Anyone else rolling their eyes over the Cyberpunk 2077 controversy?

TixyLixx 2020-12-27 12:55:45 UTC #1

Every game those developers have released has been super buggy and broken. The console versions of The Witcher 3 ran at sub 30 framerates, and go back to the PS3/360 era and it was worse all round. So I find it weird that people act surprised that Cyberpunk 2077 has the exact same issues as all their previous games. We all know you buy their games when there is an enhanced edition, that is when they’re playable lol.

I’m not defending the game, I played a few hours and was so disappointed I stopped playing. I think they had a concept, made a world, then struggled to fit a game around it. I find it weird that it has been in development since 2012, but they only just shoehorned Keanu Reeves in a year or two again. I thought he was going to be some side quest stuff, but he’s most of the story lol. It reminds me of Terry Crews in Crackdown 3, he comes in the last min and it feels like they had a game for years and didn’t know what to do with it.

At a certain point they had to release the game, now it’ll come together in the next year like The Witcher 3 did. Releasing the game gives them the feedback and direction to get stuff fixed fast. They’ll release their Blood and Wine for this game which will be really good and it’ll all be forgotten.

People will always say “BUT GAMES SHOULDN’T BE RELEASED IN THIS STATE”… well don’t buy the game then. How can you get mad? Especially do not preorder games and don’t buy games at release from studios with this track record. I think the bigger problem is why were all the reviews 90/100? Even the PC version from what I’ve played is nowhere near that, and I’ve witnessed so many bugs that all the reviews glossed over. I find that weird personally…

alms 2020-12-27 13:34:39 UTC #2

Strictly speaking TW3 didn’t have a Director’s / Enhanced / Etc version? It was an improvement over TW2, which in turn was an improvement over the first game.

All in all, it does seem realistic for people to expect CDPr to get their act more and more together with each new release.

And in some ways, they did manage that: TW2 didn’t work quite as well at a design level, while CP2077 is definitely not a success in the technical department.

What that achieved, in one of funniest curve balls I remember seeing in gaming, they managed instead to make their own Bethesda Hate Crew look positively silly.

It would be strange if someone wasn’t pissed…

2012 is perhaps the year they put together the first team which the game began at a conceptual level? It’d be unrealistic to think that the game itself entered active development at that time.

It would have overlapped with other games: TW2 launched in 2012 and stayed in development for a while more, while TW3 first came out in 2016.

CP2077 is currently an 86 on Metacritic, but I won’t nitpick. For sure some parts of the press are still pretty much in love with CD Projekt, while many critics, and gamers alike, feel strongly about the setting.

I do agree with the general point about pre-ordering, but CD Projekt has made sure the event and FOMO factors was dialed up to 11.

I’m not going to buy the game, but do I feel like I’m living under a rock…?

After the two disappointments that were the first two Witcher games, especially the second, I had no expectation the third game would make a believer out of me.

However Cyberpunk is still Cyberpunk even if it comes out of the gates of a developer that I don’t hold in any great esteem.

BillButNotBen 2020-12-27 14:14:57 UTC #3

I think a bunch of the reviews were 90% because the reviewers were expecting (and promised?) that a day one patch would get rid of most of the bugs. Plus they were only reviewing the game on more high-end platforms.

I haven’t played it, but I get the sense that if it had most of the bugs fixed and if it worked on low end platforms, a lot of people would consider it to be a 90% game.

I’ve only played the Enhanced Edition of TW1, and all I can say is "if this is the enhanced edition, what the heck was the un-enhanced edition like???!"
I like the game, there’s something undefiniably appealing about it, but even in the supposedly enhanced state a lot of the dialog made no sense and the acting and conversations could be very rough.

I think one reason people were surprised was the simple level of hype, and another was that it’s rare for a game this big to be in this bad a state. I mean, it’s basically the biggest game of the year, people have been hyped about it for years, it had the fastest selling launch of any PC game, etc… so I don’t think it’s that surprising that players had insanely high hopes for it.
It’d probably have had a hard time meeting those even if it had released in a decent state, which was the least everyone expected.

alms 2020-12-27 16:48:00 UTC #4

Oh, do you know what makes me roll my eyes exactly 100% of the times?

This:

Like it’s a charity, or something.

Aerothorn 2020-12-27 16:55:34 UTC #5

Alms, are you Canadian? Trying to figure out why the cost is so high 0_0

alms 2020-12-27 17:20:17 UTC #6

That would be 60 Euros, converted to US Dollars.

You must understand the communist EU bureaucracy and their PC BS are to blame.

Viktor 2020-12-27 17:41:46 UTC #7

In hindsight it feels weird how much game media kept hyping the game even after they got a change to test it for some hours couple of months before the release. Especially how much praising “living and breathing” Night City got. I’m disappointed that so few of them gave detailed information about the actual implementation:

Player’s actions doesn’t affect the game world. Only going forward the story changes the state of the game world.
The game world is not interactive; no sitting down, no buying and drinking beer, etc.
NPCs are mostly puppets walking around aimessly.
“Things to do” are mostly scripted events spawned around the user.
NPCs are not aware of surrounding items. They don’t care if you take bunch of money front of their face and they don’t care about loot lying around the city.
There are lots of loot lying around like in The Division and other similar games.
Picked items are teleported to you car and can be used almost anywhere.
…

Well, reviews are just opinions. At least I know those who gave 7/10 or more likes very different kind of games than I do.

Baines 2020-12-27 18:21:04 UTC #8

It’s not that much of a surprise. Being critical of a game can still land you on a publisher’s blacklist, but increasingly important is the fan backlash and attacks that can be triggered if you do anything other than only re-confirm the beliefs of said fan base. Heck, you don’t even have to be negative, you can trigger a backlash just by saying something that can be read as not being 100% glowing positive.

For Cyberpunk 2077 specifically, CDPR sent out only PC copies for review, and apparently only a few days before release day. Further, journalists had to accept an NDA that forbid the use of personally recorded game footage, you could only use video supplied by CDPR. (Wired claimed you could be charged up to $27,000 per violation.) The NDA also allegedly forbid talking about any bugs until after the game’s release.

Some still did speak out about issues, or at least didn’t give it universal praise, which lead to the fan base retaliating…

Grizzly 2020-12-27 20:16:34 UTC #9

I would like to point out that these statements are contradictory.

In part it’s just a big “egg-on-face” moment from a developer that, after having developed a track record for this sorta thing over 13 years, should really know better. In part it’s just that the culture itself has moved more and more against games being released in this state (see also: the difference in reception in Bethesda games over the last decade, with FO76 being widely derided). In part it’s, atleast in our corner of the realm, because they tried to appease Jason Schreier by telling him that they weren’t doing crunch, and then it became very obvious that they were in fact doing crunch.

and_its_man 2020-12-27 23:59:32 UTC #10

I’m more surprised the controversy is not about the horror of journalists stating Cyberpunk 2077 displays a vision of the future as seen through the lense of the 80s.
No. Our leather-jackets-of-tomorrow were large and loose. Not minuscule and fitted to waist. Everything cosmetics in the game feels more like 80s-90s underground perceived through the muddle of their 2k-2k10s revivals.

Why is it rustic brick-wall dubstep playing out in clubs, and not a Chrome song? goddammit.

01000100 2020-12-28 10:42:17 UTC #11

I think a lot of the controversy is the disconnect between expectation and execution, and CP2077 fell very short becuase they made the mistake of telling us what they hoped for the game before seeing if it’ll work across an open world, or on older consoles.

The first videos of gameplay we saw made it look like a Dishonoured style game, and in the context of the limited spaces of the demo that gameplay made sense and worked (detailed hacking, extreme mobility, robot that can be controlled for example). When you have to then design an open world to accomodate for that, well, that is a challenge and then they hit the performance issues on last gen the priority shifted to simply getting it to work.

I think the solution would have been not commit to last-gen but maybe they didn’t know about the release of the new consoles until very late? But if thats the case they knew they had a game that more or less didn’t work on last-gen. I’m no software engineer but surely you build something from the ground up with what you know for a fact you have to work with? You don’t expect to build a house from bricks when all you’ve got is timber.

The wider problem is this game made them money on release due to pre-orders. For the moneymen this is proof this is an viable strategy for making cash. Any negative PR CDPR got for crunch didn’t even put a dent in the hype, so the lesson again is that it’s an acceptable practice because it won’t harm sales. The industry will not change because of CP2077’s issues, both with development, management and techincal. Nor have we, as gamers, have learned from previous examples of over-hyped games (I’ll point to the much kicked No Mans Sky, sorry), or broken messes (Arkham Knight). On the other hand publishers need to tell people what your game is so people know it exists and buy it and as Early Access has proven the best playtesters are the customers…

This is odd I agree. Interactivity is king for immersion.

Not sure where I stand on the game. As a whole, its positive but its blinkered to ignore the issues.

Naramsin 2020-12-28 12:01:38 UTC #12

This is odd I agree. Interactivity is king for immersion.

TBH I don’t know where I stand on this. I am for it but also I am against. For example Quantic Dream is high on this and I hate it. Shaking controller’s sticks to do basic activities like putting your pants on is really off-putting to me.

On the other hand RDR2 allows sitting characters on many chairs and benches and sit/crouch almost everywhere and I loved it for it but again implementation is awkward, with a strange delay that caused me to dislike it.

Strangely things for example like cleaning guns in RDR2 or entering cars in CP2077 feel right for some reason and are immensely pleasant to perform.

Skalpadda 2020-12-28 14:52:32 UTC #13

Okay?

And to the overall point, no it’s not particularly surprising given the history of the devs (and arguably the genre), but people are still entirely justified in giving a kicking to a company selling a product that doesn’t work right.

The_Velour_Fog 2020-12-30 17:00:44 UTC #14

i’m a bit tired of this recent “why are you surprised” trope

People are entitled to a baseline functionality/quality from products they purchase

sonson 2021-01-02 15:54:13 UTC #15

The only thing I’ve been rolling my eyes over is the number of “I’m not defending Cyberpunk 2077 BUT non critical paragraphs” posts like the OP here.

It’s very strange really. Theres any number of things I dont care about or need to defend, like millions of things, and so I… don’t?

Far better for debate to acknowledge your biases, which we all have.

For example I’m disappointed that the developers of my favourite gaming series of all time have leaned hard into problematic and discriminatory practices which I believed in the past were essentially unfortunate blips against their better nature. Whether that was true at the time I can never be sure, but even if it was, things have evolved in such a way that this is definitely no longer the case.

Especially in 2020, it was pleasing for me to see individuals unapologetically wedded to problematic bullshit encounter some criticism and friction over something they cared about, even if all that was was a shitty videogame. Small win.

It’s been distressing by the same token to see the industrial amount of simpering "Give them a chance, its not that bad " posts from people who roundly criticise other developers for doing the same ie releasing something incomplete, compromised, and which is only significant because of the militant proliferation of marketing bullshit over * five years * stating that this game was going to be extraordinarily significant. Alot of people been duped who are too invested now to admit otherwise.

By their own standards they fucking failed. No ifs or buts, they set those standards, they lived by them and shouted agressivley by them and in the direction of discriminated minorities while doing so, and they fucked up. It’s called Hubris.

No, in 2021 I’m not going to give more slack to a powerful entity who would not afford the same to their employees. “Sorry this piece of work is riddled with errors boss, give me a year though and it will be fine”.

They said they would deliver something incredible. They didn’t. The end.

Baines 2021-01-03 02:58:34 UTC #16

If you are referring to earlier posts in this thread, the people (including me) who question surprise never said otherwise. For example, my comment was about game media continuing to hype the game.

If you are referring to comments made elsewhere, the sentiment of “why are you surprised” does not contradict the sentiment that “people are entitled to a baseline functionality/quality from products they purchase”. To believe that you will always receive what you should be entitled to receive, particularly regardless of circumstances or warning signs to the contrary, is naive. Worse, there are those who actively move to exploit such belief for personal gain.

If you buy a new Rolex watch, you should feel entitled to receive a working, decent-to-good quality legitimate Rolex watch. But at the same time, you shouldn’t be surprised if the Rolex you bought from some trenchcoat vendor in a back alley is neither a legitimate Rolex or a working decent-to-good quality watch regardless of what he promised you.

When you buy a Bethesda game, you should be entitled to get a working quality game. But at the same time you should expect to get a bug-filled game, not because large scale games are inherently buggy, but because Bethesda is going to Bethesda. Of course Bethesda is just one of any number of examples…

And Cyberpunk 2077 had a larger than normal number of warning signs popping up over the last year.

The_Velour_Fog 2021-01-03 14:04:08 UTC #17

Not you specifically, but the line is being used to dismiss any and all complaints in a sort of sneering, condescending way that is tiresome.

Not everyone the game was marketed to will be as savvy, especially when the Xmas period release meant it would have been gifted in massive numbers.

It is victim blaming in a way that helps no-one but the companies that perpetuate the behaviour.

LexW 2021-01-06 12:17:00 UTC #18

I know I’ve contributed to this, but I’d like to point out this because I’m a dreadful fucking bore and pedant (esp. as regards cyberpunk as a genre and Cyberpunk 2020 specifically as a TT RPG) rather than a fan of 2077!

If one needs supporting evidence one might look to the fact that I own, on CD, Billy Idol’s frankly not-great album “Cyberpunk” (from 1994, so like, just after cyberpunk as a literary movement died and was replaced by post-cyberpunk)!

Agree completely.

Yup. I don’t think it’s fair at all. 2077 on consoles particularly is ridiculously buggy and crash-y in a way it isn’t on PC, and it’s basically unplayable on Xbone and PS4, something CDPR went out of their way to hide. Even on PC it’s a game with huge holes in it, and tons of issues. People could have anticipated it would be a bit buggy/rough on release, but this level? Nah.

Baines 2021-01-06 14:07:59 UTC #19

Dismissing it simply as victim blaming helps only the companies that continue to exploit customers. (Yes, some people go too far, but that is true in both directions.)

The quality issue is at least partially a self-creating problem, one that will not be solved until the customer base itself changes. Publishers are only able to continue to release games in such dubious states because consumers continue to buy them. But attempts to get customers to accept responsibility long fell on willfully deaf ears, and now gets dismissed as victim blaming.

Nothing in the 2077 situation is new. Even CDPR’s name being involved (instead of one of the more usual suspects) isn’t technically new.

Naramsin 2021-01-06 14:56:01 UTC #20

That’s the tough one. It’s hard to assume what people could have anticipated but given the last minute postponing to December I was 90% sure that CP2077 wouldn’t be released in 2020. If the game is not ready for prepared date with hype campaign rolling, it won’t be ready in three weeks; there is no way your overworked employees can magically fix the game in such short time. I was expecting April 2021, maybe February.

With everything that transpired it turned out I’ve given undeserved credit to CDPR CEO’s minimal ounce of competence. Greed, exploitation, shady business practices and probably stock manipulation are order of the day. I really wonder what will happen next with lawsuit being filled and stuff like that.

Badowski, Kicinski and Iwanski were hailed in Poland as visionaries, captains of free market etc. Go figure.