It took like 15 years for Daggerfall to not be totally broken, so it isn’t really a “new” normal.
I remember SiN was unplayable when it first came out, but a couple years down the line it was a pretty decent game (as long as you weren’t opposed to its aesthetic, which I wasn’t)
Waiting years has been my new normal for games because I’m cheap, and it helps save on hardware costs too due to pushing back the time frame for when I start needing a more powerful system to play them. It’s a win win.
I’m hoping that devs with start offering graphics options for lower powered devices since handheld are gaining popularity. I’m getting a steam deck soon and it will be my main gaming device.
It’s only slightly less powerful than my desktop pc anyway.
I haven’t tried them but I often hear about people modding “potato mode” versions of games (pretty sure one is already out for Starfield and Friends, for example) - fighting game players sometimes use them even if their systems are good to minimize any hitches that would screw up their inputs in a match.
I’m not sure to what degree that sort of thing runs on Deck because of how Proton works, but theoretically that combined with the Deck’s other performance-enhancing modes will help some games run better for you!
That’s interesting. I didn’t know potato mode was anything other than obscure YouTuber content. I rarely play anything demanding, but I’ll look into potato mode for some games.
What I’m really looking forward to playing is fallout new Vegas, disco Elysium, and divinity original sin 2.
I’m sure they will all run super well on the deck.
I know this is the ‘patient gamers’ community, but I genuinely don’t see any other way to play games nowadays. Why would I spend $60-70 on a game that barely works and has more content coming later? I don’t see how the gaming industry even survives when it keeps reinforcing the idea that we shouldn’t buy games at launch. Is $20 just the regular sustainable price for games to a game company, and the people spending $60-70 are the overpaying suckers?
I was thinking about it the other day and have similar thoughts / questions. In the age of gamepass / lots of indie titles / backward compatibility, I don’t see how a high priced game with bugs and/or incompleteness is still viable.
I was able to wait on Hogwarts Legacy and Jedi survivor, while I played Gris, Bramble, and Batman Arkham Knight.
I don’t see how the gaming industry even survives when it keeps reinforcing the idea that we shouldn’t buy games at launch.
Because there are more than enough people paying full price for the game before it even comes out. It’s not like people who pay $20 a year or two later are the majority of sales.
Because most games do work at launch and the initial sales are what drives development and more games. If it fails at launch, it didn’t matter how many folks buy it at $20, it’s not getting a sequel.
And what do you even mean by “sustainable” in this context? Obviously it’s sustainable at the other price as well, otherwise they’d stop doing it. I mean, let’s be glad most developers aren’t like Nintendo at least.
This is why I’ve shied away from new AAA titles in general. I keep going back to the older stuff because in the words of Godd Howard “It just works.” or smaller indie titles where a beta state is forgivable, yet still less of a mess than Cyberpunk on launch day.
Its kind of a complex thought here so bear with me.
Gamers as a rule reject preordering, microtransactions, subscriptions and devs releasing a bare bones game that requires massive DLC purchases to get the full experience but at the same time Cyberpunk cost $170 something million to develop and yes CDPR did make bank on it, but the studio and the investors bet BIG on it, its the most expensive video game to date.
Now I havent played the new DLC (but I will) but it sounds like the game now is the game that they wanted to release then… I personally think we need to get behind the idea that big studios with big ideas arent going to take big risks with big money.
That if you want CDPR to do Cyberpunk 2 Electric Boogaloo with all the detail, features and polish we want, we need to accept that they arent going to pour a quarter of a billion dollars into a bucket labeled “maybe” and that something has to give if we want developers to push the boundaries and deliver groundbreaking experiences instead of churning out safe investments.
Gamers as a rule most certainly do not reject those things, a loud vocal minority try to get people to behave that way but they don’t
And none of that excuses the state C2077 released in compared to what was advertised. The complaint wasn’t that it wasn’t an original idea, it’s that it wasn’t what was promised
Yeah thats kind of my point, the money people and the studio had to know they were dropping an unfinished game, but every week of delay is another weeks wages for the people making the game, its another week for the hype train to lose momentum and its a bigger shit sandwich they have to eat if it flops. How many delays do you think the community would have swallowed before we filed it as another Duke Nukem Forever and just moved on.
The game literally had a quarter of a billion total budget, thats a lot of cheddar to gamble. My point is that mind blowing innovation costs a lot of time and money. If we want these games to be super polished and bug free at launch, the people behind it need to have faith that the money will be there when they do, or we will see more shit rushed to market before its ready to minimise risk.
Gamers as a rule reject preordering, microtransactions, subscriptions
Confirmation bias from hanging out on federated gaming forums on a tech site. The average gamer is very much okay with (or at least complicit with) all of these. Pre-orders, microtransactions, and subscriptions are at an all-time high.
It’s certainly more expensive than Cyberpunk. According to Wikipedia, the company used $193 million between 2012 and 2017, so it’s probably passed $200 million today. I wonder how playable it is these days.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t patient gaming all about enjoying games that are proven to be worth the money, and also saving money? If you hate the new normal, just play through the endless list of good games from decades prior
This was the last game I pre-ordered, and I had put in 300+ hours before any patches arrived. In my experience with the game, the shit it got was way overblown. I had 2 bugs of note, one was just a graphical glitch with an NPC t-posing across a room and out a wall, and the other was a sidequest in a building didn’t unlock the doors when it was supposed to so I could actually enter and do the quest. That’s it. It was more or less what I was expecting, having followed the game so closely before it came out. The only thing I was disappointed with was the random loot system; I never liked RNG weapon stats. I don’t know anyone else who had it on PC at launch that had any issues, either (and half my friends list was playing this game at the time). Even most videos showing bugs for the game showed the same 5 visual bugs that damn near every game has once in a while. It’s hard to take anything that has been said about this game serious, since many many things I’ve read on it like to say the game didn’t do things it did, or does things that it doesn’t. It’s like nobody really played it or there’s a conspiracy to rail it into the ground because something they said they wanted to do 10 fucking years ago, was changed 3 years before release and didn’t end up in the final game.
English isnt my first language but isnt “fine” the same as “just ok” as in “it wasn’t a bad experience”. I don’t think that requires additional praise.
My experience with cyberpunk at launch is that i was very disappointed but it was very much “fine”.
Yes there where alot of bugs but sadly enough that has become the norm at launch. It was hardly more buggy then the average Bethesda game.
The writing and quest are actually amazing.
The gameplay loop remains fun.
The biggest issue was and remains cut content and oversold hype. If marketing had not lied so much people would have treated it like every other game.
I find starfield currently to be exactly as polished and buggy as cyberpunk was. I am equally disappointed by some limitations. But I actually stopped playing starfield in favor for replaying cyberpunk because the storytelling is so much more interesting.
English isnt my first language but isnt “fine” the same as “just ok” as in “it wasn’t a bad experience”. I don’t think that requires additional praise.
English is my first language and I think you have a point there. A game can be just mediocre with quality writing being an exception.
They mean keep a few backup save files at all times so you can jump back in increments. I agree it’s good practice but it’s not really a helpful response in this instance and doesn’t excuse the bug.
Meh my favorite was the guy in the beginning who dies really fast. The other characters I didn’t really care for except the lesbo girl and the other girl. I don’t really remember any of the other characters besides Johnny.
Nah it was unplayable on PlayStation. And it shouldn’t be that hard to understand why people don’t like playing buggy messes of games that they paid good money for.
And yes people could have played it that long then, it was a buggy, unfinished mess. Physics were wild, you’d randomly die, and it was nigh unplayable on some consoles.
Games should be released in a good working state. Also, things promised should be in the game… I swear this is called bait and switch, but the number of times games have come out with promised features including stuff on the box that’s not actually in the game it’s too damn high and I keep getting away with it. And it’s not just Bethesda and it’s not just cyberpunk remember dance studio for world of Warcraft… Only the internet archives remember because it wasn’t in the expansion even though it’s in The box as a selling feature
Yup, and it’s why I became a patient gamer. I want to play less buggy games, and usually games stabilize 1-2 years after launch. CP2077 is an outlier here, but there are plenty of others where bug fixes and content don’t get released until much later after release.
To be fair the bugs I mentioned are when running on my Linux PC which I don’t think is officially supported. From what another commenter said Windows doesn’t have that issue so hopefully it’ll be totally fine for the vast majority of folks.
I never really understood the complaints when it first came out. I had a few graphics glitches here and there, but nothing really significant. I think maybe one or two of the quests had bugs. The game had beautiful graphics (especially with RTX), a great story, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve played through 3 times already.
I am aware that a lot of people had bugs, though, but I have to wonder who. Maybe I just got lucky with my hardware combination (i7-5960x and 2080TI)?
I played it on the first day, and played it for days. It was actually really fun and I had a lot fewer issues with it than I had with Dragon Age 1 that I played a little while beforehand.
Supposedly the console releases were particularly bad. I played it on a laptop with a 2060.
Exactly this. I’m hearing all these folks like “so glad I waited!” but they probably would have liked it had they just played it when it came out and ignored the hype train and the de-hype train.
I loved it from day 1. Great game, at least on PC. Admittedly it should never have come out on last-gen, but update 2.0 isn’t on those either.
I think a lot of it came from the fact that it was impossible to upgrade hardware when CP77 first launched. 30 series GPUs were selling for well over $2,000 so most people just tried playing the game with their outdated hardware.
I played it with a 3080ti at launch and it was a buggy mess, shallow as hell, it skipped over all character introductions at the start of the story with a cutscene which just made me not care about anyone talking to me, the gunplay was simplistic, the open world was the least immersive I’d ever seen, with disappearing npcs and teleporting cops and cars driving through barriers everywhere with seemingly nothing reacting to your presence in ways that other open world games had been doing for years. The performance was bad, and even on psycho RTX there weren’t any real reflection because they didn’t bother finishing the third person character model, so there were just grey panes in bathrooms.
Overall it was just super underwhelming and full of unfinished areas that were clearly meant to be in the game but got cut.
It wasn’t an issue with consoles, it was an issue with the game being bad. Seems like everyone’s whitewashing the release as if it was perfect on pc.
I didn’t experience any of that. I do remember a bug where I would pop out the roof of my car, but it only happened a few times. Maybe I didn’t notice any of the other problems, or maybe I just got lucky. Out of all the games I’ve played in the last several years, Cyberpunk 2077 is the only one I’ve played through 3 times. I legitimately felt bad for the developers when it was first released because of how much people were shitting on it; judging from my own personal experience,a lot of the criticism was undeserved.
On the plus side, this gives people plenty of time to tackle their ever increasing backlogs, and also to give companies more reasons to put out a functional product in order to compete with all the kilometric backlogs people already have.
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A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it’s price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don’t meet the system requirements, or just haven’t had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
It took like 15 years for Daggerfall to not be totally broken, so it isn’t really a “new” normal.
I remember SiN was unplayable when it first came out, but a couple years down the line it was a pretty decent game (as long as you weren’t opposed to its aesthetic, which I wasn’t)
Waiting years has been my new normal for games because I’m cheap, and it helps save on hardware costs too due to pushing back the time frame for when I start needing a more powerful system to play them. It’s a win win.
We’ve all seen the xkcd, I assume that’s how everyone in this community rolls!
I’m hoping that devs with start offering graphics options for lower powered devices since handheld are gaining popularity. I’m getting a steam deck soon and it will be my main gaming device.
It’s only slightly less powerful than my desktop pc anyway.
I haven’t tried them but I often hear about people modding “potato mode” versions of games (pretty sure one is already out for Starfield
and Friends, for example) - fighting game players sometimes use them even if their systems are good to minimize any hitches that would screw up their inputs in a match.I’m not sure to what degree that sort of thing runs on Deck because of how Proton works, but theoretically that combined with the Deck’s other performance-enhancing modes will help some games run better for you!
That’s interesting. I didn’t know potato mode was anything other than obscure YouTuber content. I rarely play anything demanding, but I’ll look into potato mode for some games.
What I’m really looking forward to playing is fallout new Vegas, disco Elysium, and divinity original sin 2.
I’m sure they will all run super well on the deck.
I know this is the ‘patient gamers’ community, but I genuinely don’t see any other way to play games nowadays. Why would I spend $60-70 on a game that barely works and has more content coming later? I don’t see how the gaming industry even survives when it keeps reinforcing the idea that we shouldn’t buy games at launch. Is $20 just the regular sustainable price for games to a game company, and the people spending $60-70 are the overpaying suckers?
I was thinking about it the other day and have similar thoughts / questions. In the age of gamepass / lots of indie titles / backward compatibility, I don’t see how a high priced game with bugs and/or incompleteness is still viable.
I was able to wait on Hogwarts Legacy and Jedi survivor, while I played Gris, Bramble, and Batman Arkham Knight.
Because there are more than enough people paying full price for the game before it even comes out. It’s not like people who pay $20 a year or two later are the majority of sales.
Because most games do work at launch and the initial sales are what drives development and more games. If it fails at launch, it didn’t matter how many folks buy it at $20, it’s not getting a sequel.
And what do you even mean by “sustainable” in this context? Obviously it’s sustainable at the other price as well, otherwise they’d stop doing it. I mean, let’s be glad most developers aren’t like Nintendo at least.
This is why I’ve shied away from new AAA titles in general. I keep going back to the older stuff because in the words of Godd Howard “It just works.” or smaller indie titles where a beta state is forgivable, yet still less of a mess than Cyberpunk on launch day.
Played it the first week of release with a 1080ti which was fine
Same, I had 2 game breaking bugs on my whole playthrough. Starfield has already blown out of the water by several magnitudes and I’m 20% through.
Still makes the point though, lol
Its kind of a complex thought here so bear with me.
Gamers as a rule reject preordering, microtransactions, subscriptions and devs releasing a bare bones game that requires massive DLC purchases to get the full experience but at the same time Cyberpunk cost $170 something million to develop and yes CDPR did make bank on it, but the studio and the investors bet BIG on it, its the most expensive video game to date.
Now I havent played the new DLC (but I will) but it sounds like the game now is the game that they wanted to release then… I personally think we need to get behind the idea that big studios with big ideas arent going to take big risks with big money.
That if you want CDPR to do Cyberpunk 2 Electric Boogaloo with all the detail, features and polish we want, we need to accept that they arent going to pour a quarter of a billion dollars into a bucket labeled “maybe” and that something has to give if we want developers to push the boundaries and deliver groundbreaking experiences instead of churning out safe investments.
Gamers as a rule most certainly do not reject those things, a loud vocal minority try to get people to behave that way but they don’t
And none of that excuses the state C2077 released in compared to what was advertised. The complaint wasn’t that it wasn’t an original idea, it’s that it wasn’t what was promised
Yeah thats kind of my point, the money people and the studio had to know they were dropping an unfinished game, but every week of delay is another weeks wages for the people making the game, its another week for the hype train to lose momentum and its a bigger shit sandwich they have to eat if it flops. How many delays do you think the community would have swallowed before we filed it as another Duke Nukem Forever and just moved on.
The game literally had a quarter of a billion total budget, thats a lot of cheddar to gamble. My point is that mind blowing innovation costs a lot of time and money. If we want these games to be super polished and bug free at launch, the people behind it need to have faith that the money will be there when they do, or we will see more shit rushed to market before its ready to minimise risk.
Confirmation bias from hanging out on federated gaming forums on a tech site. The average gamer is very much okay with (or at least complicit with) all of these. Pre-orders, microtransactions, and subscriptions are at an all-time high.
Agreed. Most people dont like them but a LOT of people will say “Oh this doesnt count” or “Its only $X” and just go along with it.
Isn’t Star Citizen the most expensive video game to date?
It’s certainly more expensive than Cyberpunk. According to Wikipedia, the company used $193 million between 2012 and 2017, so it’s probably passed $200 million today. I wonder how playable it is these days.
I just googled it and yeah you’re right. Still second most expensive until recently.
I know that Star Citizen holds the absolute crown but it still hasnt been released.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t patient gaming all about enjoying games that are proven to be worth the money, and also saving money? If you hate the new normal, just play through the endless list of good games from decades prior
It wouldn’t be if people stopped pre ordering and buying day 1
But they won’t because they need the latest titles. So it’ll continue like this.
And that’s fine with me, indie titles don’t seem to have this issue, so I’m happy shifting my spending patterns.
This was the last game I pre-ordered, and I had put in 300+ hours before any patches arrived. In my experience with the game, the shit it got was way overblown. I had 2 bugs of note, one was just a graphical glitch with an NPC t-posing across a room and out a wall, and the other was a sidequest in a building didn’t unlock the doors when it was supposed to so I could actually enter and do the quest. That’s it. It was more or less what I was expecting, having followed the game so closely before it came out. The only thing I was disappointed with was the random loot system; I never liked RNG weapon stats. I don’t know anyone else who had it on PC at launch that had any issues, either (and half my friends list was playing this game at the time). Even most videos showing bugs for the game showed the same 5 visual bugs that damn near every game has once in a while. It’s hard to take anything that has been said about this game serious, since many many things I’ve read on it like to say the game didn’t do things it did, or does things that it doesn’t. It’s like nobody really played it or there’s a conspiracy to rail it into the ground because something they said they wanted to do 10 fucking years ago, was changed 3 years before release and didn’t end up in the final game.
It was fine at release. One of the best written games ever.
Some people enjoy whinging more than playing games.
You say it was “fine” at release and the only praise you have is how it was written?
English isnt my first language but isnt “fine” the same as “just ok” as in “it wasn’t a bad experience”. I don’t think that requires additional praise.
My experience with cyberpunk at launch is that i was very disappointed but it was very much “fine”.
Yes there where alot of bugs but sadly enough that has become the norm at launch. It was hardly more buggy then the average Bethesda game.
The writing and quest are actually amazing. The gameplay loop remains fun.
The biggest issue was and remains cut content and oversold hype. If marketing had not lied so much people would have treated it like every other game.
I find starfield currently to be exactly as polished and buggy as cyberpunk was. I am equally disappointed by some limitations. But I actually stopped playing starfield in favor for replaying cyberpunk because the storytelling is so much more interesting.
English is my first language and I think you have a point there. A game can be just mediocre with quality writing being an exception.
Yes that’s what fine means.
Bethesda writing could even ruin a competently made game. If they were ever allowed to touch one of those by mistake.
I played it day 1, it was great. Not sure if I’m going to go back and replay it, though.
I’m planning on checking out the update on my old maxed out character, then doing a fresh playthrough for PL.
Oh so my savefile that’s locked in a conversation with no ability to progress forward or exit the conversation is fine?
Guess it taught you the importance of backup saves. I’m certainly fine with it.
Right like reloading the save and trying again wasn’t the first thing I tired
They mean keep a few backup save files at all times so you can jump back in increments. I agree it’s good practice but it’s not really a helpful response in this instance and doesn’t excuse the bug.
That’s not what a backup is.
Meh my favorite was the guy in the beginning who dies really fast. The other characters I didn’t really care for except the lesbo girl and the other girl. I don’t really remember any of the other characters besides Johnny.
“My experience with a game is everyone’s experience with a game therefore a well documented buggy launch didn’t happen”
-GamerTM
My opinion of the typical gamers opinion is not high.
I played it for like 80 hours at launch and you could’ve too.
Never understood the hate it got when Bethesda releases the exact same kind of janky but fun mess…
Nah it was unplayable on PlayStation. And it shouldn’t be that hard to understand why people don’t like playing buggy messes of games that they paid good money for.
Bethesda shouldn’t get a pass.
And yes people could have played it that long then, it was a buggy, unfinished mess. Physics were wild, you’d randomly die, and it was nigh unplayable on some consoles.
Games should be released in a good working state. Also, things promised should be in the game… I swear this is called bait and switch, but the number of times games have come out with promised features including stuff on the box that’s not actually in the game it’s too damn high and I keep getting away with it. And it’s not just Bethesda and it’s not just cyberpunk remember dance studio for world of Warcraft… Only the internet archives remember because it wasn’t in the expansion even though it’s in The box as a selling feature
It’s not the new normal, it’s been the norm for AAA gamrs for years now.
Yup, and it’s why I became a patient gamer. I want to play less buggy games, and usually games stabilize 1-2 years after launch. CP2077 is an outlier here, but there are plenty of others where bug fixes and content don’t get released until much later after release.
GOTY or whatever releases are where it’s at.
I actually think this patch could have done with a few more weeks of polishing to be honest. Bugs I have experienced so far:
All within the first hour or so. Not leaving a great first impression but maybe I’ve just been unlucky.
Of course the bug fix has bugs. What a shit storm from the start
To be fair the bugs I mentioned are when running on my Linux PC which I don’t think is officially supported. From what another commenter said Windows doesn’t have that issue so hopefully it’ll be totally fine for the vast majority of folks.
Are you running on proton? If so, this solution was only one that worked for me, sorted the controller confusion
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1091500/discussions/7/3878218563598783920/?ctp=3#c3878218563605539303
Yes I am, thanks for this! I’ll give it a go as it’s really frustrating.
I think proton still needs an update for 2.0, this seems a lot more common on Linux systems. Hopefully it’s something that can be fixed quickly
Windows has kb/m prompts
I never really understood the complaints when it first came out. I had a few graphics glitches here and there, but nothing really significant. I think maybe one or two of the quests had bugs. The game had beautiful graphics (especially with RTX), a great story, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve played through 3 times already.
I am aware that a lot of people had bugs, though, but I have to wonder who. Maybe I just got lucky with my hardware combination (i7-5960x and 2080TI)?
I played it on the first day, and played it for days. It was actually really fun and I had a lot fewer issues with it than I had with Dragon Age 1 that I played a little while beforehand.
Supposedly the console releases were particularly bad. I played it on a laptop with a 2060.
It didn’t meet the promises made, the game was ok, but it’s not the game they advertised
I think the biggest problem was last gen consoles, being barely able to run it and having massive problems.
I haven’t seen many complaints from the PC version as far as bugs/glitches went.
The game was missing the life it advertised, but I still had fun playing it
Exactly this. I’m hearing all these folks like “so glad I waited!” but they probably would have liked it had they just played it when it came out and ignored the hype train and the de-hype train.
I loved it from day 1. Great game, at least on PC. Admittedly it should never have come out on last-gen, but update 2.0 isn’t on those either.
I think a lot of it came from the fact that it was impossible to upgrade hardware when CP77 first launched. 30 series GPUs were selling for well over $2,000 so most people just tried playing the game with their outdated hardware.
I played it with a 3080ti at launch and it was a buggy mess, shallow as hell, it skipped over all character introductions at the start of the story with a cutscene which just made me not care about anyone talking to me, the gunplay was simplistic, the open world was the least immersive I’d ever seen, with disappearing npcs and teleporting cops and cars driving through barriers everywhere with seemingly nothing reacting to your presence in ways that other open world games had been doing for years. The performance was bad, and even on psycho RTX there weren’t any real reflection because they didn’t bother finishing the third person character model, so there were just grey panes in bathrooms.
Overall it was just super underwhelming and full of unfinished areas that were clearly meant to be in the game but got cut.
It wasn’t an issue with consoles, it was an issue with the game being bad. Seems like everyone’s whitewashing the release as if it was perfect on pc.
I didn’t experience any of that. I do remember a bug where I would pop out the roof of my car, but it only happened a few times. Maybe I didn’t notice any of the other problems, or maybe I just got lucky. Out of all the games I’ve played in the last several years, Cyberpunk 2077 is the only one I’ve played through 3 times. I legitimately felt bad for the developers when it was first released because of how much people were shitting on it; judging from my own personal experience,a lot of the criticism was undeserved.
On the plus side, this gives people plenty of time to tackle their ever increasing backlogs, and also to give companies more reasons to put out a functional product in order to compete with all the kilometric backlogs people already have.