I seem to remember Cyberpunk 2077 having a release that was quite far from perfection...
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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The whole release was early access in my opinion, they just weren't honest about it. Eventually it was a really good game, but even then it didn't have everything they'd advertised.
It took 2 years and an expansion before it was no longer “early access,” and as soon as it was actually good, they announced there would be no more updates.
Took them to 1.6 to fix some very critical performance issues too. lol And even then I wouldn't say the game is in a state that I'd call "perfection".
The issue with Cyberpunk was 100% a problem created by the marketing team and executives giving false promises and ideas about the content of the game, and rather than admitting they were wrong, forcing the developers to change what they were developing into the game the marketing team was marketing.
False promises didn't make broken perks (anything related to knife throwing) or useless skill tree (crafting) or police spawning right behind you or cars being completely undriveable on higher speeds or all the other things they fixed after release.
Marketing was an issue but there were things wrong with the game that had nothing to do with marketing. The game was broken even if marketing had been on point.
Marketing was an issue but there were things wrong with the game that had nothing to do with marketing.
If the executives tell the developers they need to add or change something to match what the marketing team put out and that they have limited time to do it, those changes can have adverse effects on other systems that may have already been in the game before the changes were mandated. Altering something simple can sometimes lead to other systems behaving incorrectly especially if you don't have enough time to implement it properly, this is a very common thing that happens all the time in programming.
Why are you assuming the marketing team could do whatever they want and then management just goes "guess we're doing that now"? Did they hold the directors (or whoever they got in front of the camera) at gun point to force them to say they're going to do things they weren't planning to do? Even if we somehow accept that are true it still opens up the question of why wasn't this then properly planned into the roadmap and have timelines adjusted? Or did the marketing also dictate the timeline?
It's more likely marketing also did what management told them to do and the poor management is what got us the bad marketing material and poor quality product.
We can agree that management was the issue and that marketing generally sucks (I've had first hand experience where marketing/sales fucks over the devs because they never even talked to us, with normal management that happens only once), but I don't think you can or should blame marketing to the extent that you have.
I wouldn't say 100%. Marketing wasn't responsible for releasing on platforms that couldn't actually run the game properly..
Witcher 3 was pretty damn buggy on release too. Not Cyberpunk level buggy, but still
And a complete lackluster main quest.
I dont think they updated the main quest line much, its still short and not too special. But there are many side quests of which some a really good. Also the Phantom Liberty expansion is excellent, best part of the game imo
I mean, he's talking about what he'd prefer. I'm sure that if you ask him, he wouldn't prefer problems at launch either.
The lack of self awareness is outstanding.
I preordered the very first day and BG3 early access was rough.
But Larian got a shit ton of alpha testers that paid to test.
And with only act 1, people played it dozens of times trying every stupid thing they could think of.
That's a huge advantage for the studio, and players fucking loved it.
You could argue Cyberpunk had a lot of alpha testers as well, it just wasn't labeled early access.
Eh, I got cyberpunk on release too, and honestly didn't have many issues.
It was on a decent PC, but I never understood why so many people have such issues
I even bought it on PS5 later as well
It ran like ass and was full of bugs, you just got lucky.
It ran perfectly fine on my 4th gen i7/1080ti PC on day 1.
Bruh the first 6 months of cyberpunk were an unofficial early access
The Witcher 3, as well. It wasn't as bad as cyberpunk, but it definitely wasn't the masterpiece it is today
I was gonna say "that last line is hilarious because the game was a broken mess up on release" 🤣
So, did that whole "late discovery" thing just not happen with Cyberpunk? Because I just have a hard time imagining CDPR looking at the state that game launched in and thinking that they'd made a game that was basically perfect. I mean, at least they learned in time for Phantom Liberty's release, I guess.
Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of "The Pickup" which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.
Now the game is still a good game. But it's a great "emergent gameplay" game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it's not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of "The Pickup", which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.
Wasn't the Witcher 3 also a mess at release? I've never played them, but I distinctly remember my friends complaining about it, and now it's pretty beloved.
Maybe CDPR is hoping the same thing happens with Cyberpunk?
I played both later (TW3 in 2018 and I just played through CP) and they were very stable for me. CP a little glitchy at times but hardly game breaking. I recommend doing this in general, with big games such as these.
True, but your point is more consumer side. The headline is talking about CDPR wanting to have a "banging game" on release, which is historically uh...sketchy at best. They should be called out on the statement separate from consumer habits.
I'm a day one CP77 player and spent a lot of time in Night City. I've made four level 50 characters, read every patch note as it updated, and even fell into the FF06B5 rabbit hole.
The launch wasn't great, but the negativity was miscalibrated.
The worst part of launch was the previous gen versions, which were functionally unplayable.
Yet most people were hanging shit on visual bugs and physics irregularities. This is an issue since CP77 is supposed to specialise in spectacle and immersion, but was a long way from being "unplayable".
Outside of one instance, during an emotional scene, when a character died while a gun was clipped through his head, these bugs were funny. It didn't affect how much fun I had.
The game is in a very good state now. The progression system had a major overhaul since the start of 2.0 and it is a fucking blast!
The game is far more streamlined, they've reduced the time spent in the menu, and made cyberware more important.
Perk points are now a lot more balanced.
Previously, if you wanted to play "properly", you would dump 20 attribute points in Cool for Cold Blood, 18 in Tech to craft legendary items, and 20 into Intelligence/Body/Reflex, depending on your main damage type. It was quite restrictive.
Now the game is pushing you to use each attribute type to level up all five of your skills.
Besides leveling Tech up to 20 (you're a dipshit if you don't), and Reflexes to 15 (for air-dash) you can basically do whatever the fuck you want with your stats, and the gameplay is far better for it.
Once you get things set up, you're zipping around the city like spiderman, sliding up to peoples butts at 70km/h and shoving the funnel of a shotgun into their ass. It's a good feeling.
What platform did you play on?
PC
I played day one as well. The worst bugs I had was one where the AI just didn't want to work for a random encounter; and one where I was driving, came to an immediate stop, got out of the car, then got launched straight up in the air as high as you could go. That one was hilarious, and I kinda liked getting to see the whole map from that POV.
The game is honestly fantastic with an awesome story and killer set pieces. The combat is pretty damn fun as well, especially if you spec into melee and sandy.
Sandy is even MORE broken now.
The Apogee variant slows time by 85% for six seconds.
Increases head shot damage, crit chance and crit damage. Each kill extends the sandy and gives stamina.
It's busted as fuck. Melee is the new OP way to play, and personally, most fun.
Sometimes I miss my "I'm too high to fight you" character. She was fully decked out in all things hacking, including the old style of perk progression - which meant levelling breach protocol to 20 - there are almost not enough terminals in the game to hit 20, seriously.
Imagine this:
Fixer asks you to get a diamond encrusted dildo from the most dangerous gang in the neighbourhood.
You sit outside an enemy building, look at their camera, play a little matching game, ping the camera, highlight the boss top floor and order them to vomit until they die.
You watch as everyone in the building starts throwing up, vomit running down the stairs, the ceiling fan flicking vomit on the walls, basically everywhere except the toilet.
You walk in, grab the dildo, and walk out, there was never a threat of danger.
Why wouldn't it work? I mean, if CP2077 came out in EA a lot of the shit CDPR scrambled to get fixed, all the plans they changed based on the response, etc might have been lessened or not even a problem since it would be expected to be unfinished. And I say this as someone who didn't have a problem with what I got with the game at launch, personally.
Of course, teasing it all the way back in 2012 and showing off concepts that never materialized didn't help either.
Cyberpunk is less systems driven than BG3 and naturally less segmented compared to BG3's three act structure. Both of those things make it less ideal for an early access period, not that it wouldn't work at all. The 2012 tease was as early as it was in order to recruit talent to work on the game, but production wasn't in full swing until The Witcher 3 was done.
This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback
They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is "an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc"
Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.
The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there's more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let's you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.
The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could "defeat them in any order*" (*not really)
When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.
Yeah, there are tons of games that are open world that probably shouldn't be. I don't know that I would champion RDR2 though. For as many systems as they put into the game for the open world, the meat that I was there for was the story, where they forbid me from getting creative with any of those systems at all, so it really took the wind out of my sails.
Still waiting for this game to release, then.