Check out the latest trailer for the highly anticipated Phantom Liberty expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. We're getting new cyberware, new weapons – including a ...
While I wish CDPR had pulled the band-aid and canceled (with refund or free upgrade to next gen) the PS4 and Xbox Series platforms, my controversial opinion is that this game has been GoTY on PC since day one. Plenty of my favorite games had rough launches (Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, No Man’s Sky, Witcher 3, Skyrim - hell, I even lost an hour to the cross-save bug in Baldurs Gate 3), but it became a meme to hate on CP2077, and I understand why the devs claim to this day that the game deserves more credit.
I understand that players are tired of broken launches, and I agree that devs should be more cautious about what features they show in alpha/beta stages to manage hype, but I think the oversized backlash this game received stopped or delayed a large swathe of gamers from experiencing a truly great game and gave the devs way more stress than they had earned.
Yes, it was far far more than just a buggy release. Even if the game was originally released in the state it’s in now people would still have been pissed. The bugs were just a distraction.
Yeah, the only other game that was so brazenly lied about before launch was No Man’s Sky and to their credit Hello Games actually implemented everything that was promised back then now and then some, for free.
Did you somehow get a different game? Or maybe you somehow avoided all the bugs everyone else experienced. Still even if worked perfectly, game of the year seems a bit much.
Even now, years later, there are still unfixed bugs. I have a game where there’s one mission showing up in a building that is impossible to enter. I even started the game clean from the beginning a year ago and hit the same damn bug again.
Others have reported it too, so I’m not the only one.
I didn’t have any gamebreaking bugs, but had soooo so many “how the fuck did this pass quality control?” bugs. Most of them were pretty funny, like the time I didn’t understand how the cyberpsycho quests worked, and tried to take the unconscious body with me.
The game system did not like having that body in the trunk of my car, with hilarious Dali-esque consequences.
Aside from that, the deep systems that were promised were extremely shallow; the onscreen map was fucked, too small to see turns coming (pathing too CPU-intensive when zoomed out?); the onscreen HUD still last time I played was too small to read on a 4k screen; the car handling / driving is still atrocious (at least, last time I played). It is a fun game, especially for those picking it up now. Mods make it much more fun.
If by rough launch you mean pretty much omitted majority of things they said will be in the game, then yes. Rough launch. And here I am worrying when indie devs don’t have enough time to fix minor bug in their games.
Honestly you’re not wrong, the launch of the game was actually horrible. The game was good in theory but was halfway executed and shoved into our faces as something great when it obviously wasn’t when they shipped it.
I’ve been a huge fan of CDPR since the witcher 2. I love the world of cyberpunk. The combination seemed like a dream come true. So, I deliberately held out on absolutely any and all spoilers. It was not easy.
I bought a new computer for the game. I booked a two week vacation to play the game.
And, I mostly enjoyed it. It was a little bit underwhelming, and some systems seemed a bit contrived. But, it was still fun, with some amazing city design. Definitely not something that I would call GoTY.
Then, I looked at all the outrage, and I looked at the promotional material. And, oh boy, did that seem fraudulent. Like, “how come no one went to jail”-fraud. Pretty straight up lying about every part of the game. And why? I don’t know, but it seriously stained my view of CDPR.
Never ever ever buy a game until after reviews come out. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t matter if it’s from a legendary game studio, they can find all of the developers, they could fire all of the managers, and still be called the same thing. The name is no guarantee of anything.
Pre-ordering games had a point back when they were mostly physical, because if you didn’t, you ran the risk of them running out. Although I didn’t pre-order GTA V, and just walked into a game store on the day of release and bought two copies, so since then I’ve rather been of the opinion that even with physical products, it’s probably not very likely they’re going to run out.
But now everything’s digital there’s 100% no reason to pre-order. Make them make the actual product they claimed to have made.
I played through it at launch on my lower end gaming laptop (1050 GPU) that I had at the time. With some fiddling, and basically turning everything to lowest I got it to just about playable framerates.
Massively enjoyed the game and its universe. I hit a few bugs but nothing that was hugely game breaking, at least nowhere as bad as people were saying. I also managed my expectations knowing my hardware at the time was low-end/dated.
Then I saw footage of the game being played on base tier PS4 and Xbox One hardware and holy shit, if I’d bought it on either of those (especially Xbox), I’d have been furious. The game was not ready and should never have been released for those consoles. It clearly needed at least PS4 Pro or One X to even be remotely playable at launch.
I think a lot of the negativity also comes from misunderstanding what the game is.
Just like you, I played the game on release (on PC) and it is for me one of the best games of all time for one specific reason: immersion and story. That’s exactly what I expected from CDPR after Witcher 3 (another story and immersion focused game) and that’s exactly what I got. I didn’t expect a company known for their story focus and relatively weaker gameplay to deliver a game focused on gameplay or sandbox elements.
I think a lot of people wanted something that CDPR was never going to deliver, but it seems like Phantom Liberty is leaning more into the sandbox that people wanted and (unsurprisingly) didn’t get at release.
You can’t say that when for literally YEARS CDPR advertised the game as being exactly that. A futuristic, play-who-you-want RPG sandbox. Instead we practically got a Far Cry clone with light RPG elements. They just quietly stopped advertising it as such.
But people remember. Just because you didn’t expect it yourself doesn’t mean it wasn’t advertised as such.
While I wish CDPR had pulled the band-aid and canceled (with refund or free upgrade to next gen) the PS4 and Xbox Series platforms, my controversial opinion is that this game has been GoTY on PC since day one. Plenty of my favorite games had rough launches (Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, No Man’s Sky, Witcher 3, Skyrim - hell, I even lost an hour to the cross-save bug in Baldurs Gate 3), but it became a meme to hate on CP2077, and I understand why the devs claim to this day that the game deserves more credit.
I understand that players are tired of broken launches, and I agree that devs should be more cautious about what features they show in alpha/beta stages to manage hype, but I think the oversized backlash this game received stopped or delayed a large swathe of gamers from experiencing a truly great game and gave the devs way more stress than they had earned.
(Deleted)
Yes, it was far far more than just a buggy release. Even if the game was originally released in the state it’s in now people would still have been pissed. The bugs were just a distraction.
Yeah, the only other game that was so brazenly lied about before launch was No Man’s Sky and to their credit Hello Games actually implemented everything that was promised back then now and then some, for free.
Did you somehow get a different game? Or maybe you somehow avoided all the bugs everyone else experienced. Still even if worked perfectly, game of the year seems a bit much.
Even now, years later, there are still unfixed bugs. I have a game where there’s one mission showing up in a building that is impossible to enter. I even started the game clean from the beginning a year ago and hit the same damn bug again.
Others have reported it too, so I’m not the only one.
I didn’t have any gamebreaking bugs, but had soooo so many “how the fuck did this pass quality control?” bugs. Most of them were pretty funny, like the time I didn’t understand how the cyberpsycho quests worked, and tried to take the unconscious body with me.
The game system did not like having that body in the trunk of my car, with hilarious Dali-esque consequences.
Aside from that, the deep systems that were promised were extremely shallow; the onscreen map was fucked, too small to see turns coming (pathing too CPU-intensive when zoomed out?); the onscreen HUD still last time I played was too small to read on a 4k screen; the car handling / driving is still atrocious (at least, last time I played). It is a fun game, especially for those picking it up now. Mods make it much more fun.
If by rough launch you mean pretty much omitted majority of things they said will be in the game, then yes. Rough launch. And here I am worrying when indie devs don’t have enough time to fix minor bug in their games.
What about it makes it GOTY for you? It was a broken, hollow shell of what they had been promising for years.
Honestly you’re not wrong, the launch of the game was actually horrible. The game was good in theory but was halfway executed and shoved into our faces as something great when it obviously wasn’t when they shipped it.
I’ve been a huge fan of CDPR since the witcher 2. I love the world of cyberpunk. The combination seemed like a dream come true. So, I deliberately held out on absolutely any and all spoilers. It was not easy.
I bought a new computer for the game. I booked a two week vacation to play the game.
And, I mostly enjoyed it. It was a little bit underwhelming, and some systems seemed a bit contrived. But, it was still fun, with some amazing city design. Definitely not something that I would call GoTY.
Then, I looked at all the outrage, and I looked at the promotional material. And, oh boy, did that seem fraudulent. Like, “how come no one went to jail”-fraud. Pretty straight up lying about every part of the game. And why? I don’t know, but it seriously stained my view of CDPR.
Never ever ever buy a game until after reviews come out. It’s not worth it. It doesn’t matter if it’s from a legendary game studio, they can find all of the developers, they could fire all of the managers, and still be called the same thing. The name is no guarantee of anything.
Pre-ordering games had a point back when they were mostly physical, because if you didn’t, you ran the risk of them running out. Although I didn’t pre-order GTA V, and just walked into a game store on the day of release and bought two copies, so since then I’ve rather been of the opinion that even with physical products, it’s probably not very likely they’re going to run out.
But now everything’s digital there’s 100% no reason to pre-order. Make them make the actual product they claimed to have made.
I played through it at launch on my lower end gaming laptop (1050 GPU) that I had at the time. With some fiddling, and basically turning everything to lowest I got it to just about playable framerates.
Massively enjoyed the game and its universe. I hit a few bugs but nothing that was hugely game breaking, at least nowhere as bad as people were saying. I also managed my expectations knowing my hardware at the time was low-end/dated.
Then I saw footage of the game being played on base tier PS4 and Xbox One hardware and holy shit, if I’d bought it on either of those (especially Xbox), I’d have been furious. The game was not ready and should never have been released for those consoles. It clearly needed at least PS4 Pro or One X to even be remotely playable at launch.
I think a lot of the negativity also comes from misunderstanding what the game is.
Just like you, I played the game on release (on PC) and it is for me one of the best games of all time for one specific reason: immersion and story. That’s exactly what I expected from CDPR after Witcher 3 (another story and immersion focused game) and that’s exactly what I got. I didn’t expect a company known for their story focus and relatively weaker gameplay to deliver a game focused on gameplay or sandbox elements.
I think a lot of people wanted something that CDPR was never going to deliver, but it seems like Phantom Liberty is leaning more into the sandbox that people wanted and (unsurprisingly) didn’t get at release.
(Deleted)
You can’t say that when for literally YEARS CDPR advertised the game as being exactly that. A futuristic, play-who-you-want RPG sandbox. Instead we practically got a Far Cry clone with light RPG elements. They just quietly stopped advertising it as such.
But people remember. Just because you didn’t expect it yourself doesn’t mean it wasn’t advertised as such.
I stopped playing the game because of how bad I found the story and the characters.
@scops @simple I started playing CP from day one and sincerely it wasn’t that bad at all. There was a huge wave of self entertained moaners