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.
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.
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...
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.
They still trying to gaslight lmao.
CDPR have good writers and terrible management. Cyberpunk 2077 was in development for 7 years, 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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This gane should have been released in 2022, not 2020.
And it shows, the improvement over the years made this game into a full game and not whatever mess it was.
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)
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.
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