Cyberpunk 2077 - New RPG by CD PROJEKT RED

[DJ Spinoza]

From the little bit that I can gather, it largely seems to come down to CDPR demanding/requiring faith, either in the short-term with the day 1 patch, or at least in the long term that the bugs will be fixed. Again, I'm only going off passive observation, but as far as I understand it, nobody has played the fully patched versions yet, and I saw developers claiming that the games are effectively different, including on consoles.

The most charitable reading I have, without even getting into the questionable elements of the marketing and crunch, is that the coordination and execution of the release has been really haywire. You have a game going out with huge hype and not just one patch but at least two big ones. It's hard not to come away with the conclusion that the game was still rushed, and I'm even willing to suspend judgment about whatever bugs until I actually play for myself with all the patches. I honestly have no idea how much holiday sales impact things. I would assume this game is hyped enough and will have long enough legs that it won't matter, but I guess there still is some significance to getting it done now, not to mention that delaying again would be even more bad PR (I think they would have needed to delay it longer than now from the most recent delay if they go this route).

All that said, I'm still in somewhat of a wait and see with the game. I have it pre-ordered but in general I think there's so much noise around it that it's hard to separate the wheat from chaff (in terms of the performance, graphics, etc). The main reason I'm really keeping my pre-order is that I don't really think I'd wait long enough to see much of a sale, and the bugs won't bother me unless they are the kind that corrupt your save entrely.

 

[DJ Spinoza]

This is the first clearly stated thing I've seen about console versions and the newest patch (surely there are others, but I'm not actively searching them out).

edit: as soon as I hit "post", I glanced at the comments and even then saw skepticism about whether this is actually the "day 1 patch."

My gut also says not to trust in the patch as a magic solution, and I wouldn't even be shocked to find out there's continuous crunch going through til the very bitter end, but there will almost certainly still be bugs with the way these things go.

 

[SniperHF]

edit: as soon as I hit "post", I glanced at the comments and even then saw skepticism about whether this is actually the "day 1 patch."

When W3 came out there were still cries of people saying the downgrade (look it up if you aren't aware) wasn't real/didn't happen. It may or may not be the "final" day 1 version but various chatter without having the actual game in hand is really hard to go by one way or the other.

a sequence designed to cause seizures?

I would be........heavily skeptical of this idea.

My gut also says not to trust in the patch as a magic solution, and I wouldn't even be shocked to find out there's continuous crunch going through til the very bitter end, but there will almost certainly still be bugs with the way these things go.

It's just as likely the patch introduces new bugs. Well it's almost a certainty just depends on how many and how bad.

 

[Mikeaveli]

Looks like even with an RTX 3090 I will have to settle for playing at 1440p lol (unless DLSS Ultra Performance mode doesn't offer a huge reduction in quality). Those recommended specs were undershooting the mark quite a bit imo. Not sure why they recommended the 3080 for Ultra Ray Tracing settings at 4k.

 

[Osprey]

Where does my RX 570 figure into those graphs?

BTW, this is encouraging: on the front page of pcgamer.com is an article entitled "6 bug-riddled messes that eventually became great games." I wonder what prompted that .

Edit: If anyone is interested, here's the PC Gamer review, which describes a lot of the bugs encountered:
Cyberpunk 2077 review | PC Gamer

 

[Leafs at Knight]

That epilepsy thing is...yikes. It sounds like they literally put in a sequence designed to cause seizures? That needs to be patched out, these devs are insane. Why would you ever put in something that can hurt people physically? Also how do they expect to escape future litigation? A safety warning is not going to protect them if people die.

Yea I'm gonna go ahead and guess it wasn't deliberate... It's dumb that's its in the game, but they're not out here trying to cause episodes on purpose come on. Also you do realize there's tons of media that have seizure like patterns, that's why they give the warnings.

 

[Leafs at Knight]

Thus far, the reviews are pretty disappointing from my view.

Seems like a decent game that’s getting high scores because of its reputation.

Weird line of thinking to go about things but you do you.

 

[RandV]

Off-topic: They should never allow crafted weapons to be better than artifacts like the Daedric prizes. Defeats the whole purpose of questing, even if they are great decorations for your home.

I always hated how they just railroaded you into what under D&D terms would be considered evil alignment quest. Like okay, I accept a quest to investigate a haunted house. By the end I'm torturing some dude in a cage for the pleasure of a demon prince. At not one point does the game stop and ask you 'are you sure you want to do the bidding of this extremely powerful and evil entity?'

No, you just start a random quest not knowing what it will entail then you either ignore it in your quest log (and leaving excess quests open slows the game down) or you proceed through the linear steps to see it to completion. I know TES games don't run on any sort of good/evil moral but considering the extreme nature here you'd think they could give you the option to say '**** this I'm out' and then maybe have some follow up consequences. And of course like you said not only are the rewards nothing that special, the quests themselves are fairly common and can be stumbled upon just by wandering around. My first play through I used a 'random start location' mod and got dropped near the town in the SW corner, I think the very first quest I picked up was a Daedric one when some random village guy asked me to look at his dog who was acting strange.

I've gone into rant mode I guess but this stuff is just bad world building and ends up being immersion breaking for me. If you like fantasy and want to do good world building these powerful entities should be teased out and difficult to get to, make the pantheon lore available but limit each game/region to involve only one or two of them. Not have literally all of them just hanging around Skyrim waiting for you to stumble across their quest line so with a single quest you can receive their item of power and become each ones champion.

 

[syz]

Yea I'm gonna go ahead and guess it wasn't deliberate... It's dumb that's its in the game, but they're not out here trying to cause episodes on purpose come on. Also you do realize there's tons of media that have seizure like patterns, that's why they give the warnings.

I mean, depends on how we're defining "deliberate." Not deliberate in the sense that "we want to give some people seizures" but it definitely sounds deliberate in a "we want to accurately emulate this real world headset (that also happens to give people seizures)" kinda way, which... dunno what they expected was going to happen.

 

[GreytWun]

My buddy on Xbox got it a day early. He changed his zone to New Zealand and was able to download and start playing it.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Weird line of thinking to go about things but you do you.

The reviews say:

The combat is fine, but not superb
The game is riddled with a historic amount of bugs. So bad that reviewers couldn’t use their own footage for their videos.
The side quests, while plentiful, tie in very little with the main quest

And the game still comes out with a magic 10/10 score. In an industry with a well-known reputation for paying off reviewers for good scores.

The game is still an immediate purchase from me, I’m just calling a spade a spade. Sorry it doesn’t fit your narrative.

*~* but you do you *~*

 

[TheDoldrums]

Aside from the seizure stuff, most concerning part of the reviews for me is the sense that they didn't really use the setting as a way to explore deeper themes. Feels like they just created this really cool world that doesn't have much to say. I'm not expecting any Blade Runner or even Deus Ex levels of depth in the storytelling (and Mankind Divided was pretty shallow but at least they tried).

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Aside from the seizure stuff, most concerning part of the reviews for me is the sense that they didn't really use the setting as a way to explore deeper themes. Feels like they just created this really cool world that doesn't have much to say. I'm not expecting any Blade Runner or even Deus Ex levels of depth in the storytelling (and Mankind Divided was pretty shallow but at least they tried).

The Gamespot review highlighted this a bunch. Definitely a bummer.

Very possible some of these themes get explored more in DLC. Especially given how fantastic the DLC was for W3.

 

[The Mars Volchenkov]

 

[Mikeaveli]

The reviews say:

The combat is fine, but not superb
The game is riddled with a historic amount of bugs. So bad that reviewers couldn’t use their own footage for their videos.
The side quests, while plentiful, tie in very little with the main quest

And the game still comes out with a magic 10/10 score. In an industry with a well-known reputation for paying off reviewers for good scores.

The game is still an immediate purchase from me, I’m just calling a spade a spade. Sorry it doesn’t fit your narrative.

*~* but you do you *~*

The thing is, video games are subjective.

For example, Fallout: New Vegas is my favourite video game of all time. Thus, if there is one game that I would give a perfect 10/10 score to, it would be that game. However, it suffers from basically the exact problems you've listed there. Yet, because the rest of the game is so good I can overlook those issues when playing and still have an excellent experience when replaying the game over and over even 10 years later.

If you were to argue that no video game should be given a 10/10 score, that I would probably agree with. And it is entirely possible that the reviewers are paid off. I'm just arguing this point in a general sense.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

I still remember when Transistor got an 8/10 on Gamespot with no negatives in the bulletpoints and no negatives in the actual review.

But to be as transparent as possible for a reviewer, and I know it's up to the writer, but if you're running into massive bugs to the point of crashing, do not review the game a f***ing 10/10, even if parts of the game you love aren't fully fleshed out.

 

[ScottishCanuck]

This is playable on Xbox if you set your location to NZ by the way.

I really think it's going to run like ass on current gen consoles though, because even my Series X is struggling framerate-wise just now.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

The thing is, video games are subjective.

For example, Fallout: New Vegas is my favourite video game of all time. Thus, if there is one game that I would give a perfect 10/10 score to, it would be that game. However, it suffers from basically the exact problems you've listed there. Yet, because the rest of the game is so good I can overlook those issues when playing and still have an excellent experience when replaying the game over and over even 10 years later.

If you were to argue that no video game should be given a 10/10 score, that I would probably agree with. And it is entirely possible that the reviewers are paid off. I'm just arguing this point in a general sense.

That might be how you rate a game (it’s how I probably do as well), but it’s not how reviewer should. They’re reviewing the game for the general public, not themselves. Most of these companies have criteria developed in order to score games.

The reviewer might be able to tolerate bugs that crash the game (I probably can as well), but 95% of the general population doesn’t have the attention span for that. It should be reflected in the score.

I’m more in favor of a big, beautiful, interesting world over perfect combat. But most of the people buying this game probably feel the opposite way. This should be reflected in the score.

There’s a nice little disconnect between the score the game is receiving, and what is being written in the actual review. Conveniently, most people will go to Wikipedia and look at just the scores to determine if they should buy the game. It happens all the time, this isn’t a big conspiracy. I’m just noting my disappointment that we probably don’t have a Witcher 3-caliber game on our hands here.

Still very excited to play!

 

[RandV]

The thing is, video games are subjective.

For example, Fallout: New Vegas is my favourite video game of all time. Thus, if there is one game that I would give a perfect 10/10 score to, it would be that game. However, it suffers from basically the exact problems you've listed there. Yet, because the rest of the game is so good I can overlook those issues when playing and still have an excellent experience when replaying the game over and over even 10 years later.

If you were to argue that no video game should be given a 10/10 score, that I would probably agree with. And it is entirely possible that the reviewers are paid off. I'm just arguing this point in a general sense.

One should be able to distinguish between 'favourite' and 'best' and be able to knock a few points for admitted flaws in your favourite game.

I mean video game ratings are just broken but it is kind of a bonkers industry to rate. Compare it to the movie industry, and it's like The Avengers being released to theatres while they're still in post production. 'Sure this scene is a little strange when you have Robert Downey Jr standing around in a skin tight body suit, but we know in a year they will probably have the Iron Man suit patched in so we'll overlook it for now as we rate the movie'.

For me my go to 10/10 game was Metroid Prime. Some people will knock points off because they would see the 'backtracking' as a flaw rather than a good design choice, but otherwise the game was innovative, cutting edge (for the time), and all around flawless. On the other hand my 'favourite' game is probably Civ V or Civ VI and that's full of flaws.

 

[JaegerDice]

• Because it appeals to them as a game they would like to play?

• Because they need a new game to start?

• Because small launch bugs don’t bother them?

• Because they don’t put a lock of stock in a time where a lot of reviews are paid for?

Because they've invested so much in they hype, they can't bear to face the idea that it might not be amazing.

Same reason people couldn't bear to face the idea that, no really, Mass Effect Andromeda sucks.

 

[Jussi]

Is there supposed to be a proper Series X/PS5 update coming later?

 

[Khelandros]

Is there supposed to be a proper Series X/PS5 update coming later?

There is supposed to be a full release with the game set to current(?) gen specs.

 

[The Crypto Guy]

Is there supposed to be a proper Series X/PS5 update coming later?

Yes, probably sometime next year.

 

[John Price]

It's on twitch

Looks good

 

[Dolemite]

Psst. This works.

Some People Are Playing Cyberpunk 2077 A Day Early On Xbox By Switching Time Zones