
Never ever ever buy a game until after reviews come out. It's not worth it. It doesn't matter if it's from a legendary game studio, they can find all of the developers, they could fire all of the managers, and still be called the same thing. The name is no guarantee of anything.
Pre-ordering games had a point back when they were mostly physical, because if you didn't, you ran the risk of them running out. Although I didn't pre-order GTA V, and just walked into a game store on the day of release and bought two copies, so since then I've rather been of the opinion that even with physical products, it's probably not very likely they're going to run out.
But now everything's digital there's 100% no reason to pre-order. Make them make the actual product they claimed to have made.
I played through it at launch on my lower end gaming laptop (1050 GPU) that I had at the time. With some fiddling, and basically turning everything to lowest I got it to just about playable framerates.
Massively enjoyed the game and its universe. I hit a few bugs but nothing that was hugely game breaking, at least nowhere as bad as people were saying. I also managed my expectations knowing my hardware at the time was low-end/dated.
Then I saw footage of the game being played on base tier PS4 and Xbox One hardware and holy shit, if I'd bought it on either of those (especially Xbox), I'd have been furious. The game was not ready and should never have been released for those consoles. It clearly needed at least PS4 Pro or One X to even be remotely playable at launch.
I think a lot of the negativity also comes from misunderstanding what the game is.
Just like you, I played the game on release (on PC) and it is for me one of the best games of all time for one specific reason: immersion and story. That's exactly what I expected from CDPR after Witcher 3 (another story and immersion focused game) and that's exactly what I got. I didn't expect a company known for their story focus and relatively weaker gameplay to deliver a game focused on gameplay or sandbox elements.
I think a lot of people wanted something that CDPR was never going to deliver, but it seems like Phantom Liberty is leaning more into the sandbox that people wanted and (unsurprisingly) didn't get at release.
I see this argument a lot when people criticize this game and it seems like you are all suffering from some Mandela fever dream. Or maybe you just didn't watch any of the trailers and dev commentary?
CDPR literally marketed the game as and constantly raved about how the city was the most immersive sandbox possible. With fully scripted AI living full lives and reacting realistically to you. A full police system that would enforce harsh punishments. They wanted players to believe it was going to be the same level of interactivity with the world as games like GTA or Watch Dogs.
Idk what made you think they were "never going to deliver" that when it was constantly being talked about by the PEOPLE WHO MADE THE GAME.
"Well, CDPR has never made a game like that and the Witcher series wasn't like that so it doesn't matter that they spent years telling everyone that it was going to be that way! It's you're fault for not knowing!"
Classic.
You can't say that when for literally YEARS CDPR advertised the game as being exactly that. A futuristic, play-who-you-want RPG sandbox. Instead we practically got a Far Cry clone with light RPG elements. They just quietly stopped advertising it as such.
But people remember. Just because you didn't expect it yourself doesn't mean it wasn't advertised as such.
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I stopped playing the game because of how bad I found the story and the characters.