Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received,” CDPR dev says
Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received,” CDPR dev says
Cyberpunk 2077 faced a tough reception at release, but with the Phantom Liberty DLC nearing launch, one CDPR dev feels the RPG was better than history records.
Cyberpunk 2077 faced a tough reception at launch, but with the Phantom Liberty DLC nearing launch, one CDPR dev feels the RPG was better than history records.
…uh, no. It was a hot mess at launch.
Have people forgotten all the straight up lies, broken promises and features?
The police would spawn inside locked elevators with you!
NPCs disappeared if you turned around!I'm glad some of you had fun with the story but the game was still a damn mess.
I'm glad some of you had fun with the story
Not to mention the story was still very much on rails. Even if there were like what, 3 different outcomes? And on top of that, once you beat the game there is absolutely fuck all to do.
Honestly. I put about 50-60 hours into cyberpunk. I enjoyed every single hour of it. But once the main campaign was complete, there was just nothing left to do. I tried many times to jump back in and go do side quests or explore but the world is just completely empty.
My feelings exactly.
I played for 60 hours or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. But they put a fatal design flaw into the game by forcing to you be V, and by putting a ticking time bomb in your head. That means that if you play logically, you'll follow the storyline quests in order to fix the big issue rather than spending the time slowly exploring the world they made. It also means that once you beat it, there's no fun in going back and doing it again, because you have to follow the same railroad tracks and go through the same story beats again. It cheapens the experience greatly.
Like you, the world holds no interest for me now that I have found a satisfying ending for V. The least they could have done was put in a "story mode," and a separate "open mode" where you can build any character (who isn't V) and live any life you choose, free from the main quest railroad.
I'll never understand why game designers would make an open world, and then slap on a "YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR LIFE HURRY UP!!! railroad quest as the main story. It's a lazy and utterly stupid design choice.
A lot of that is because there isn't a post game. So, you finish the quest lines and that's it. Witcher is the same way and it's fine, but Witcher was also a longer game with more interesting side content.
I'm torn because Skyrim was also a buggy mess. But it's my most played comfort game. The first few games, I couldn't finish the main quest. And it was soooo much worse than I ever experienced with cyberpunk. Both games I played within the first week of release.
One game, the dragon refused to be caught in Whiterun.
Another game, I caught him and he promised to let me ride him, but the guards never released him.
Another game, half the floor was missing from the floor of the greybeards manor. They were inside but there was a giant gap I couldn't cross over.
For the dark brotherhood, I couldn't complete that quest the first time when you hunt down Cicero because the room he was in also had no floor except for his area.
So many quests just wouldn't progress to the point I had the wiki open so I could use console commands to move quests forward.
I once got locked in during the werewolf quest when my companion was supposed to open the gate for me. He just stood there.
One quest where I fought three ghosts for the boss had a locked door behind me. I could never get that door to unlock with the fight. Sometimes I beat them all. Sometimes I could kill 2 and the third one just disappeared. The only fix was reverting to a save from before I ever entered the dungeon at all.
And so many more. Way more issues and game breaking bugs than cyberpunk. And yet I still hold Skyrim close to my heart. Especially as patches started coming and, more importantly, the Skyrim community patch mod. The modders are really what held up Skyrim.
It feels weird for me to hate what cyberpunk was when I live what Skyrim is.
If they hadn't over-promised things and straight up lied, it would have been received better. A lot of what they said was gonna be in the game still isn't, and likely won't ever be...
This is what it is. It's not the state that it launched in. It's that they literally lied about what the game was (I still swear that it's not even an rpg, because nothing you do matters, it's a story driven action adventure game) and kept promising features they KNEW were not present, but still kept doing it. Same as No Mans Sky. Just blatently lied repeatedly and then blame the fans "because it was cool to hate us" .... UM NO.
Yeah the only mission with the multiple paths/strategies to go through was the one from the gameplay demo. Everything else was pretty much on rails.
That annoyed me so much.
To be fair to No Man's Sky, the devs realized their mistakes and have actively made the game better. They have consistently put out free updates that have made the game 100% better than how it started and continue creating new questlines to follow (most recent came out this month and is a four part series throughout the year). All of this for free, despite the game technically being old now. They even have VR capabilities. As a company, I appreciate that they've owned up that. CDPR, instead, are making a DLC, which is their right but definitely a different mindset concerning their customers' experience.
Honestly I felt it was pretty on par for an RPG game. Many quests have multiple outcomes, you get follow-up quests depending on how you handle certain things. You have about 3-4 separate endings to the game.
Most games don't have the kind of choices people actually expect and still get called rpgs. Skyrim for example has only a handful of quests with different outcomes and it's still considered a great RPG, although I myself have severe criticisms of it.
This is what everyone is missing.
The game wasn't what was advertised. And once you finish the first section and you realize all the cool shit you thought you'd do happens in a cut scene you feel pretty discouraged.
It's also shitty that they shipped a buggy game to begin with. I don't care if you're CDPR, EA, Bethesda or Blizzard. Unfinished projects shouldn't be shipped.
Yeah, this smacks of some PR spin. Now that some time has passed between the games release they want to fix their tarnished image.
I mean not only was the performance just awful across platforms, the game itself was only OK. It looked pretty but the gameplay was not at all what they promised.
We'll see how many outlets get paid and or suckered into this blatant PR move to try and retcon how bad they screwed up.
Nevertheless, Platkow-Gilewski also says that he feels the original version of Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received.” “I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive. Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. We knew that the game was great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. “That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like ‘let’s do this.’”Yeah, I actually can get behind this. They got a lot of crap for the technical performance of the last-gen console version, partly because there was no current-gen native version. Having played it on PC day one my impression was that it was rough-to-normal (still better than day one Skyrim). Design-wise, the combat parts and open world design are the least interesting parts of it to this day, but even at the time I thought the narrative elements and obviously the visuals were great.
Just to sanity check this, even with the torubled launch the PC version reviewed with an average of 86 on Metacritic and sold very well. It was a technically rough launch and they should have delayed the console ports at the very least, but it's not a bad game.
"(still better than day one Skyrim.)"
I'm glad you mentioned this because I almost never see anyone make the comparison, and skyrim didn't get nearly as much hate despite that fact. I remember if you were playing on PS3, walking into water would crash your game, and it was like this for the entire first year of the game on PS3. It also had a problem where save files that were too big would guarantee save file corruption. It was the definition of unplayable for lots of people.
Not saying cyberpunk is better than skyrim, just explaining how dire the launch for skyrim was, many people have forgotten just how rough around the edges skyrim was.
People tend to forget how broken games were at launch once they're no longer broken, which is why these days you only get broken games.
I think studios need to reassess what is a showstopping bug these days, because restricting it to hard blockers is no longer enough, but that may require people having a different perspective on these things.
But yeah "the game will eventually get into an endless crash loop if you play too much of it" is a pretty high bar to meet in terms of launching a broken game, and since I did play Skyrim on PS3 first, I may have a bettter memory of it than others.
New Vegas and Fallout 3 were borderline unplayable on PS3 when they launched too.
Old timers keep warning people not to buy on launch. But every time a 'big' game comes along, there are a lot of people who ignore the warnings and do it anyway.
Witcher 3 was the same. Roach(horse) on a roof was a meme at one point. But CDPR wasn't as famous then, so far less people played that on launch.
Oh, and while we're at it, Witcher 3 isn't a true RPG either. Cyberpunk is quite a lot like Witcher 3 IMHO.
You did get screwed if you tried to play Skyrim on the PS3. The hardware limitations on the console caused obvious instability in the game that I don't think they ever fully resolved.
But I don't think most people played Skyrim on PS3 so they aren't going to have that same experience. I know I didn't.
Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had "open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years" maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.
Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.
Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?
Next-gen was broken from day one (xbox series s, in my case). It took months to get it to a reliable state. T-posing, broken missions, broken driving, terrible draw distance, progress resets, crowd/npc behavior. (Remember when it took them over a year to figure out how to make crowds behave realistically when a gun fight breaks out. Even then, most of them just dropped into a grab position with their hands above their hands, hiding behind nothing.) Even if we forget all of that, there's still the frequent crashing, with no rhyme or reason. You never knew what was going to cause it, and it was months before it was mostly reliable.
It deserved the hate.
https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/03daxuxcE5t7NHYGJwO1AyQ-2.fit_lim.size_768x.jpg
I think it's a good perspective but it rather downplays the biggest problem: Hype. He talkes about being "hyped up" and all this "hype surrounding us was big pressure" but it is one of the biggest reasons the game was recieved so harshly. It had been built up into being one of the greatest games ever made. In the end it was a good game but couldn't live up to the expectations.
Also while the game was better on PC, it really was a disaster on PS4 and Xbox One which is what drove it's bad reputation.
I like the game but to be honest I'm yet to finish it. The plot and narrative is good, but the open world is disappointing with far too much reliance on purely combat side missions, often with minimal associated narrative. The world would have felt much richer if they'd put in more narrative around the side missions and found other non-combat things to do in the city. I loved the Witcher 3 which has a lot of story around the side missions. I think CDPR could have take a leaf out of Bethesda's book for CP had multiple narratives running alongside the main plot.
But ultimately the game finishes unfinished - they promised too much to deliver at that launch, so kudos to them to being able to focus and deliver a good core game. It just could have been a great game if they'd managed to develop other elements of the game world.
I missed your comment before mine, but this tracks with my experience. Thinking about it I did a stealth fists playthrough, with stealth being all about avoiding combat where possible... I thought I was just bad at the game, but maybe it was my inner reviewer telling me combat is not a fun way to play the game 😂
I'm old enough now that I accept it's fine to switch difficulty to be trivial in games where combat is not the point.
To be clear, combat in CP is still better than Witcher 3 combat, especially at launch of that game, but it's also not why I'm there. I'm there for the exquisitely rendered Keanu and the extremely granular, detailed story beats with unexpectedly affecting writing.
I think on PC it was tolerable at launch. Definitely not perfect, but not a hot mess either. On consoles, I think I would agree with you though.
I got my fill before the first major patch hit....100%ing it and playing all paths of the main story I could find.Exactly this, thank you! I had an amazing time with the game on release, and yes I DO remember launch day Skyrim and how broken it was. And how game-breakingly buggy it CONTINUED TO BE for over a year. There was a main story quest that I was unable to complete because of broken voicelines not being loaded! In comparison, CP2077 was a smooth as butter experience, and I had very few serious bugs. The one time I had them, a simple reload of my save fixed it.
The release of the game really hinged around the system you had at the time of launch. I really wanted to buy the game prior to launch, but I'm glad I didn't. All the promises CDPR made sounded awfully familiar to all those promises Hello Games made about NMS.
I didn't purchase the game until I had a PS5, and the Playstation Store put it back in their queue (PS4 version). I bought it on sale, yet a week later it was going for like $25 IIRC. I should have waited, but whatever. And there were minor issues, but the game was not broken like the clips I saw at launch. And I'll say it again, despite all the promises the studio made, a lot of the problems revolved around the specific equipment you were running.
The dev kind of does have a point, there was some overreaction, and seriously how many times are gamers going to continue to trust studios to deliver on their promises to these kind of games? However I believe he's painting a different picture at a critical point in the game's history where its first expansion is on the horizon.
And you see these same promises coming from the studio. The tone sounds so similar. Don't buy the DLC until after launch...I'm not. Wait to see the game reviews before buying. The only way publishers will stop making these overblown promises is when gamers stop pre-ordering games and expansions, regardless what carrots they dangle.
The wise thing to do was to shut the hell up. Why he's even trying to defend it anymore in the first place? People were onboard for Phantom Liberty
Cyberpunk 2077 is the reason I'm no longer pre-ordering games from studios I like.
Never preorder. Why would you pay for a product you haven't even seen yet? It doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter who.
Never preorder.
I don't know why it's still a thing, especially on PC, where almost all games are digital. Even when I was still getting disk based games, I never actually ran into the issue of not being able to get hold of a copy.
I don't even want to play newly released games, since they're pretty much guaranteed to be broken for the first week at least.
Even the early-access games make more sense than preordering games months ahead for the same price.
And it’s why I don’t trust a lot of YouTube game reviewers any more.
i don't think i've pre-ordered anything since bestbuy ended GCU. 20% off special editions (and in many cases a $10 giftcard for preordering)? sign me up.
$70 for a game that will probably be broken at launch and not fixed until it's a $20 game? no thanks.
sony's scummy practice of restricting steelbooks to the $150+ special editions (and not even including a physical disc to put in said steelbook) has completely killed any incentive to preorder a first party sony game. even outside sony, you see what atlus is doing where they'll re-release the game over and over again with new content and no upgrade path, or games that just outright disappoint like tales of arise, yakuza 7, etc. and it's VERY hard to justify a preorder in 2023.
They still trying to gaslight lmao.
CDPR have good writers and terrible management. Cyberpunk 2077 was in development for 7 years and one of the most expensive games ever made and still released as a pile of shit marketed behind false promises. Where the money went and what happened during that time, only they know, but something went seriously wrong.I dunno, I finished it which is rare enough for me nowadays. I didn't speed through the story like I did with Diablo 4, either; I found it compelling when I could immerse myself in the game world. Then again I play on PC, so I may have fewer bugs to contend with than console players?
This was my experience as well. I played the game on PC day one and it was fine in terms of bugs/glitches. Maybe some minor stuff but nothing that really took me out of the game and it ran perfectly fine, albeit I had a shiny new 3070 at the time.
Ran fine on my old 1080 too. Had only two issues that was bad enough to be noticeable: Audio sometimes came from the wrong location in scripted scenes. And NPCs cars drivingpast was severely damaged, sometimes sank into the road, sometimes suddenly getting thrown into the air for no reason and blowing up. Oh, and a third, the famous climbing through certain broken windows teleported you far back bug.
Lol nah. Game was a mess. Nowhere near feature parity with what they promised, bugs galore, awful police AI, and the last gen versions were literally unplayable to the point that they were removed from stores.
I went back and played it again a couple of weeks ago on PS5 with all the updates applied and…yeah, it’s still bad. Graphics look nice but the gameplay is terrible. Loads of bugs still with random glitching through surfaces, NPCs glitching and doing random shit, gun-play still clunky as hell, still no police chases. The whole game just feels soulless and I personally don’t find any fun in playing it.
when I saw everyone high on hypium and how they advertised it like it's the cure for cancer I knew it was gonna be a cash grab
I find most commentary reads as though people were expecting GTA from CDPR, which is completely unfair. I don't see a lot of "this doesn't play like Skyrim" from TW3 commentary, and there's a lot in common with those comparisons: CDPR titles are more story-driven, less freedom in their protagonist's character and role, and far less "life" outside the main path (ie, townsfolk and little finds along the way).
E: I think it played less buggy on launch than Skyrim, too. PC
“Without a doubt, quality is of paramount importance,” CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński says. “We strive to publish games which are as refined as Red Dead Redemption 2, and recent Rockstar releases in general."
https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/11/25/cyberpunk-2077-aims-to-be-as-polished-as-red-dead-redemption-ii-at-launch
Ehh, I'd say they are maybe 20% right about that one, the gaming community just piled on top of it like it was the most irredeemable pile of trash ever.
The thing is the other 80% of that story is them telling upfront lies about the game, them intentionally hiding that it was literally unplayable on consoles, and even now years after its launch after numerous updates and bugfixes the game is still just a shadow of what it could have been.
It's a fun good game but the thing I think about most while playing it is usually about missed potential, "damn this could have been so much better". Maybe Phantom Liberty and the free update improves this, I really hope it does, but the game is a mess of gameplay mechanics, terrible progression loops and empty open world.
Sony outright stopped selling it and started giving refunds. Doesnt sound like an amazing game that met player expectations.
I'm glad that it seems like they've turned around on this game but they cannot be revisionist about the performance of the game at launch. It was quite bad and we have receipts to prove it.
Dissappointing from a technical point of view
Dissappointing from a roleplay point of view
Dissappointing from a narrative point of view
At least for me
Was it? Is it, even? Still stuck on how you can make a game with the name "punk" and have one of the mechanics in free roam be... hearing police chatter, you jump in and kill a bunch of folk while knowing only the bare minimum of the situation, and getting paid. :thonk:
Nah. It was a mess on launch and it's still kind of a mess. It's full of dead ends and stuff that doesn't quite make sense from cut content, wonky bugs everywhere (play long enough and you'll see a bunch), and whole ass features missing. People need to remember that CDPR's magic is its writers, not its devs. The Witcher games, when compared with other 3rd person action focused games, aren't great. We're talking C+ to B- game design from my perspective. It's just that the dang stories and settings are so compelling.
There are dozens of games that do what Witcher or CP2077 do (gameplay wise) with vastly more polish and style.
Also I really hate the whole "yer dyin', V" conceit. It literally does not matter to the gameplay except for one tiny, hidden thing that a lot of players won't even see. Plus it serves no purpose in the broader narrative than serving as a reason to push V into action ... except he/she ALREADY HAS ONE. There's no need for second inciting event writers, you already wrote 3 of them, one for each background. So basically it's redundant and the way it's handled in the story feels like a cop-out. I hate it when the narrative and the game play aren't aligned; it just feels bad.
Lmao it was not, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a train wreck on all platforms.
We need to stop giving triple-a games the benefit of the doubt. These aren't some small struggling indie dev team, this is a huge corporation with a massive budget and almost a decade of development time. If they can't deliver on a technical level, they need to scale down. Hundreds of indie games release with lower budgets and development time that do far more with much, much less. Hell, there are even some big releases with no problems. Look at half life alyx: announced 5 months before it came out, released on time, and had few (if any) game-breaking or immersion ruining bugs. Hell, tears of the kingdom apparently got a year to just do QA and polish everything.
I will continue to argue to this day, Cyberpunk should have been a PC exclusive. Most of the performance issues were on consoles, consoles that hold back innovation and progress in gaming. I remember a time when PC games were always at the forefront of better graphics and new ideas. Now, we cater to the lowest common denominator.
FWIW, I had a good time with the game on release. I don't know what was promised and still don't, but the game that I played was solid and fun. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
Most of the performance issues were on consoles, consoles that hold back innovation and progress in gaming.
except cyberpunk didn't do anything special that the consoles couldn't handle, it was just a case of a game that was very clearly designed for pc (the UI makes it obvious) and didn't bother to optimize their game. consoles didn't hold back anything.
Even on PC it was crap though. Not only was it extremely buggy but also poorly optimized. Low and unstable FPS even on my NVIDIA 3090 / Ryzen 5900X rig. It took several patches (and over a year) for performance to get better.
The game shouldn't have been a PC exclusive, it should have been delayed by a year or two (and not released on older consoles at all).
I mean, it wasn't nearly as bad as some people made it out to be, but it definitely wasn't anywhere near the game it was promised to be, so...
Lies. It wasn't
I still remember feeling so betrayed after pre-purchasing that game. They had a "gold certificate" or something saying it was working with minimal bugs. Cyberpunk is the reason why I don't pre-order anything ever.
Cyberpunk 2077 was a hot mess at launch. The one good thing I think is the Judy storyline was pretty well done.
It was a hot mess, but it got really good
I enjoyed it on my PC. I did wish there was more of the memory hack things.
Cyberpunk has great atmosphere, but the city is completely devoid of life. Mindless NPCs, no interactions whatsoever. GTA III had a better, more living environnement.
Say what you will about Rockstar, but they set the bar really fucking high for Open World games.
I actually kind of believe them. But not because the game was in great shape when it launched and everyone ignored it.
I played on release and it was rough. But I also played it recently and it was also extremely buggy even though people act as if the game was patched into perfection. Performance is still awful, although even at minimum the game looks amazing. Reflections in particular look "grainy" and awful unless you put Screen Space Reflections on Psycho or enable RT which murders performance.
On the other hand, the story is pretty good, the characters are outright fantastic and the secondary missions (that aren't just going somewhere and murdering everyone) are great.
Article absolutely doesn't go into why someone might've thought it was bad, nice meme
my opinion nobody asked for, as someone who played it:
think the main story is great and that it touches upon a lot of cyberpunk themes in a very faithful way, not personally into GTA type gameplay and openworld, so that was a loss for me, but in general the world felt empty (why i tend not to like openworld) and the combat basic especially in comparison to anything promised a year before launch.
It also had some cute sidemissions here and there, particularly the Ghost in the Shell easteregg is tragic, and I enjoyed the sentient car (though I wish I could've been hanging out with my AI car alongside my tulpa)It was better, in that it was a good game compared to a lot of shovelware that gets released.
But that wasn't the issue. The issue was that it didn't deliver on a lot of what was promised, and one of the versions they released was virtually unplayable, to the point it had to be pulled off shelves.
If they had pulled back expectations and not made the old-gen version, it probably would've been much better received. They did a lot of things they shouldn't of done that either confused players, frustrated players, or just broke any trust they had.
Redmod sucks open up real modding and this solved
Did this dev even play the game on PS4 / Xbox? The current hardware it was developed for at the time? It run constantly sub 30 FPS, even dropping into 20s and below. Like I get the idea that it should of been a "next gen" only title, but copies of the game were sold with the expectation that it's would be payable, 20 FPS with poor frame pacing isn't acceptable
