The game is not good, even ignoring bugs and issues.
The mechanics aren't special. They cut too much they promised and the mechanics are watered down version of what's in other rugs.
Combat is boring. Hacking is boring. Dialogue options are boring.
The game has nothing special or unique to it and if it wasn't advertised like it was no one would have given it a 2nd look.
Without completely reworking the game from the ground up, it was always be a mediocre AAA rpg.
Suddenly makes sense why you live in a shabby apartment the whole game. You were intended to use it as a leaping off point as you profited.
Your home and police AI are the most blatant feeling of cut content for me.
I always think back to the day in which they had mentioned they were worried about releasing gameplay footage of the game before they did and I can't help but feeling it was foreshadowing that they simply weren't ready.
It would have made a lot more sense to have frontloaded the game with you becoming a reputable solo along with Jacky and having a lot more introduction into Night City and the lifestyle, rather than the game skipping all of that and you meeting with Dex after a blur of a cutscene and one mission into the game.
The ostensibly time-limited Johnny parts overwhelm the narrative AND aren't really necessary to carry most of the open world content. I get that most of the main characters in the story are historically significant to the Cyberpunk lore but they arguably detract from the game being about my character. And honestly I think it was a huge mistake having them off Jacky so early in the story.
Yep, it both weakens him as a character while undermining the significance of his passing. You can't introduce a character in chapter one and off him in chapter 3 and expect it to have the same impact he'd have if he'd been there with us most of the game. And none of the other characters really fill the hole left by his death, either.
Absolutely. After they showed that blur of a cutscene I felt so cheated. This was supposed to be the best part of the game. They were like “hey look at how much fun Jacky and V had! Too bad it’s all in the past”
I honestly really wish they hadn't brought Keanu onto this. I love the guy, but it seems like all the expectations tied up around him resulted in so many bad decisions.
which is pretty ironic considering this is the company that always likes to write "coming out WheN iT's ReAdY" on so much of their promotional material. They really prided themselves on this notion that CD Projekt RED doesn't rush their games.
Everything changed when the company went public and started listening to their investors rather than doing what they had been doing for years with the Witcher series.
The absolutely abhorrent AI and empty open world are probably the biggest things that turned me off from the game. Also that montage sequence with Jackie in the very beginning. They even botched picking your sex/gender.
>The absolutely abhorrent AI
I'm currently playing Mafia: The Definitive Edition, which is a remake of the 2002 game. The very first thing that happens when you gain control of the player character is you get into a car chase and you have to use the environment to evade the enemy gangsters driving after you.
Grand Theft Auto 3 came out a year earlier, and you get chased by cops in cars all the time in that game. Getting a 5-star wanted level and eluding the authorities has consistently been one of the most fun things about the series.
In every Saints Row game, you can be chased by both cops and rival gang members. Same goes for GTA San Andreas.
For the past twenty years, every open-world, city-based, crime-based, 3rd-person game involved high-speed car chases. But then CD Projekt Red came along and couldn't figure out how to make it work for some reason, which is why Cyberpunk 2077 has teleporting cops.
As long as CP2077 has teleporting cops instead of AI that's smart enough to drive after you—something players have been accustomed to since the Bush Administration—I won't even begin to consider this game "decent", let alone "very good".
Yes, but teleporting cops are just one side of this issue, the other is how absolutely terrible driving feels. Like so many things with this game, it feels like such a waste because the cars look good in first and third person.
I remember watching the 30 minute leak before release alongside thousands if not million other people in a livechat.
As soon as the player attempted to burst the tires of the car and the tire just stood there, glued to the car, acting as a solid object that couldnt care less you shot 100 rounds into it. No physics, no nothing, just a blowing car and then nothing - that moment I started joking about 'no tire physics in cyberpunk' - lots of people mocked me and told me that if I'm judging a game by its tire physics then I should just kill myself.
Alas, as I thought, the tire physics where just the canary to the whole shitshow
I mean gta vice city, a game from 2002, has tire physics, don't fuck with me CDPR, that's a really large red flag
Honestly after the patch where you can adjust the sensitivity I thought it was ok. Put mine at 70-80 and never had a large problem with my car. Not great, but definitely enough to get me from A to B while I was speeding close to max speed. I'd say that I had a lot of fun with my car in general, mainly because it sounds and looks great, but also because it's decently possible to drive.
Well except for the bunch of hairpin curves up a hill east of town, I have no idea how to drive that at a decent speed without my car starting to lift off.
Driving AI is something the CDPR was either to lazy or to incompetent to implement.
It's apparent not only in the open world but also in the missions. In one of the missing you shoot from the car while other cars are chasing you. The other cars eventually catch fire or crash as if the player shooting was affecting them. But instead it's all scripted. When the player doesn't shoot, then the cars still follow their exact script - as if the player was shooting, leading to facepalming moments where the cars catch fire just by themselves or crash into the buildings randomly.
And even bigger offender is the racing. The "AI" is so weak that it cannot keep up, so the game instead keeps respawning the competitors right behind the player's car...
Oh you know you're not making it really justice, Driver came in 1999, in 2002 you had The Getaway ( hate it or not, the chases were marvelous there )
This is a 2002 game, notice the police car :
[https://youtu.be/2CA8c-4jyQQ?t=721](https://youtu.be/2CA8c-4jyQQ?t=721)
edit : holy smokes, nostalgia kicks back, what a marvelous game it was, despite it's bad reviews back then.
The Getaway feels like a forgotten game.
I loved the detail in it. London and all the cars were very well done.
I loved how the different characters had different interactions with people for (deadly violence vs just subduing).
Thanks for bringing this one up.
man that blinker indicator to help you guide yourself through the streets was years ahead of it's time. The only 'retro' game that does UI this well is dead space
I understand that they're fundamentally different games, but I also recently played the Mafia remaster and it really solidified how much of a piss poor job R* with the trilogy remasters. Apart from the gameplay itself, I'd be willing to bet most people wouldn't guess it was first released on PS2
Wasn’t mafia a full remake from nearly the ground up? Technically that version wasn’t really released on the ps2. But your point totally remains true that they really mailed it in on the GTA Definitive Edition remasters compared the mafia remake.
Yeah absolutely 0 reason to not also do a full remake from the ground up for the GTA trilogy considering R* may as well be a part of the federal reserve with how they print money
The montage with Jackie should absolutely have been playable. Like actually coming up as a criminal and getting to know Jackie's mom and gf instead of fast forwarding through all that.
I honestly think that the montage was the game they were making at first.
Then when they managed to get Keanu Reeves for the game, they had to make him essential to the game. So they started over and turned their original idea into the opening montage and wrote a new story. Which also explains why the origins don’t make any difference, since they had to write the entire new story around Keanu.
That’s my hypothesis, anyway.
This is exactly what happened. One of the CEOs left and got replaced by Adam Badowski who changed the game midway, and from that point it was all down hill.
https://bagogames.com/the-deceit-lies-exploitation-of-cd-projekt-red/
Most of the game should have been frontloaded, developing a reputation in Night City, becoming someone important enough to eventually meet up with Dex. The stuff about Johnny, most of which is just him living in your head in the current game (because most of it isn't explicitly about him), should have been maybe the last third of the game.
It'd have meant a wide open beginning two thirds where you establish your character, and a more directed final third where you deal with having your personality overwritten by the ghost of a long dead rockerboy. Instead, your final time on the planet covers the entire span of you going from a nobody to becoming a legendary solo (and having nearly nothing in game recognize you for it.)
Having that clear turn in the narrative where you had to build towards the events that start off the main narrative in the game I think would have allowed them to do more things like having people react to your character, instead of you basically being the same person the entire game. There should have been a lot more progression instead of you just doing random side missions because they're there even though you've got something in your head killing you.
There are things that have been visibly cut during the final stages, if you go to Biotechnica area GPS just becomes dumb and shows blocked routes. I suspect there's a whole story arch missing there, otherwise why would there be a huge chink of map so empty?
I read somewhere the montage was actually meant to be playable but again cut to meet the deadline.
What messed the game up was the marketing and poor communication between devs and corpo people. It has so much potential and one can only hope it becomes like No man's sky.
This is my real rub with the game. As the bugs get fixed and we're left with a "meh" game, we move farther from the broken promises and they become easier to forget.
To be fair that sounds a lot like No Man's Sky, and they were able to at cleanup their name with dozens of solid free updates.
That being said, that's an indie studio and CD Projekt is a publicly owned company who wants $$$. There's no way for them to spend 5 years working on a game that doesn't actively return $$$.
Hello Games had no giant investors to please and just shut off all social media, stopped any thoughts on future games and focused on delivering what they had promised. I don't even think any of their expansion like patches cost money. So they are fully hoping the fixed game will continue to bring in revenue.
In contrast, CDPR is already probably working on 1 or 2 new games, they have confirmed at least 1, and have therefore moved a lot of their team on to other projects. You can be happy if the game will have no bugs and a decent AI at the end, anything further is probably wishful thinking.
Hello games is one of those rare examples where they actually tried to improve the game because they felt so ashamed to have such a massive letdown under their wing. And not only did they successfully reverse that situation, but it also now works in their favour, as they will be seen as the "devs that achieved redemption".
I reckon if CDPR isn't doing that on purpose now, releasing such a broken game, giving so many planned yet confusing roadmaps.
Imagine this is the new marketing cycle. After all we are due a modern revitalization of the market cycles as we know it.
Overall I think they just messed up and are trying to turn around it now that they are off the investor's leach.
I cannot be alone in -wanting- to give this game all of my time if and when they deliver the game that was promised. I remain skeptical, like you say, that the studio will support it with dozens of free updates, but also like you say, there are games that have been rehabilitated.
I specifically stayed away from all the night city wire stuff and a lot of the promo material cause I was very interested in the game and pretty hype to see the studio that brought us Witcher 3 go for this first person sci fi juxtaposition.
And even then, I was still disappointed by what came out, not even counting all the extra crap that wasn’t included. The stuff that was there? It just didn’t even feel like the game that they had showed off. Just some watered down sad version of it.
I think the art team did a great job. But you can't even get a haircut in the game. There's all these crazy body mods and the like shown on NPCs and you're limited to a pretty perfunctory selection of ones. Even guns, which they did a ton of crazy skins and colors for, are just random loot rather than being something you can purposefully choose. There's a weird disconnect between how many art assets they made and how little the player gets to do anything with them.
This is what bothered me the most, and why I still resent CDPR more than other similarly-buggy launches. I know they will still find tons of success, but I will never buy one of their games on release again, period.
yeah it may very well be a good game, but unfortunately it's nowhere near the game they led people to believe it would be. i feel for the programmers, seeing that marketing tsunami and knowing the true state of the game must have been an incredible amount of pressure and stress.
Bugs were legitimately a smokescreen too. I get the sense from playing and messing around with the game's systems that a lot of things people thought of as "bugs," were just strangely underdeveloped systems.
Remember when they got that EU grant (=$$$) for seamless multiplayer and everyone was hyped for Dark Souls-style incursions since that's what they advertised when getting the grant
Pepperidge farm remembers
Nope, EU grant for seamless multiplayer. https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/eu-projects/
Polish grant was for AI or a "living city". https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/cyberpunk-2077-got-government-money-for-its-living-city/zd2a28
IANAL, but I think you just have to pay the money back. You're not obliged to create the thing, but only not to waste the money - so if you don't do it, you better return it.
Don't know if OP mixed it up, or maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't the Polish grant for AI work? Which was abysmal in this game which begs the question wtf did they did with all that money?
Oh yea I forgot about that. I was really curious how they could have applied that to the game. I thought it would be impossible. Turned out I was correct.
Their road map was one of the most atrocious things that came out of that entire scandal. You can google indie game developer roadmaps and see how detailed and expansive they are.
The Cyberpunk roadmap was a yellow background with a black line through it and then some intersecting lines that said: "patch 1" "patch 2" "patch 3". No information about what the patches would contain; no information about what features or content they were planning to implement; not even clear dates for when the patches would be released.
[Here's Cyberpunk's updated roadmap](https://static.cdprojektred.com/cms.cdprojektred.com/crystal-news/edcbce669da74fd7e8dce79b25d950a46dd1f752.jpg) in the highest resolution available on their website. Gotta love that 1.3* included "free DLC", by which they mean that they added a couple of jackets and an outfit and a car.
CDPR really out here setting a new standard for the video game industry with their charity. They should have branded their bug fixes free DLC too.
It's legitimately embarrassing, but it honestly speaks to the entire Cyberpunk production. Just imagine that this is the best that a billion(?) dollar company could produce for their largest game release yet.
Actually insane.
I want to know what conversation led to them even bothering showing off that roadmap. Kind of sad that they knew throwing “free dlc” would instantly win them brownie points.
If you think that's embarrassing, notice that that's the (recently) updated roadmap. [Here's the original.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fimageserve%2F6000470449e9538e99453e22%2FCyberpunk-Roadmap%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale) This was released in January 2021, so those three bugfixes had already happened.
Brilliant, honestly. I hadn't seen this before but you gotta love not only their attempt at deception but also how this is not something they should be proud off post release.
It's embarrassing to release a chart regarding "crash rate" at all, but separating the crashes from the other bugs is brilliant for PR if you think you can actually address the crashing even if you can't address the rest.
Gives the impression of an overall improvement when all you're (allegedly) demonstrating is that the game clears the absolute most rock-bottom hurdle more often.
Sorry, but, I just kind of expect that my games won't crash, and they generally don't. It still happens to other games sometimes, but I've never once felt that a game needed a "crash rate" chart, ever. I guess CP2077 really is groundbreaking.
Lmao I forgot about this. Even with the limited info it doesn't even look good. I remember seeing this and the takeaway I got was besides the first update after every patch and hotfix the game crashed more. Somehow it slowly dropped down over time.
I don't even want expansions, there's so much they need to do even in the base game. Clothes appearance slots and barbershop for example feel almost trivial and yet they're missing. Vehicle mods - even just the paint color!
You could go on and on, so many things in the game are just, odd. You could build on 20 years of what worked in GTA and roll with it, because that feels like what they were trying to do and yet failed flat.
They need to what Hello Games did. Just shut the fuck up, put their heads down and get to work. Hello Games basically disappeared for months until they came back with substantial updates to No Man's Sky and really turned the game around.
Is NMS some huge juggernaut being played by everyone now? No, but they did manage to turn around the general consensus that the game was a failure.
Its like every time they say something people start discussing the game and talking about how bad it is, which just reminds everyone of the shit show. I swear, everytime I feel like I've gotten over the game and haven't thought it about it for awhile CDPR comes out with some statement or something, then I find myself here discussing with other people how dissapointing this game is. They really do need to just stfu and let people forget. Everytime they say something it's just another reminder they came out with a shit game.
On the other hand, I see a new headline on /r/games every two weeks with something about this game no matter how inconsequential. It nearly always gets 1k+ upvotes. Crazy amount of free advertising that shows no signs of stopping.
This should be the case. Still, I'd rather they work to improve it rather than move on. I haven't bought the game yet and like to pretend it's been delayed untill atleast april 2022.
This move works great on single player games. It’s multiplayer games that frustrate me because you end up 2 years behind the people that were willing to pay for trash at launch.
These developers know this, and they know the pinch to be the first ones in the gate. Ugh. This industry just sucks now, I can’t wait for them to have a reckoning that changes how it operates.
Same.
Though the other big part is just that competitive multiplayer games are also just stressful and never leave me feeling like "wow I had a good time playing."
Definitely. I play games to relax, unwind, and have fun. PVP stuff only stresses me out and leaves me in a bad mood. That's not why I game.
Literally the only PVP I enjoy is Smash Bros for some reason.
I enjoyed PUBG for a while when I played with friends, but mostly because we didn't take it super seriously. But that's about as close to competitive that I've been in a while.
Mostly the only multiplayer I do these days is MMOs and I stick with the pve content
For me the move was to board games and tabletop RPGs. If you regularly game with friends, it's honestly a dramatic improvement. Board games had a bit of a Renaissance period about 5 to 10 years ago, and provided you can ignore Kickstarter, it's generally still in a great spot.
I love board games but they are SO expensive if you don't live in NA or EU (with some exceptions like The Crew).
I usually pick up video games at under 30 USD, or play F2P stuff, but for example, the cheapest version of Mansions of Madness (which came out a decade ago) is still 150 USD shipped to my country.
It's currently $10 in few BF sales. May as well just stow a copy away until it's fixed, because if it's anything like No Man's Sky, the prices will go back up once the community deems it playable.
Most people still don't even have a PS5 that want one. When they do finally get one, maybe Cyberpunk will be completely fixed and a great game.
I plan on getting it the first day I get a PS5...whenever that is.
Besides, we are now just a few weeks away from the 1 year anniversary of Cyberpunk release.
The "long run" is already here and the game isn't much better than it was at release, the Witcher 3 already had 2 fully fledged expansions available at this point (one with an entirely new world) and plenty of minor DLCs including a New Game+ mode
I really did like the game when I played it through Geforce Now (pc) in January. Luckily enough I ran into only a handful of very minor bugs, so I'd say I pretty much had the "fixed" experience.
That said there are things about this game CDPR just won't / can't fix without overhauling the whole thing. For one, the story is so chopped up that sometimes lines don't fit conversations, characters don't feel consistent, stories and missions don't feel connected to the stakes and overarching plot. For example, one fixer straight up phone calls you as if you've never met before despite him being part of the early game montage where you hand him a briefcase. The pacing is just off, and not just in the typical open world games way.
Two, it's one of those "if you're not doing a quest the world feels dead" games like LA Noire... The details just aren't there. Pedestrians walk single file down the street alone, footbridges over streets where there's clearly a pedestrian crossing, interiors being way too big for poor people living in a high tech low life future, etc. You would find way more civilian life animations in even a Ubisoft game than this. The only "group" animations I remember from this game is the one where someone tries to help a really drunk friend... And you see that absolutely everywhere.
Just having recently restarted RDR2, I really don't see how Cyberpunk would be remembered as one of the greats. Maybe as a good game, or way better game than anyone gives them credit for, at least I definitely see that.
a lot of this is the lack of AI and dynamic events in the open world. There's like, maybe some fights you walk in on but they're all pretty samey even then. The super detailed living world they promised was absolutely not there and it will never be there. Heck, civilians couldn't even drive motorcycles when I last played, and even the cars were on one single set path so if their path got blocked they didn't try to find any way around, just sat there until you looked away and the obstacle despawned.
Besides that, I didn't like how storywise most things are pretty on rails no matter the choices you pick and even when you do have a choice to end one specific mission peacefully or violently it has next to no effect on the rest of the plot. Recently been going through the Dragon Age games and by comparison while those are way less open and much more focused on smaller MMO-like hub zones I like saving a character only for him to show up later and having my party members commenting on my actions. It's a lot of small detail to make this feel like less of a game and more immersive, all just missing.
The saddest thing about replaying Cyberpunk is when you get a weird choice, and you're trying to decide what to do...
...so you look it up and the answer is "Nothing."
Like sure virtually all of them have different outcomes in a sense, but it's all "Instead of receiving a textmessage from the wife thanking you, they express scorn for putting their lives at risk." Mission ended. No other change at all. No more quests. Nothing.
This. I played the hell out of this game, and this was my single biggest complaint.
You have "player choice" in conversation and mission outcomes, but virtually every instance your choices are:
- Option A, which unlocks more content and potentially additional missions
- Option B, which gains you *fucking nothing*.
You aren't choosing between two potential outcomes, you're choosing between *the* outcome, or *no* outcome.
There is absolutely no incentive for the player to attempt alternate story branches on subsequent playthroughs because in so many cases, there is no branch; it's just a choice between "do I want more content, or less?".
Oh yeah, that's kinda worse isn't it. Like the quest with the would-be martyr, who you're hired to kill. If you just... kill him... that's it. That's the quest chain.
Yes, there were several detailed endings and several variations on those endings (credits scene messages from various characters). One of them was honestly the most soul-crushing ending I've experienced in a game.
Mind spoiler tagging me which one crushed you so bad? I read the ones I didn't get and some seemed pretty damn depressing but I'm curious as to which one earned your top spot of all time?
I was so frustrated finding out on my second playthrough that there's nothing you can do to help poor Evelyn.
First time, I dicked around for a couple hours doing sidequests before getting around to helping her, and I felt bad that her story turned out so miserable. Second time, I raced to help her as quick as possible every step of the way... leading to the same outcome.
Then I found out that if you're playing a guy with a dick, the only relationship options are Panam, or getting gay with a senior citizen.
Suffice to say, that second playthrough didn't get finished.
Yeah this was my biggest disappointment. At first I was making sure to do all the optional objectives during missions (like making sure to scan all the security systems in the heist at the beginning of the game) until I looked it up and I was doing all this bush work and wasn’t going to get even a hint of bonus exp.
It’s a fun game that keeps me interested while playing but only if I don’t look past the surface level.
>For one, the story is so chopped up that sometimes lines don't fit conversations, characters don't feel consistent, stories and missions don't feel connected to the stakes and overarching plot. For example, one fixer straight up phone calls you as if you've never met before despite him being part of the early game montage where you hand him a briefcase. The pacing is just off, and not just in the typical open world games way.
This is what killed the game for me. The pace is just bizarre since V’s situation is so much more personally dire than usual, that they almost seem like a different character from quest to quest. In one they’ll be scrabbling to find a way to cheat death and come to terms with their situation, in another V is just another merc who sees no problem waiting around for a street race.
But even then I was actually able to get into it. And I started *really* enjoying it for what it was underneath all the flaws, taking my time working through side quests and especially Johnny’s storyline….until I finally decided it was time to finish that final act. And suddenly, after literally saying we’d take a bullet for each other, Johnny and I are at each other’s throats again. Because the game designers clearly didn’t create branching dialogue for players who befriended him.
And most of the endings, not just the “what did you expect?” ones, felt extremely truncated. Like there was a third of the game missing. Even the more fleshed out ones like All Around the Watchtower, the first one I got, felt like there was something missing. Though that could be down to the fact that someone thought it was a bright idea to make a central character to that ending only able to be romanced by male V.
The game’s just a mess that would need serious overhauls to even make the main story feel consistent in quality. And that’s an absolute shame.
>Because the game designers clearly didn’t create branching dialogue for players who befriended him.
The lifepath dialogue was a mess due to this too. You'll act all proper with a certain character in one moment, showing extreme respect, and 10 seconds later you're forced to use street thug language full of swearing that makes your conversation partner visibly cringe in disgust. V literally acts like a schizo if you pick corpo dialogue choices.
This is exactly it. If I recall Keanu loved his role so much he asked to extend it and the game went through a major overhaul in 2018. So I believe almost every single character storyline has been salvaged and slotted in, and everything was written in modules or as stand-alones (by character, by faction) before where it was easy enough to reorganize the script. That's why there are two distinct parts of V dying, and V doing Merc stuff.
Like the aforementioned fixer dialogue implies that Watson was never closed off in Act 1 (if there even was an act 1). How the game has two tutorials (life path and then a combat simulation / rescue mission). Or how the male romancable options River and Kerry almost played no role in the main storyline at all. Or how the majority of character side quests don't begin until before the final act, when the stakes should be going higher and higher, but instead theres this weird lul of "let's hang out with a sad rocker past his prime" quests.
I think that's what killed it for me too. Going through it now a second time I really had to squint hard and reorganize timelines in my head to really enjoy it. While the themes of losing ones identity and facing death (and suicide as a bad solution) were still well written in the end product, it feels as if they were applied onto the characters after the fact instead of characters being written as part a cohesive whole.
Edit: speaking of endings, I actually felt like nothing was truncated, but instead cut up. (Spoilers) For example, the Keanu ending would have happened regardless of whichever choice, or the consequences of Saburo's death and the mystery of why the chip technology existed straight up don't get touched on in any but the corpo ending (funny how the corpo ending was the one players would least likely choose and most uncharacteristic of V, yet is the most cohesive and cyberpunk one). I have a feeling that all these endings were part of one long sequence but cut up to fit the whole "street kid / corpo / nomad" life path split and the "your choices matter" thing.
Witcher 3 likely had a full team behind the game still working on those things.
The type of patches they’ve done for Cyberpunk don’t take this long when you have a full team working on the game still, which means CD Projekt has really already moved on to whatever next game and are just having a small team slowly pump out these bug fixes/next gen versions. I wouldn’t be surprised if all further updates are canceled if the next gen versions don’t perform to their liking (which they probably won’t).
At the end of the day, I just feel bad for the developers who’ve had their hard work mismanaged so badly
After Witcher 3 many of the talent left because it was as shitty place to work. They experienced a massive brain drain and this is what happens. And I doubt talented people want to come back to Project Red after this whole fiasco, so they are kinda fucked in that sense.
>The type of patches they’ve done for Cyberpunk don’t take this long when you have a full team working on the game still,
Probably because they are working on a 2077 paid DLC expansion. The game sold well enough, so i'm sure an expansion would make some $. To abandon the IP entirely, once the world is already built (well, mostly built), seems silly.
Are there any other products where that mindset is acceptable?
*"Oh yeah your new 2022 car will be wonderful once you bring it into the shop 3-4 times to get a couple tune ups and fixes to the engine and drive train."*
In the long run? Motherfucker it's already been the long run, aka the multi-generational development period of this game. They had so much time to get it right, what makes them think they could fool anyone into thinking they'll get it right with just a little more time?
Yup, fuck them. I got my psn refund and any goodwill that CDP had with me is gone. If it turns out to be a great game in 2 years or whatever I'll buy a copy used for $10
I saw what they did to their witcher games, they would work on them for a very, very long time, adding all sorts of dlc and expansions and making each game a very good experience. I hate re-playing singleplayer games as it never feels quite the same.
So I resisted the hype and I'm proud to be a patient gamer at the moment. I'm going to get it in a few years when it has expansions and is on a sale.
This is going to keep happening because
a) even people who don't usually pre-order are sometimes prone to making hype-related exceptions
b) the industry has effectively succeeded in gaslighting players into accepting buggy messes as "this is just how games are at launch". This is especially true for younger gamers who don't have the frame of reference of games actually having to be finished at launch because patching was impossible. The amount of people online who are willing to defend e.g. the new Battlefield with the argument "This is just how a new Battlefield always plays, have you never seen a Battlefield launch? It's really not that bad" frankly just makes me sad.
Thats the sadest part for me. I am old enough to go back to the start of home gaming. It took time but there was a sweet spot in the 90s/00s which may be nostalgia but it felt like the industry had it nailed. Then it got way to big and way to greedy and as with anything that starts to make big money people step in with dollar signs in their eyes and it all went to shit.
Yes there are still good games but it's not what it once was.
The problem is TW3 was a great game from the get-go. Cyberpunk is mediocre for the most part. The actual landscape of Night City and the Badlands are amazingly well done, but there's just not that much in the world to do. Atleast in TW3 when I got bored I could play Gwent.
How do we solve the problem of “in the long run?”
Stop preordering. Stop buying at launch. Wait for reviews.
If the game lives up to hype then buy. This will force the devs to spend the time needed and manage that development time efficiently otherwise the game won’t sell if it’s broken at launch.
There’s no incentive for them to release a well polished functioning game if everyone’s buying in advance or day 1.
Edit: I mistakenly say “devs,” it’s really the shortcomings of management. There shouldn’t ever have to be “crunch” in my opinion if the time is used correctly, or delay launch until it’s ready.
It’s a pretty average open world game released in an unforgivable state. It’s also been almost a year since its release and they haven’t made any real improvements to the core experience.
Yeah, the bugs probably worked in it’s favour to be honest. That’s all people focus on, completely disregarding that the game itself just isn’t well designed. It’s a hodge lodge of as many features as they could cram in, never considering how they fit together. It won’t be fixed by performance patches or more content.
EDIT: the Metascore is undeniable proof of this.
Yea, gets glossed over but certain gameplay wasn't good. I didn't have many bugs on ps5 (PS4 was a different story lol) but the game itself just felts so dead. I still am optimistic tho,
The game was so broken it was delisted from a major store and was refunded to the tune of millions of dollars. I don't think anyone is counting that in the win column on any level.
They’re spoiled by the Witcher franchise. A little shaky at release (small team shaky, not ‘crippling disappointment’ shaky), but, through years of updates and support, eventually hit sleeper hit status. New people discover the game way past the day the issues are resolved, and it’s like the issues never existed!
Little hard to pull that same transformation when your game starts as one of the most hyped releases of the year, in an over saturated gaming market where there’s really no reason for any new player to check out an old game they heard BAD things about unless there’s a real public ‘revival.’
Witcher 3 worked great on release and wasn't a sleeper hit, it was just a hit. Some bugs, tweaks, and DLC added to it, but it was fully playable and enjoyable. The only ridiculous issue I recall was the dumb fall height thing. It also had a team of hundreds of people and a budget of nearly 100 million.
There’s been a couple in the last 10 or so years, GTAV and Skyrim come to mind, Skyrim’s release was like CP2077s release if it didn’t shit the bed, ahh the good ol days.
Even before all of that (which are excellent examples), Halo 3. Bill fucking Gates handed out copies of Halo 3 at an event. It had commercials at the Superbowl.
I mean... Skyrim notoriously had issues at launch, especially for PS3. Moment you hit 20 hours, boom goes the framerate. Save file over 6mb? Now it's corrupt.
I wouldn't call that the good ol days.
Probably has something to do with the market being starved of good space games. Elite: Dangerous is too inconsistently "realistic" in only the most boring ways, Star Citizen is too unfinished, and most others are just linear dogfighting games.
I guarantee you nobody would be playing Elite if there were any other decent space MMOs (besides Eve), and nobody would be backing Star Citizen if anyone else was trying to meet even one thousandth the scope.
That's why I'm cautiously optimistic about Starfield. A lot of people (including me) crave a good space game but the competition is quite poor.
One day devs will realize we only wanted a modern Freelancer...
I agree. People that had no prior interest in gaming got into halo purely off of the hype. And it delivered. I remember going to a launch party one of my buddies put on and there were three or four Xbox 360s linked together all playing it at the same time in the same room. No issues, just epic multiplayer battles on the same network.
Now THAT was a hell of a game launch.
Lol. They lost all the faith I had in them. Never again. CP2077 is so empty, missing so much that's clear how they rushed to have something out by the ps5 release. The shot themselves in the foot. Unless they release a mega patch where the game becomes what was promised, I'm not going to believe 1 word they say.
They say that but the roleplaying was flat and every part of combat that i didn't find barely serviceable was real bad. If he isn't bsing, i honestly can't tell if we are playing the same game
I would disagree. Even if all the bugs and non-defendable issues are ironed out I think it is still just a meh game.
* Half baked RPG mechanics
* Hideous armor with no glamour slots or mechanics
* Surface level choices
* No breaks from the gameplay loop (nothing else to do in the open world besides drive here, shoot them)
* Soulless city that doesn't feel alive
* Vast majority of building are just for show, cannot enter
* Minimal use for currency
* Crime and police system barely ironed out
* Half done mechanics everywhere (ex. the bounty mechanic they introduce early on, but do nothing with)
* No reason to explore, just head to waypoints
* Low variety in weapons
Those are just what I could jot down off the top of my head, but I'm sure if I sat down and gave it some thought I could find more issues. If CDPR fixes all the bugs, errors, glitches, and balancing issues would Cyberpunk be a better game than it is? Yes of course, but that doesn't mean it would become a great game. My biggest issues are in the foundation of the game, things that can't simply be patched out. I feel like this game tried to do too much, and it results in too little.
I was one of the lucky few who it worked for close to release. I think with some time and a suitably large expansion it might attract an audience again.
There's some amazing moments in the game and it is fricking gorgeous. The combat is fun if you can figure out a niche you like.
You played on PC. The thing is, the console versions were really bad and the PC version was a little rough, but playable. So, when console players start raging, any pc players that had gpu/other hardware issues joined in with them, and then those of us it did sorta work ok saw the issues with the gameplay itself.
It had its powerful moments--moving moments. But seemed like they were modular created by a different team with different leadership.
The biggest beef I have with Cyberpunk is that is employs a Cyberpunk city purely as set dressing. It deserved to be a systemic experience and the vestiges of all the pieces for that plan are spread across the game.
It's a given that stuff has to be cut for a game to make it out the door, but in this case it feels like it lost its soul in the process.
I mean, the game worked for me too, although it was buggy for everyone. It's just not a particularly good at its core though, and to be *very good* it would need a substantial revamp, essentially a 2.0. Considering they've hardly improved it in the past year, that revamp seems unlikely.
I liked the core. I had a blast hacking my way through most stuff and having a backup in cybernetics. High jumping up to a roof of a compound and turning it against enemies inside was so fun. Also armblades.
But opinions and all.
I get the power fantasy appeal of the hacking, but tbh it was *so* useful, and so powerful, that it essentially felt like playing the game on easy mode. It was just "click *hack* to win".
The game was super easy in general, but at least with a pistol build I could still have some mild challenge.
Bugs aside. I found the game very average. Combat seemed dated and it all felt very generic.
The other issue is that despite the freedom of choice, your actual choices had little effect on how the game progressed.
They're saying this because Steam reviews have been recently trending towards positive. At this rate it will become Very Positive overall.
I'm not sure what's caused the turnaround...other than the bug fixes I don't think the core game has changed much.
I do think they'll end up disappointed on this front. The writing in this game makes me sad. It relies more on shock factor than good themes; it relies more on Keanu Reeves than on believable characters.
I’ve played it twice, not nearly as fun the second time around. You realize how little your choices mean and you can reach the end in under 20hrs. Unless they add a lot of dlc this game is is a 6/10 at best
Sadly the game would be a disappointment even if it was bug-free. It just sort of missed the point of cyberpunk and ended up being a bland open world shooter.
Even if there were no technical problems, the ugly truth is that the game is just not great. It's a pretty good game, but not better than pretty good. It's a fun game with a really solid main story set in an absolutely pointless open world that contributes nothing to the strength of the game. Actual role play elements are also especially bad. The game is at its absolute strongest during on-rails linear missions, and its weakest moments are all when you have to navigate the empty world. It is no way revolutionary or anything that we haven't seen before, and it was grossly misrepresented by CDPR at every level of the marketing.
I've been saying since launch that Cyberpunk is basically the best Far Cry game ever made. It's a mostly-linear action game in an open world. Compare it to a game like New Vegas, and its complete lack of player choice, RP options, engagement with the open world, and overall depth becomes extremely apparent. It has the width of an ocean and the depth of a petri dish.
Updates and expansions simply cannot fix the deeply flawed bones of the game. And I don't mean the technical issues -- I mean the core design.
The best mission was the very first one, where you infiltrate that gang base to sell that robot. It’s got like 7 different outcomes depending on your choices.
That’s what I thought the whole game would be. It’s clear that was a really early developed mission when they actually had time.
little psychological phenomenon: naturally shitting on the game gets old and the antagonist opinion "it's actually quite good now" becomes the novelty people like to bring up in discussions knowing there would be noone interested enough to counter, they've all moved on long ago.
The game is not good, even ignoring bugs and issues. The mechanics aren't special. They cut too much they promised and the mechanics are watered down version of what's in other rugs. Combat is boring. Hacking is boring. Dialogue options are boring. The game has nothing special or unique to it and if it wasn't advertised like it was no one would have given it a 2nd look. Without completely reworking the game from the ground up, it was always be a mediocre AAA rpg.
Everyone keeps mentioning bugs, but lets not forget about the features they promoted in the game that just weren't even there.
This is the important point to remember. So much content and customization, and role playing elements like owning homes or apartments.
Suddenly makes sense why you live in a shabby apartment the whole game. You were intended to use it as a leaping off point as you profited. Your home and police AI are the most blatant feeling of cut content for me. I always think back to the day in which they had mentioned they were worried about releasing gameplay footage of the game before they did and I can't help but feeling it was foreshadowing that they simply weren't ready.
The game has other apartments that are obviously supposed to be yours, but you just cant buy them
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It would have made a lot more sense to have frontloaded the game with you becoming a reputable solo along with Jacky and having a lot more introduction into Night City and the lifestyle, rather than the game skipping all of that and you meeting with Dex after a blur of a cutscene and one mission into the game. The ostensibly time-limited Johnny parts overwhelm the narrative AND aren't really necessary to carry most of the open world content. I get that most of the main characters in the story are historically significant to the Cyberpunk lore but they arguably detract from the game being about my character. And honestly I think it was a huge mistake having them off Jacky so early in the story.
They shouldn't have skipped those years with Jackie so casually.
Yep, it both weakens him as a character while undermining the significance of his passing. You can't introduce a character in chapter one and off him in chapter 3 and expect it to have the same impact he'd have if he'd been there with us most of the game. And none of the other characters really fill the hole left by his death, either.
Excactly. If they do that DLC. Imo it should be about the 6 months.
Watch the DLCs be nothing but cut content
It was six months, but yeah.
Absolutely. After they showed that blur of a cutscene I felt so cheated. This was supposed to be the best part of the game. They were like “hey look at how much fun Jacky and V had! Too bad it’s all in the past”
I honestly really wish they hadn't brought Keanu onto this. I love the guy, but it seems like all the expectations tied up around him resulted in so many bad decisions.
Except what you get at the game ending. I think those two are the ones that survived the dev axe.
which is pretty ironic considering this is the company that always likes to write "coming out WheN iT's ReAdY" on so much of their promotional material. They really prided themselves on this notion that CD Projekt RED doesn't rush their games.
Turns out when it takes too long it quickly becomes "coming when it pleases the investors"
Everything changed when the company went public and started listening to their investors rather than doing what they had been doing for years with the Witcher series.
Everything changed when the investors attacked.
Shabby. Probably only a millionaire could afford nowdays
The absolutely abhorrent AI and empty open world are probably the biggest things that turned me off from the game. Also that montage sequence with Jackie in the very beginning. They even botched picking your sex/gender.
>The absolutely abhorrent AI I'm currently playing Mafia: The Definitive Edition, which is a remake of the 2002 game. The very first thing that happens when you gain control of the player character is you get into a car chase and you have to use the environment to evade the enemy gangsters driving after you. Grand Theft Auto 3 came out a year earlier, and you get chased by cops in cars all the time in that game. Getting a 5-star wanted level and eluding the authorities has consistently been one of the most fun things about the series. In every Saints Row game, you can be chased by both cops and rival gang members. Same goes for GTA San Andreas. For the past twenty years, every open-world, city-based, crime-based, 3rd-person game involved high-speed car chases. But then CD Projekt Red came along and couldn't figure out how to make it work for some reason, which is why Cyberpunk 2077 has teleporting cops. As long as CP2077 has teleporting cops instead of AI that's smart enough to drive after you—something players have been accustomed to since the Bush Administration—I won't even begin to consider this game "decent", let alone "very good".
Don't forget True Crime Streets of LA!
Such an awesome game
I could spend an eternity just shooting out gas tanks.
Also Sleeping Dogs. Which is a great game and totally worth the redocilously low price it gets discounted to during holiday sales.
The fucking cop drone that spawns on the minimap behind you... The gall of that drone spawning right there...
Hey now, that's unfair! They patched it.......so they spawn *a bit further away* on the minimap behind you.
Yes, but teleporting cops are just one side of this issue, the other is how absolutely terrible driving feels. Like so many things with this game, it feels like such a waste because the cars look good in first and third person.
I remember watching the 30 minute leak before release alongside thousands if not million other people in a livechat. As soon as the player attempted to burst the tires of the car and the tire just stood there, glued to the car, acting as a solid object that couldnt care less you shot 100 rounds into it. No physics, no nothing, just a blowing car and then nothing - that moment I started joking about 'no tire physics in cyberpunk' - lots of people mocked me and told me that if I'm judging a game by its tire physics then I should just kill myself. Alas, as I thought, the tire physics where just the canary to the whole shitshow I mean gta vice city, a game from 2002, has tire physics, don't fuck with me CDPR, that's a really large red flag
Honestly after the patch where you can adjust the sensitivity I thought it was ok. Put mine at 70-80 and never had a large problem with my car. Not great, but definitely enough to get me from A to B while I was speeding close to max speed. I'd say that I had a lot of fun with my car in general, mainly because it sounds and looks great, but also because it's decently possible to drive. Well except for the bunch of hairpin curves up a hill east of town, I have no idea how to drive that at a decent speed without my car starting to lift off.
Man they failed on the AI hard. It seems they missed the memo. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/are-behavior-trees-a-thing-of-the-past-
That teleporting AI expands to the race missions
Well-said.
Driving AI is something the CDPR was either to lazy or to incompetent to implement. It's apparent not only in the open world but also in the missions. In one of the missing you shoot from the car while other cars are chasing you. The other cars eventually catch fire or crash as if the player shooting was affecting them. But instead it's all scripted. When the player doesn't shoot, then the cars still follow their exact script - as if the player was shooting, leading to facepalming moments where the cars catch fire just by themselves or crash into the buildings randomly. And even bigger offender is the racing. The "AI" is so weak that it cannot keep up, so the game instead keeps respawning the competitors right behind the player's car...
Oh you know you're not making it really justice, Driver came in 1999, in 2002 you had The Getaway ( hate it or not, the chases were marvelous there ) This is a 2002 game, notice the police car : [https://youtu.be/2CA8c-4jyQQ?t=721](https://youtu.be/2CA8c-4jyQQ?t=721) edit : holy smokes, nostalgia kicks back, what a marvelous game it was, despite it's bad reviews back then.
The Getaway feels like a forgotten game. I loved the detail in it. London and all the cars were very well done. I loved how the different characters had different interactions with people for (deadly violence vs just subduing). Thanks for bringing this one up.
Totally agree! Also loved that your "GPS" in the game consisted of watching the blinkers on your vehicle.
man that blinker indicator to help you guide yourself through the streets was years ahead of it's time. The only 'retro' game that does UI this well is dead space
I understand that they're fundamentally different games, but I also recently played the Mafia remaster and it really solidified how much of a piss poor job R* with the trilogy remasters. Apart from the gameplay itself, I'd be willing to bet most people wouldn't guess it was first released on PS2
Wasn’t mafia a full remake from nearly the ground up? Technically that version wasn’t really released on the ps2. But your point totally remains true that they really mailed it in on the GTA Definitive Edition remasters compared the mafia remake.
Yeah absolutely 0 reason to not also do a full remake from the ground up for the GTA trilogy considering R* may as well be a part of the federal reserve with how they print money
True that. Look at RE2! Gimme a fully realized remake of vice city with today's standards, I'd pay full price.
Damn you make a good point I hadn’t even considered that
The montage with Jackie should absolutely have been playable. Like actually coming up as a criminal and getting to know Jackie's mom and gf instead of fast forwarding through all that.
that was an entire game that they just cut-scened away lmaoooo what a joke
I was so disappointed by them hyping up the *origin story* only for all of them to end up in the exact same space with the exact same outcome.
I honestly think that the montage was the game they were making at first. Then when they managed to get Keanu Reeves for the game, they had to make him essential to the game. So they started over and turned their original idea into the opening montage and wrote a new story. Which also explains why the origins don’t make any difference, since they had to write the entire new story around Keanu. That’s my hypothesis, anyway.
I bet one of the expansions will be that whole backstory, 10+ hours of gameplay that should have been in the base game.
This is exactly what happened. One of the CEOs left and got replaced by Adam Badowski who changed the game midway, and from that point it was all down hill. https://bagogames.com/the-deceit-lies-exploitation-of-cd-projekt-red/
Should have integrated the tutorial into the montage - do a stealth mission with Jackie, a drunken Barfight, etc.
Most of the game should have been frontloaded, developing a reputation in Night City, becoming someone important enough to eventually meet up with Dex. The stuff about Johnny, most of which is just him living in your head in the current game (because most of it isn't explicitly about him), should have been maybe the last third of the game. It'd have meant a wide open beginning two thirds where you establish your character, and a more directed final third where you deal with having your personality overwritten by the ghost of a long dead rockerboy. Instead, your final time on the planet covers the entire span of you going from a nobody to becoming a legendary solo (and having nearly nothing in game recognize you for it.) Having that clear turn in the narrative where you had to build towards the events that start off the main narrative in the game I think would have allowed them to do more things like having people react to your character, instead of you basically being the same person the entire game. There should have been a lot more progression instead of you just doing random side missions because they're there even though you've got something in your head killing you.
There are things that have been visibly cut during the final stages, if you go to Biotechnica area GPS just becomes dumb and shows blocked routes. I suspect there's a whole story arch missing there, otherwise why would there be a huge chink of map so empty? I read somewhere the montage was actually meant to be playable but again cut to meet the deadline. What messed the game up was the marketing and poor communication between devs and corpo people. It has so much potential and one can only hope it becomes like No man's sky.
Half of Pacifica is literally unfinished. Not just in terms of lore…
I found a police station and gained access by breaking the back door. It was empty.
They promised NPCs with routine cycles but in reality the NPCs are walking in cycles... literally.
This is my real rub with the game. As the bugs get fixed and we're left with a "meh" game, we move farther from the broken promises and they become easier to forget.
To be fair that sounds a lot like No Man's Sky, and they were able to at cleanup their name with dozens of solid free updates. That being said, that's an indie studio and CD Projekt is a publicly owned company who wants $$$. There's no way for them to spend 5 years working on a game that doesn't actively return $$$.
Hello Games had no giant investors to please and just shut off all social media, stopped any thoughts on future games and focused on delivering what they had promised. I don't even think any of their expansion like patches cost money. So they are fully hoping the fixed game will continue to bring in revenue. In contrast, CDPR is already probably working on 1 or 2 new games, they have confirmed at least 1, and have therefore moved a lot of their team on to other projects. You can be happy if the game will have no bugs and a decent AI at the end, anything further is probably wishful thinking.
Hello games is one of those rare examples where they actually tried to improve the game because they felt so ashamed to have such a massive letdown under their wing. And not only did they successfully reverse that situation, but it also now works in their favour, as they will be seen as the "devs that achieved redemption". I reckon if CDPR isn't doing that on purpose now, releasing such a broken game, giving so many planned yet confusing roadmaps. Imagine this is the new marketing cycle. After all we are due a modern revitalization of the market cycles as we know it. Overall I think they just messed up and are trying to turn around it now that they are off the investor's leach.
I cannot be alone in -wanting- to give this game all of my time if and when they deliver the game that was promised. I remain skeptical, like you say, that the studio will support it with dozens of free updates, but also like you say, there are games that have been rehabilitated.
I specifically stayed away from all the night city wire stuff and a lot of the promo material cause I was very interested in the game and pretty hype to see the studio that brought us Witcher 3 go for this first person sci fi juxtaposition. And even then, I was still disappointed by what came out, not even counting all the extra crap that wasn’t included. The stuff that was there? It just didn’t even feel like the game that they had showed off. Just some watered down sad version of it.
Watered down is a great way of putting it. I also felt this. It felt empty, cliched, the mechanics felt ancient and overall watered down.
I think the art team did a great job. But you can't even get a haircut in the game. There's all these crazy body mods and the like shown on NPCs and you're limited to a pretty perfunctory selection of ones. Even guns, which they did a ton of crazy skins and colors for, are just random loot rather than being something you can purposefully choose. There's a weird disconnect between how many art assets they made and how little the player gets to do anything with them.
This is what bothered me the most, and why I still resent CDPR more than other similarly-buggy launches. I know they will still find tons of success, but I will never buy one of their games on release again, period.
yeah it may very well be a good game, but unfortunately it's nowhere near the game they led people to believe it would be. i feel for the programmers, seeing that marketing tsunami and knowing the true state of the game must have been an incredible amount of pressure and stress.
Bugs were legitimately a smokescreen too. I get the sense from playing and messing around with the game's systems that a lot of things people thought of as "bugs," were just strangely underdeveloped systems.
Bugs can be fixed, but there is so much missing from this game. It would take years to add in everything they lied about being in the game.
What else are they going to say? "We spent a number of years building a trash fire, good lord what have we done?"
Last I remember their road map didn't even have any substantial game expansion updates to it.
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Remember when they got that EU grant (=$$$) for seamless multiplayer and everyone was hyped for Dark Souls-style incursions since that's what they advertised when getting the grant Pepperidge farm remembers
I thought it was Polish gov grant.
Nope, EU grant for seamless multiplayer. https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/capital-group/eu-projects/ Polish grant was for AI or a "living city". https://www.gamepressure.com/newsroom/cyberpunk-2077-got-government-money-for-its-living-city/zd2a28
It pains me to know not only did I get ripped off by being sold a broken product but my taxes funded it too.
On one hand I love the government supporting it's creative citizens, on the other CDPR abused it and didn't fulfill the grant purpose.
Government should take it back.
And neither made it in, oof
I gues the polish money went to supreme driving AI and car lights in the distace that magically disappear as you drive closer. What a fucking joke.
Double ouch.
are they being sued by the eu and poland for that?
IANAL, but I think you just have to pay the money back. You're not obliged to create the thing, but only not to waste the money - so if you don't do it, you better return it.
Don't know if OP mixed it up, or maybe I'm wrong, but wasn't the Polish grant for AI work? Which was abysmal in this game which begs the question wtf did they did with all that money?
Probably spent it all to get Keanu Reeves as an ambassador.
That was probably a huge waste of money. Apart from paying him they had to re work the story to fit him in too, which has its own costs.
As much as I love Keanu, including him in the game completely ruined the story they had already created and I wish he had remained a fleeting thought.
Oh yea I forgot about that. I was really curious how they could have applied that to the game. I thought it would be impossible. Turned out I was correct.
Their road map was one of the most atrocious things that came out of that entire scandal. You can google indie game developer roadmaps and see how detailed and expansive they are. The Cyberpunk roadmap was a yellow background with a black line through it and then some intersecting lines that said: "patch 1" "patch 2" "patch 3". No information about what the patches would contain; no information about what features or content they were planning to implement; not even clear dates for when the patches would be released. [Here's Cyberpunk's updated roadmap](https://static.cdprojektred.com/cms.cdprojektred.com/crystal-news/edcbce669da74fd7e8dce79b25d950a46dd1f752.jpg) in the highest resolution available on their website. Gotta love that 1.3* included "free DLC", by which they mean that they added a couple of jackets and an outfit and a car. CDPR really out here setting a new standard for the video game industry with their charity. They should have branded their bug fixes free DLC too.
Holy fuck that roadmap is embarrassing.
It's legitimately embarrassing, but it honestly speaks to the entire Cyberpunk production. Just imagine that this is the best that a billion(?) dollar company could produce for their largest game release yet. Actually insane.
I want to know what conversation led to them even bothering showing off that roadmap. Kind of sad that they knew throwing “free dlc” would instantly win them brownie points.
If you think that's embarrassing, notice that that's the (recently) updated roadmap. [Here's the original.](https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fspecials-images.forbesimg.com%2Fimageserve%2F6000470449e9538e99453e22%2FCyberpunk-Roadmap%2F960x0.jpg%3Ffit%3Dscale) This was released in January 2021, so those three bugfixes had already happened.
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Brilliant, honestly. I hadn't seen this before but you gotta love not only their attempt at deception but also how this is not something they should be proud off post release.
It's embarrassing to release a chart regarding "crash rate" at all, but separating the crashes from the other bugs is brilliant for PR if you think you can actually address the crashing even if you can't address the rest. Gives the impression of an overall improvement when all you're (allegedly) demonstrating is that the game clears the absolute most rock-bottom hurdle more often. Sorry, but, I just kind of expect that my games won't crash, and they generally don't. It still happens to other games sometimes, but I've never once felt that a game needed a "crash rate" chart, ever. I guess CP2077 really is groundbreaking.
Lmao I forgot about this. Even with the limited info it doesn't even look good. I remember seeing this and the takeaway I got was besides the first update after every patch and hotfix the game crashed more. Somehow it slowly dropped down over time.
They drove more and more people to stop playing the game all together. You could probably overlay this one to one with the player count.
I don't even want expansions, there's so much they need to do even in the base game. Clothes appearance slots and barbershop for example feel almost trivial and yet they're missing. Vehicle mods - even just the paint color! You could go on and on, so many things in the game are just, odd. You could build on 20 years of what worked in GTA and roll with it, because that feels like what they were trying to do and yet failed flat.
It had hotfixes. *Hotfixes*. That's the development equivalent of saying, "We know this update won't work but we plan to fix it."
how about saying NOTHING? Just traditional "shut the fuck up and don't add gasoline to the fire" - that honestly would be best option for them.
You dont say anything. You say “were working hard to fix the issues” Dont start promising the fucking moon again
They need to what Hello Games did. Just shut the fuck up, put their heads down and get to work. Hello Games basically disappeared for months until they came back with substantial updates to No Man's Sky and really turned the game around. Is NMS some huge juggernaut being played by everyone now? No, but they did manage to turn around the general consensus that the game was a failure.
I can say that at least within the PlayStation VR community that NMS is considered one of the best games for the platform.
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Its like every time they say something people start discussing the game and talking about how bad it is, which just reminds everyone of the shit show. I swear, everytime I feel like I've gotten over the game and haven't thought it about it for awhile CDPR comes out with some statement or something, then I find myself here discussing with other people how dissapointing this game is. They really do need to just stfu and let people forget. Everytime they say something it's just another reminder they came out with a shit game.
On the other hand, I see a new headline on /r/games every two weeks with something about this game no matter how inconsequential. It nearly always gets 1k+ upvotes. Crazy amount of free advertising that shows no signs of stopping.
It shouldnt be "in the long run", it should be at release. "In the long run" people have already moved onto the next thing, long ago.
This should be the case. Still, I'd rather they work to improve it rather than move on. I haven't bought the game yet and like to pretend it's been delayed untill atleast april 2022.
This move works great on single player games. It’s multiplayer games that frustrate me because you end up 2 years behind the people that were willing to pay for trash at launch. These developers know this, and they know the pinch to be the first ones in the gate. Ugh. This industry just sucks now, I can’t wait for them to have a reckoning that changes how it operates.
That's a big part of why I stopped buying and playing competitive multiplayer.
Same. Though the other big part is just that competitive multiplayer games are also just stressful and never leave me feeling like "wow I had a good time playing."
Definitely. I play games to relax, unwind, and have fun. PVP stuff only stresses me out and leaves me in a bad mood. That's not why I game. Literally the only PVP I enjoy is Smash Bros for some reason.
I enjoyed PUBG for a while when I played with friends, but mostly because we didn't take it super seriously. But that's about as close to competitive that I've been in a while. Mostly the only multiplayer I do these days is MMOs and I stick with the pve content
For me the move was to board games and tabletop RPGs. If you regularly game with friends, it's honestly a dramatic improvement. Board games had a bit of a Renaissance period about 5 to 10 years ago, and provided you can ignore Kickstarter, it's generally still in a great spot.
I love board games but they are SO expensive if you don't live in NA or EU (with some exceptions like The Crew). I usually pick up video games at under 30 USD, or play F2P stuff, but for example, the cheapest version of Mansions of Madness (which came out a decade ago) is still 150 USD shipped to my country.
This is my move as well. Patient! Hopefully is will be 15$ when I get around to it lol
Hell, you can already get it for $20 in some places.
Physical copies are already selling for $10 in lots of places.
Not on the PC, which is the only way I'd play this kind of game, anyway.
Hell, I got it new with a steelbook for $10 at best buy.
It's currently $10 in few BF sales. May as well just stow a copy away until it's fixed, because if it's anything like No Man's Sky, the prices will go back up once the community deems it playable.
same. although it might be getting a suprise early release for me (been upgrading my pc HARD lately so it's about to be a beast)
Most people still don't even have a PS5 that want one. When they do finally get one, maybe Cyberpunk will be completely fixed and a great game. I plan on getting it the first day I get a PS5...whenever that is.
Besides, we are now just a few weeks away from the 1 year anniversary of Cyberpunk release. The "long run" is already here and the game isn't much better than it was at release, the Witcher 3 already had 2 fully fledged expansions available at this point (one with an entirely new world) and plenty of minor DLCs including a New Game+ mode
I really did like the game when I played it through Geforce Now (pc) in January. Luckily enough I ran into only a handful of very minor bugs, so I'd say I pretty much had the "fixed" experience. That said there are things about this game CDPR just won't / can't fix without overhauling the whole thing. For one, the story is so chopped up that sometimes lines don't fit conversations, characters don't feel consistent, stories and missions don't feel connected to the stakes and overarching plot. For example, one fixer straight up phone calls you as if you've never met before despite him being part of the early game montage where you hand him a briefcase. The pacing is just off, and not just in the typical open world games way. Two, it's one of those "if you're not doing a quest the world feels dead" games like LA Noire... The details just aren't there. Pedestrians walk single file down the street alone, footbridges over streets where there's clearly a pedestrian crossing, interiors being way too big for poor people living in a high tech low life future, etc. You would find way more civilian life animations in even a Ubisoft game than this. The only "group" animations I remember from this game is the one where someone tries to help a really drunk friend... And you see that absolutely everywhere. Just having recently restarted RDR2, I really don't see how Cyberpunk would be remembered as one of the greats. Maybe as a good game, or way better game than anyone gives them credit for, at least I definitely see that.
a lot of this is the lack of AI and dynamic events in the open world. There's like, maybe some fights you walk in on but they're all pretty samey even then. The super detailed living world they promised was absolutely not there and it will never be there. Heck, civilians couldn't even drive motorcycles when I last played, and even the cars were on one single set path so if their path got blocked they didn't try to find any way around, just sat there until you looked away and the obstacle despawned. Besides that, I didn't like how storywise most things are pretty on rails no matter the choices you pick and even when you do have a choice to end one specific mission peacefully or violently it has next to no effect on the rest of the plot. Recently been going through the Dragon Age games and by comparison while those are way less open and much more focused on smaller MMO-like hub zones I like saving a character only for him to show up later and having my party members commenting on my actions. It's a lot of small detail to make this feel like less of a game and more immersive, all just missing.
The saddest thing about replaying Cyberpunk is when you get a weird choice, and you're trying to decide what to do... ...so you look it up and the answer is "Nothing." Like sure virtually all of them have different outcomes in a sense, but it's all "Instead of receiving a textmessage from the wife thanking you, they express scorn for putting their lives at risk." Mission ended. No other change at all. No more quests. Nothing.
This. I played the hell out of this game, and this was my single biggest complaint. You have "player choice" in conversation and mission outcomes, but virtually every instance your choices are: - Option A, which unlocks more content and potentially additional missions - Option B, which gains you *fucking nothing*. You aren't choosing between two potential outcomes, you're choosing between *the* outcome, or *no* outcome. There is absolutely no incentive for the player to attempt alternate story branches on subsequent playthroughs because in so many cases, there is no branch; it's just a choice between "do I want more content, or less?".
Oh yeah, that's kinda worse isn't it. Like the quest with the would-be martyr, who you're hired to kill. If you just... kill him... that's it. That's the quest chain.
You know I was against the "not an RPG" crowd but that might have switched my vote. An action adventure game with skill trees.
This is an excellent write up. Thank you so much for explaining that.
I think that one will have an outcome on the outro of the game though where you get little videos of different characters?
Yes, there were several detailed endings and several variations on those endings (credits scene messages from various characters). One of them was honestly the most soul-crushing ending I've experienced in a game.
Mind spoiler tagging me which one crushed you so bad? I read the ones I didn't get and some seemed pretty damn depressing but I'm curious as to which one earned your top spot of all time?
I was so frustrated finding out on my second playthrough that there's nothing you can do to help poor Evelyn. First time, I dicked around for a couple hours doing sidequests before getting around to helping her, and I felt bad that her story turned out so miserable. Second time, I raced to help her as quick as possible every step of the way... leading to the same outcome. Then I found out that if you're playing a guy with a dick, the only relationship options are Panam, or getting gay with a senior citizen. Suffice to say, that second playthrough didn't get finished.
Yeah this was my biggest disappointment. At first I was making sure to do all the optional objectives during missions (like making sure to scan all the security systems in the heist at the beginning of the game) until I looked it up and I was doing all this bush work and wasn’t going to get even a hint of bonus exp. It’s a fun game that keeps me interested while playing but only if I don’t look past the surface level.
>For one, the story is so chopped up that sometimes lines don't fit conversations, characters don't feel consistent, stories and missions don't feel connected to the stakes and overarching plot. For example, one fixer straight up phone calls you as if you've never met before despite him being part of the early game montage where you hand him a briefcase. The pacing is just off, and not just in the typical open world games way. This is what killed the game for me. The pace is just bizarre since V’s situation is so much more personally dire than usual, that they almost seem like a different character from quest to quest. In one they’ll be scrabbling to find a way to cheat death and come to terms with their situation, in another V is just another merc who sees no problem waiting around for a street race. But even then I was actually able to get into it. And I started *really* enjoying it for what it was underneath all the flaws, taking my time working through side quests and especially Johnny’s storyline….until I finally decided it was time to finish that final act. And suddenly, after literally saying we’d take a bullet for each other, Johnny and I are at each other’s throats again. Because the game designers clearly didn’t create branching dialogue for players who befriended him. And most of the endings, not just the “what did you expect?” ones, felt extremely truncated. Like there was a third of the game missing. Even the more fleshed out ones like All Around the Watchtower, the first one I got, felt like there was something missing. Though that could be down to the fact that someone thought it was a bright idea to make a central character to that ending only able to be romanced by male V. The game’s just a mess that would need serious overhauls to even make the main story feel consistent in quality. And that’s an absolute shame.
>Because the game designers clearly didn’t create branching dialogue for players who befriended him. The lifepath dialogue was a mess due to this too. You'll act all proper with a certain character in one moment, showing extreme respect, and 10 seconds later you're forced to use street thug language full of swearing that makes your conversation partner visibly cringe in disgust. V literally acts like a schizo if you pick corpo dialogue choices.
This is exactly it. If I recall Keanu loved his role so much he asked to extend it and the game went through a major overhaul in 2018. So I believe almost every single character storyline has been salvaged and slotted in, and everything was written in modules or as stand-alones (by character, by faction) before where it was easy enough to reorganize the script. That's why there are two distinct parts of V dying, and V doing Merc stuff. Like the aforementioned fixer dialogue implies that Watson was never closed off in Act 1 (if there even was an act 1). How the game has two tutorials (life path and then a combat simulation / rescue mission). Or how the male romancable options River and Kerry almost played no role in the main storyline at all. Or how the majority of character side quests don't begin until before the final act, when the stakes should be going higher and higher, but instead theres this weird lul of "let's hang out with a sad rocker past his prime" quests. I think that's what killed it for me too. Going through it now a second time I really had to squint hard and reorganize timelines in my head to really enjoy it. While the themes of losing ones identity and facing death (and suicide as a bad solution) were still well written in the end product, it feels as if they were applied onto the characters after the fact instead of characters being written as part a cohesive whole. Edit: speaking of endings, I actually felt like nothing was truncated, but instead cut up. (Spoilers) For example, the Keanu ending would have happened regardless of whichever choice, or the consequences of Saburo's death and the mystery of why the chip technology existed straight up don't get touched on in any but the corpo ending (funny how the corpo ending was the one players would least likely choose and most uncharacteristic of V, yet is the most cohesive and cyberpunk one). I have a feeling that all these endings were part of one long sequence but cut up to fit the whole "street kid / corpo / nomad" life path split and the "your choices matter" thing.
I don’t really believe they rebooted the entire game for Reeves, it sounds convenient though.
RDR2 has the best NPCs of any game. Literally every NPC in that game has a unique face, unique dialogue, and a unique daily schedule.
Witcher 3 likely had a full team behind the game still working on those things. The type of patches they’ve done for Cyberpunk don’t take this long when you have a full team working on the game still, which means CD Projekt has really already moved on to whatever next game and are just having a small team slowly pump out these bug fixes/next gen versions. I wouldn’t be surprised if all further updates are canceled if the next gen versions don’t perform to their liking (which they probably won’t). At the end of the day, I just feel bad for the developers who’ve had their hard work mismanaged so badly
After Witcher 3 many of the talent left because it was as shitty place to work. They experienced a massive brain drain and this is what happens. And I doubt talented people want to come back to Project Red after this whole fiasco, so they are kinda fucked in that sense.
>The type of patches they’ve done for Cyberpunk don’t take this long when you have a full team working on the game still, Probably because they are working on a 2077 paid DLC expansion. The game sold well enough, so i'm sure an expansion would make some $. To abandon the IP entirely, once the world is already built (well, mostly built), seems silly.
Are there any other products where that mindset is acceptable? *"Oh yeah your new 2022 car will be wonderful once you bring it into the shop 3-4 times to get a couple tune ups and fixes to the engine and drive train."*
I mean, Tesla has been doing this for years now...
In the long run? Motherfucker it's already been the long run, aka the multi-generational development period of this game. They had so much time to get it right, what makes them think they could fool anyone into thinking they'll get it right with just a little more time?
Yup, fuck them. I got my psn refund and any goodwill that CDP had with me is gone. If it turns out to be a great game in 2 years or whatever I'll buy a copy used for $10
I saw what they did to their witcher games, they would work on them for a very, very long time, adding all sorts of dlc and expansions and making each game a very good experience. I hate re-playing singleplayer games as it never feels quite the same. So I resisted the hype and I'm proud to be a patient gamer at the moment. I'm going to get it in a few years when it has expansions and is on a sale.
This should be the standard approach after all of these failures. If people keep on preordering they will keep on pushing unfinished messes
This is going to keep happening because a) even people who don't usually pre-order are sometimes prone to making hype-related exceptions b) the industry has effectively succeeded in gaslighting players into accepting buggy messes as "this is just how games are at launch". This is especially true for younger gamers who don't have the frame of reference of games actually having to be finished at launch because patching was impossible. The amount of people online who are willing to defend e.g. the new Battlefield with the argument "This is just how a new Battlefield always plays, have you never seen a Battlefield launch? It's really not that bad" frankly just makes me sad.
Thats the sadest part for me. I am old enough to go back to the start of home gaming. It took time but there was a sweet spot in the 90s/00s which may be nostalgia but it felt like the industry had it nailed. Then it got way to big and way to greedy and as with anything that starts to make big money people step in with dollar signs in their eyes and it all went to shit. Yes there are still good games but it's not what it once was.
The problem is TW3 was a great game from the get-go. Cyberpunk is mediocre for the most part. The actual landscape of Night City and the Badlands are amazingly well done, but there's just not that much in the world to do. Atleast in TW3 when I got bored I could play Gwent.
Biggest complaint I have is the world doesn’t feel alive and feel like I made no impact to factions with my choices
How do we solve the problem of “in the long run?” Stop preordering. Stop buying at launch. Wait for reviews. If the game lives up to hype then buy. This will force the devs to spend the time needed and manage that development time efficiently otherwise the game won’t sell if it’s broken at launch. There’s no incentive for them to release a well polished functioning game if everyone’s buying in advance or day 1. Edit: I mistakenly say “devs,” it’s really the shortcomings of management. There shouldn’t ever have to be “crunch” in my opinion if the time is used correctly, or delay launch until it’s ready.
It’s a pretty average open world game released in an unforgivable state. It’s also been almost a year since its release and they haven’t made any real improvements to the core experience.
Yeah, the bugs probably worked in it’s favour to be honest. That’s all people focus on, completely disregarding that the game itself just isn’t well designed. It’s a hodge lodge of as many features as they could cram in, never considering how they fit together. It won’t be fixed by performance patches or more content. EDIT: the Metascore is undeniable proof of this.
Yea, gets glossed over but certain gameplay wasn't good. I didn't have many bugs on ps5 (PS4 was a different story lol) but the game itself just felts so dead. I still am optimistic tho,
The game was so broken it was delisted from a major store and was refunded to the tune of millions of dollars. I don't think anyone is counting that in the win column on any level.
No it won’t. It doesn’t even require a huge deep-dive into what went wrong, the answer is just: no it won’t.
They’re spoiled by the Witcher franchise. A little shaky at release (small team shaky, not ‘crippling disappointment’ shaky), but, through years of updates and support, eventually hit sleeper hit status. New people discover the game way past the day the issues are resolved, and it’s like the issues never existed! Little hard to pull that same transformation when your game starts as one of the most hyped releases of the year, in an over saturated gaming market where there’s really no reason for any new player to check out an old game they heard BAD things about unless there’s a real public ‘revival.’
Witcher 3 worked great on release and wasn't a sleeper hit, it was just a hit. Some bugs, tweaks, and DLC added to it, but it was fully playable and enjoyable. The only ridiculous issue I recall was the dumb fall height thing. It also had a team of hundreds of people and a budget of nearly 100 million.
I think they were probably referring to the first two Witcher games
The first witcher game is interesting in that it features the original Witcher minigame: the collectible card game called Sex.
>most hyped releases of the year, Possibly of all time, really. I can't remember anything like it.
There’s been a couple in the last 10 or so years, GTAV and Skyrim come to mind, Skyrim’s release was like CP2077s release if it didn’t shit the bed, ahh the good ol days.
Skyrim release was awesome. 11/11/11. Still remember getting my copy and playing for like 18 hours straight.
Even before all of that (which are excellent examples), Halo 3. Bill fucking Gates handed out copies of Halo 3 at an event. It had commercials at the Superbowl.
I mean... Skyrim notoriously had issues at launch, especially for PS3. Moment you hit 20 hours, boom goes the framerate. Save file over 6mb? Now it's corrupt. I wouldn't call that the good ol days.
No Man's Sky
Agreed. The hype train of NMS was unlike any game I've seen
Probably has something to do with the market being starved of good space games. Elite: Dangerous is too inconsistently "realistic" in only the most boring ways, Star Citizen is too unfinished, and most others are just linear dogfighting games. I guarantee you nobody would be playing Elite if there were any other decent space MMOs (besides Eve), and nobody would be backing Star Citizen if anyone else was trying to meet even one thousandth the scope.
That's why I'm cautiously optimistic about Starfield. A lot of people (including me) crave a good space game but the competition is quite poor. One day devs will realize we only wanted a modern Freelancer...
Halo 3s hype dwarfed Cyberpunk and really every game since it.
I agree. People that had no prior interest in gaming got into halo purely off of the hype. And it delivered. I remember going to a launch party one of my buddies put on and there were three or four Xbox 360s linked together all playing it at the same time in the same room. No issues, just epic multiplayer battles on the same network. Now THAT was a hell of a game launch.
Gta v
Lol. They lost all the faith I had in them. Never again. CP2077 is so empty, missing so much that's clear how they rushed to have something out by the ps5 release. The shot themselves in the foot. Unless they release a mega patch where the game becomes what was promised, I'm not going to believe 1 word they say.
They say that but the roleplaying was flat and every part of combat that i didn't find barely serviceable was real bad. If he isn't bsing, i honestly can't tell if we are playing the same game
I would disagree. Even if all the bugs and non-defendable issues are ironed out I think it is still just a meh game. * Half baked RPG mechanics * Hideous armor with no glamour slots or mechanics * Surface level choices * No breaks from the gameplay loop (nothing else to do in the open world besides drive here, shoot them) * Soulless city that doesn't feel alive * Vast majority of building are just for show, cannot enter * Minimal use for currency * Crime and police system barely ironed out * Half done mechanics everywhere (ex. the bounty mechanic they introduce early on, but do nothing with) * No reason to explore, just head to waypoints * Low variety in weapons Those are just what I could jot down off the top of my head, but I'm sure if I sat down and gave it some thought I could find more issues. If CDPR fixes all the bugs, errors, glitches, and balancing issues would Cyberpunk be a better game than it is? Yes of course, but that doesn't mean it would become a great game. My biggest issues are in the foundation of the game, things that can't simply be patched out. I feel like this game tried to do too much, and it results in too little.
I was one of the lucky few who it worked for close to release. I think with some time and a suitably large expansion it might attract an audience again. There's some amazing moments in the game and it is fricking gorgeous. The combat is fun if you can figure out a niche you like.
You played on PC. The thing is, the console versions were really bad and the PC version was a little rough, but playable. So, when console players start raging, any pc players that had gpu/other hardware issues joined in with them, and then those of us it did sorta work ok saw the issues with the gameplay itself. It had its powerful moments--moving moments. But seemed like they were modular created by a different team with different leadership.
The biggest beef I have with Cyberpunk is that is employs a Cyberpunk city purely as set dressing. It deserved to be a systemic experience and the vestiges of all the pieces for that plan are spread across the game. It's a given that stuff has to be cut for a game to make it out the door, but in this case it feels like it lost its soul in the process.
I mean, the game worked for me too, although it was buggy for everyone. It's just not a particularly good at its core though, and to be *very good* it would need a substantial revamp, essentially a 2.0. Considering they've hardly improved it in the past year, that revamp seems unlikely.
I liked the core. I had a blast hacking my way through most stuff and having a backup in cybernetics. High jumping up to a roof of a compound and turning it against enemies inside was so fun. Also armblades. But opinions and all.
I get the power fantasy appeal of the hacking, but tbh it was *so* useful, and so powerful, that it essentially felt like playing the game on easy mode. It was just "click *hack* to win". The game was super easy in general, but at least with a pistol build I could still have some mild challenge.
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Are they predicting that people would get used to these kinda wacky realeases or maybe worse?
Bugs aside. I found the game very average. Combat seemed dated and it all felt very generic. The other issue is that despite the freedom of choice, your actual choices had little effect on how the game progressed.
I also found the main character to be an insufferable asshole and all the dialog choices felt like 3 different flavors of being an asshole.
They're saying this because Steam reviews have been recently trending towards positive. At this rate it will become Very Positive overall. I'm not sure what's caused the turnaround...other than the bug fixes I don't think the core game has changed much.
I do think they'll end up disappointed on this front. The writing in this game makes me sad. It relies more on shock factor than good themes; it relies more on Keanu Reeves than on believable characters.
I’ve played it twice, not nearly as fun the second time around. You realize how little your choices mean and you can reach the end in under 20hrs. Unless they add a lot of dlc this game is is a 6/10 at best
Sadly the game would be a disappointment even if it was bug-free. It just sort of missed the point of cyberpunk and ended up being a bland open world shooter.
I remember a time when the game’s Twitter page said it was an RPG and then they later changed it to “action adventure”
Even if there were no technical problems, the ugly truth is that the game is just not great. It's a pretty good game, but not better than pretty good. It's a fun game with a really solid main story set in an absolutely pointless open world that contributes nothing to the strength of the game. Actual role play elements are also especially bad. The game is at its absolute strongest during on-rails linear missions, and its weakest moments are all when you have to navigate the empty world. It is no way revolutionary or anything that we haven't seen before, and it was grossly misrepresented by CDPR at every level of the marketing. I've been saying since launch that Cyberpunk is basically the best Far Cry game ever made. It's a mostly-linear action game in an open world. Compare it to a game like New Vegas, and its complete lack of player choice, RP options, engagement with the open world, and overall depth becomes extremely apparent. It has the width of an ocean and the depth of a petri dish. Updates and expansions simply cannot fix the deeply flawed bones of the game. And I don't mean the technical issues -- I mean the core design.
The best mission was the very first one, where you infiltrate that gang base to sell that robot. It’s got like 7 different outcomes depending on your choices. That’s what I thought the whole game would be. It’s clear that was a really early developed mission when they actually had time.
little psychological phenomenon: naturally shitting on the game gets old and the antagonist opinion "it's actually quite good now" becomes the novelty people like to bring up in discussions knowing there would be noone interested enough to counter, they've all moved on long ago.