They used the No Man’s Sky strategy: release trash, polish it a bit, then get praised for improving while the game is still nowhere near what was promised.
They arguably did worse, because NMS didn’t just polish the game, they retroactively added most of the content + didn’t release a paid DLC. Cyberpunk falls short of what has been promised to this day.
I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.
I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.
Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.
Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.
That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.
I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.
As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.
You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.
NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.
You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.
Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.
Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.
CD Projekt has been building up expectations, previewing intriguing scenes and customizations that never came to pass.
It went to promise real-time AI that would grant over a thousand NPCs a variety of roles and actions that, complete with a day/night cycle, was designed to change up their routines. But as fans began playing, they quickly discovered this wasn’t true.
Then, there are the gameplay and AI issues that hinder the experience. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 runs on crime, and CD Projekt promised realistic interactions with the police. One would fully expect officers to come running if a crime was committed out in the open with witnesses, or even in a remote alleyway. Sadly, there is nothing realistic about a bunch of cops spawning unexpectedly around the player with guns firing – especially if no one even witnessed the crime.
Basically all of the marketing turned out to be lies and the game that CDPR promised never existed.
I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.
I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.
There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.
I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.
I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.
Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.
It’s why I’ll never get it unless obtained for the good ol’ price of free. I’m glad people are enjoying it and it’s much improved over the trash pile they delivered! But it’s still a very different game than advertised.
Frankly, it’s concerning how quickly the narrative shifted on this. You’d think with the internet recording the whole fiasco, there wouldn’t be a quick narrative shift and misinformation on the subject, but people have convinced themselves the launch wasn’t that bad, Sony somehow screwed them and this is what they said the game would be!
One’s mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.
Oh absolutely. I know it wasn’t super janky for everyone - but the fact is that it was so broken on launch for not just PC, but PS as well. The mass refunds, which Sony has never done, etc. Denying that this was a thing is what the narrative seems to be for many.
I’m glad it worked for you on launch, and hope you had a great time playing it!
I would encourage you to support GoG before you have to rely on them, otherwise if everyone does like you they may not be able to sustain their business.
It’s a bit akin to waiting for a crash before putting your seatbelt on.
If GOG benefitted Linux users as much as steam does then Yea, I’d be throwing cash at them every payday. I love GOG and what they do, but I also need to show support for what valve is doing for Linux too.
I don’t get why they don’t just have like, install cards with cheaper but slower storage on them for smaller game devs or extra large games that require installation to the system first before it can run. Seems like the in-between of key cards and full speed game cards which still might be faster than downloads and also helps game preservation by having the game actually on the card. Kind of like CD ROM or floppy disc games on PC.
It’s even worse. All the people who defend the physical editions do it because when servers close, they can still play the game. A game key card is just a glorified digital release. When the servers close, you’ll have a piece of plastic.
This is partly the case for any game that receives significant updates as well. Your disc/cart contains 1.0, but is that the version you will want to play 50 years from now when you can’t download updates anymore?
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Also the right thing to do was not lying to your audience on purpose…fk CDPR’s ceo …
I must admit based on how well that game runs on an incredibly expensive desktop computer I am skeptical.
I mean… Cyberpunk needs to be on a physical card. Otherwise how would you slot it into your neck?
But… the physical copy of CP2077 on launch for PC was just a box with some merch telling us to go download it from GOG.
to be fair you then put that installer on an usb and it’s physical. I’d rather a DRM free digital game in a box than the code with DRM
I mean, releasing something physical means it has to be done. Remember what state Cyberpunk 2077 was in on release?
Hey, it’s been awhile, it’s gotta be done by now!
Did they finally add all the features they advertised?
I’ve just started playing it for the first time, seems to run fine on my steam deck.
They used the No Man’s Sky strategy: release trash, polish it a bit, then get praised for improving while the game is still nowhere near what was promised.
They arguably did worse, because NMS didn’t just polish the game, they retroactively added most of the content + didn’t release a paid DLC. Cyberpunk falls short of what has been promised to this day.
I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.
I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.
Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.
Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.
That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.
I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.
As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.
You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.
NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.
You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.
Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.
Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.
People were expecting the game that was promised in all the lead-up marketing.
Basically all of the marketing turned out to be lies and the game that CDPR promised never existed.
“Masterpiece” is a real stretch
Be sure to watch part 2 where they show pedestrian & vehicle pathing.
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I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.
I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.
There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.
I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.
I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.
Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.
It’s why I’ll never get it unless obtained for the good ol’ price of free. I’m glad people are enjoying it and it’s much improved over the trash pile they delivered! But it’s still a very different game than advertised.
Frankly, it’s concerning how quickly the narrative shifted on this. You’d think with the internet recording the whole fiasco, there wouldn’t be a quick narrative shift and misinformation on the subject, but people have convinced themselves the launch wasn’t that bad, Sony somehow screwed them and this is what they said the game would be!
One’s mileage could vary wildly at launch with that game. It did work just fine for me, with some minimal jank, but I could clearly see the video evidence others had of their bad time.
Oh absolutely. I know it wasn’t super janky for everyone - but the fact is that it was so broken on launch for not just PC, but PS as well. The mass refunds, which Sony has never done, etc. Denying that this was a thing is what the narrative seems to be for many.
I’m glad it worked for you on launch, and hope you had a great time playing it!
I agree, but nms probably did it better
Battlefield 2042 tried that and still seems to be widely hated. I like it, it was on sale recently and would’ve been a good buy for $7 bucks.
That game also happens to have some of the worst enemy AI I’ve ever seen in any game ever
Uhh, it’s mostly a PvP game, there’s only ever AI when a round isn’t full.
You’re right! I mixed it up with a different battlefield. I was thinking of the campaign mode for BFV
No… They built on what they managed to make instead. Frankly, a more manageable solution
Ah the ol’bait’n’switch, a classic.
That’s not going to mean shit when it downloads a 100GB day one patch.
It is though. That’s the entire point
Digital for things you consume. Physical for things you love.
Or at least a drm free installer.
I guess I’ll stock up on gog installers for games I own on Steam if Steam ever becomes the villain.
I would encourage you to support GoG before you have to rely on them, otherwise if everyone does like you they may not be able to sustain their business.
It’s a bit akin to waiting for a crash before putting your seatbelt on.
If GOG benefitted Linux users as much as steam does then Yea, I’d be throwing cash at them every payday. I love GOG and what they do, but I also need to show support for what valve is doing for Linux too.
They gave the Heroic Launcher devs an affiliate link, so while they don’t really support Linux they at least approve of it
And here’s an opinion by a game publisher NOT invested in getting haggled by a monopolist.
Virtue signaling isn’t going to get them anywhere if it’s not a polished experience.
I don’t get why they don’t just have like, install cards with cheaper but slower storage on them for smaller game devs or extra large games that require installation to the system first before it can run. Seems like the in-between of key cards and full speed game cards which still might be faster than downloads and also helps game preservation by having the game actually on the card. Kind of like CD ROM or floppy disc games on PC.
Because that would be good for the consumer. They make more money on digital only, you don’t actually own the product, and you can’t resell it.
It’s a corporation’s wet dream.
The best way to handle it would be to keep the core game files on a physical card that loads into RAM, and download the assets to the local drive.
The game-key cards can actually be borrowed or resold, it just doesn’t have the game itself on it.
Until Nintendo says they can’t.
It’s even worse. All the people who defend the physical editions do it because when servers close, they can still play the game. A game key card is just a glorified digital release. When the servers close, you’ll have a piece of plastic.
This is partly the case for any game that receives significant updates as well. Your disc/cart contains 1.0, but is that the version you will want to play 50 years from now when you can’t download updates anymore?
I cannot wait to see the performance on basically a cell phone processor…
Is there something wrong with cellphone processors?
They are not very powerful, and cyberpunk is a pretty beefy game.
Mine is very very powerful at least. But it depends on what you compare to I guess. As for cyberpunk, isn’t it more gpu intensive?
My cellphone’s hardware is some of the strongest on the market, but I can’t imagine it would run Cyberpunk anywhere near playable hahaha