Meanwhile Sony just announced they will be refunding purchases for this game and taking it off their virtual store due to it being extremely buggy and seemingly unfinished on consoles. This is an unprecedented move for a game of this stature and is a monumental failure from CDPR.
I suspect the Sony decision came on the tail of CDPR asking upset fans to request a refund from Sony. For the last few days people have been posting screenshots of Sony denying refunds, making Sony look bad. I feel like this is Sony saying to CDPR "If its broken enough you're sending people to us for refunds, it's too broken to sell"
You're right this is about avoiding bad press on Sony (or the need for Sony to revise their return policy), but it's also about Sony as a publisher enforcing their relationship with studios.
Sony's return policy for digital isn't consumer-friendly and something I want to defend, many call it a "no refunds" policy, as if you start the game even once you can't get a refund. But as publisher it's their right, and within their interest, to enforce it. It's not up to studios to unilaterally change it.
On Dec 13th, CPDR issued the tweet/statement, "For copies purchased digitally, please use the refund system of PSN or Xbox respectively."[0]
The next day at an investor call, investors asked them if they had a special refund agreement with Sony and Microsoft. They said they didn't. [1]
Then the next public statement from either was Sony saying it's removed. The next statement from CPDR was to investors but was leaked, essentially saying they met with Sony and Sony told them it was being removed.[2] Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that meeting.
Microsoft has also said full refunds for anyone who requests, matching Sony.[3]
This game should not have passed certification and how it happened clearly shows to the public what has long bugged me: how much you get away with and how many, or how serious, issues you get a waiver for in cert is directly proportional to how high profile your game is. This reinforces the issues with big titles being released in a bad state.
Which is weird, because my impression was that it was only truly broken on last-gen consoles (i.e. PS4, not 5), where it didn't really belong in the first place. It's buggy on all platforms, but it's the normal open-world-game level of buggy (remember when Skyrim launched?).
I've been watching my girlfriend play it on PC and it's been generally fine
There is controversy around this idea. The game is certainly buggy and many similar open world games have also been buggy on release. However, a lot of the problems in Cyberpunk 2077 don't appear to be bugs. They appear to be active design decisions that were made as a shortcut on promised features. Here is a Twitter thread with some examples of design decisions that might appear as bugs to an untrained eye.[1]
It seems like CDPR knew they had an unfinished game and couldn't deliver it close to its release date. Management decided to do whatever had to be done to release a game in time for Christmas. This "open world games are always buggy on release" narrative plus some shady behavior surrounding how they handled reviews[2] allowed them to get largely great reviews and a huge influx of cash. Hopefully that provides enough capital to justify a long term commitment to finishing this game because it is doesn't appear to be a few bug fixes or performance improvements away from being the game that was promised.
I’m loving the game so far (on a PC with a 3080), but it is certainly wide instead of deep. It feels really really shallow. There is a lot of content but very little feels meaningful. Outside of the missions with the girlfriend there is very little relationship building. Even this come short compared to most other rpg’s. I have also had a few insane bugs, but nothing came breaking. For example for a while my character was standing naked in his bike, and in another instance a lady was standing like the Rio Christ statue for a whole mission.
I don’t really mind the examples in the Twitter thread, but I do mind that you really cannot interact with the world in any meaningful way.
Sounds like the eternal issue of open world games though. Olympic size wading pools is how I like to describe them. Many things to do, but with minimal depth and little, if any, impact on the game world.
None other than skyrim is one of the best examples of this.
Thats why I actually like that Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have a fairly focused mission structure. (I haven't played very far, mind you). It always bothered me in e.g. Bethesda's games that I was supposed to be on some all-important world-saving quest, but it's no problem if I want to just spelunk in ancient dwarves ruins for a few months instead.
Yes, playing it as anything but a rails game seems to be wildly out of character once the story has progressed beyond the initial handshake. The open world backdrop makes the railed story far more immersive than an actual rails tunnel that you cannot leave could ever be, but only if you mostly ignore it. And the main story track is pulling much stronger than in something like Skyrim.
With this game it's probably a generational thing on more than one level: not only do most people tend to grow out of side quest competitionism at some point, I suspect that older parts of the audience are also drawn into this particular main story stronger than their younger peers. It's just so perfectly 1990ies vibe that you almost forget that people did not in fact have mind machine interfaces and fancy prosthetic limbs when they sent their first email on AOL. The game represents exactly how people born around 1977 remember the movies of their youth (entirely unlike how you'd perceive them if you'd see them today).
Sure, but cyberpunk is based on a pen and paper RPG so I really hoped it had a little more.
But yeah your description is pretty good.
For me it was great on the beginning, the mood and the graphics are pretty good. Some missions are great as well. But now I’m not really sure if I will even finish it. It doesn’t really feel meaningful.
Also even though there are some explicit sex scenes (but so few I’m not sure why they are there), it is really not edgy at all. It’s like a corporation designed the game which is everything cyberpunk is not supposed to be.
There are a ton of great ideas in there, but then someone realized it would take too long so they half assed everything.
If you role-play your character there is zero room for toying around with side missions once the story kicks in. cp77 simply isn't a do whatever you like game, it's a story game with a backdrop of a somewhat interactive surrounding. Compared to earlier cityscape story backdrops like e.g. in Deus Ex series games or the endless iterations of Assassins Creeds the backdrop is far more interactive and even a little gamified. But it shouldn't be considered the game, it's a backdrop.
> There are a ton of great ideas in there, but then someone realized it would take too long so they half assed everything.
Totally agree. Take for example character backgrounds. They are meaningless. You have a custom 5 min introduction for that background and then you are playing the same game as everybody with the addition of just a few dialogs.
They could have just focused on one background and make the side quests more relevant to that background.
Not sure of that. The most critically acclaimed games e.g. RDR2, Horizon Zero Dawn etc. have very deep and intriguing stories while maintaining the world as “open” as possible. Even the Witcher is another example. Cyberpunk sounds like a case of massive overhyping and under delivering. Some fanboys here and there are unwilling to face the reality, but most reviews I’ve read seem to be sober and corroborate the above point.
I disagree. Maybe don't skip the dialogues :) I have quite a contrary impression - the game is very deep and their world is not so wide as it could be.
Its buggy and some parts seem to be missing, like can cops/enemies even track you at all?
But at same time it gives more than a well built game would, yesterday I tried to make easy money by running over max-tac cops and taking their lvl 50 stuff.
I cant kill them with guns, but hitting them with car seems to do the job.
In normal game, high level enemies would kill you instantly, but in cyberpunk, you can just take their stuff, run couple blocks and everybody forgets that you just killed 2 cops, then go back and do it again.
That is a great example of an actual bug, that ALL players saw, and many didn't notice at all.
The police seemly doesn't have an AI, people actually believed they didn't.
But a player happened to see a police car with cops inside (extremely rare to see that), and saved his game near, and ran several tests.
He found out if you piss off the cops, using a car (on foot they just exit the car and never climb back on), and then you hit their car with yours (shooting them doesn't work, they just go away following a pre-programmed path), they start chasing your GTA-style.
So this means they DID code the cop cars to chase the player car, but a sequence of bugs make the only way to see this content to be go out of your way to do it (you need to see cops in a car spontaneously while you are inside a car too, then run over a pedrestrian, then hit the cop car with your car).
Really npc's are stupid in skyrim, gta, cyberpunk whatever. And it doesn't matter. When you look at Watch Dogs, its getting very repettetive anyway; You look at a few and discover that you actually don't care about it anyway.
I play cyberpunk right now for the story they build and they build, so far, a very good story.
They can keep the npcs as they are honestly; Finetune perhaps but meh
You are right that NPCs are generally stupid across the board. However, in CP2077 they are outright broken. If you look at an NPC, turn 180 degrees and then look back, the NPC is either gone or replaced with another NPC entirely. There are stuff like that, not related to "stupidity", that breaks the immersion for me.
PS. I'm also enjoying the game a lot, but soft locks and brokenness is starting to take it's toll.
Both GTA V and Red Dead 2 have pretty broken and uninteresting NPCs as well unless you start causing havoc in immersion breaking and unrealistic ways. I think the fact that in Cyberpunk 2077 you can't have fun just randomly blowing up shit and causing havoc is a good thing. It is very unsatisfactory to randomly kill people or run them over, because there is nothing interesting about it. The art direction and ambiance works very well as a "movie set" but not so much as a sandbox.
GTA 5 does that too, but it may be observed more often when you’re low on RAM/VRAM. When I played GTA 4 on a microwave, it spawned the same car over and over until you get far enough from a current location. Not saying that it is okay for CP2077 in 2020, but this behavior is not unique. Maybe they overestimated where hardware industry will be in 2020Q4.
I played a lot of GTAV, and I never noticed it. Perhaps it preserved actors within a certain radius of the player? Or maybe the third person view made it less apparent. To dynamically spawn/despawn actors is a necessity I suppose, but I've never seen it handled so poorly and sloppy as in CP2077.
GTA generally is pretty good about keeping things close to you around, e.g. looking backwards won't usually remove traffic in front of you. The most obvious case are NPCs that aren't "relevant" anymore, e.g. people that have places around the city that depend on time of day. If their "active" time ends, they'll start wandering off from their location. If you follow one, you can for a long time, but if you then even look away for a split second they'll be removed, presumably because the game tracks them as something it wants to unload after their useful time has ended, but won't do it while you look.
In earlier GTAs like San Andreas there is an explicit difference between "traffic in the distance" and "traffic close by" - the former will be removed if out of sight, doesn't have full-fidelity 3D models, apparently doesn't have physics applied to them, ... Once they get close enough, they get more complete and sticky. (GTA V quite possibly does the same, I just know less about the details there and its a lot less obvious)
Yeah, I think GTA has been doing a good job at handling these things gracefully.
Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.
However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.
And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.
Still doesn't matter to me and has not had any real influence on me whatsoever. I'm not doing anything with them. They are there for the feeling not for relevance.
100% agree. I think the people that harp on about this are expecting the game to be something it's just not. Why not focus on the aspects of it that are good, instead - like, literally anything else? Visuals? Story? Tactics? Ambience? Different character builds? The game gives you plenty of freedom to decide how you want to experience it. It seems like a lot of people just want to focus on the uninteresting/minor parts for some reason.
People have focused on the poor story and gameplay too.
That said, why do we have to remain purely positive for an expensive AAA game that promised so much and sold at a high price tag? Why should they be excused?
Reading the Twitter thread I wonder if people just have unrealistic expectations.
Self driving cars are a billion dollar industry, and yet you expect a game dev studio to come up with a realistic AI for drivers?
It's a game. People know that it's not real. Sure, it's fun to discover the tricks that the devs had to pull off to make it work. But man, don't blame a game dev studio that they haven't come up with an algorithm for self driving cars.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I don't think you know what you are talking about here. Driver AI in a video game isn't nearly as complex as self driving cars in the real world. Plenty of games have been able to create a more realistic driver AI.
For example take a look at this video[1], specifically the part in which the user shoots at AI driven cars. The AI in GTA 5 responds in a much more realistic fashion. This has a huge impact on immersion and creating a lifelike world. GTA 5 came out 7 years ago. There is no technical reason for Cyberpunk's AI being this bad. CDPR simply didn't want to invest the time in making it better.
You're right, I had no idea how realistic drivers behave in newer games. Would be interesting to see what tricks GTA pulls off to hide the limits of their AI. Obviously they do a better job.
(Sidenote: When the guy started beating up pedestrians I just couldn't continue watching that video. Maybe I'm getting old.)
Self diving cars are not comparable to a driver AI. The AI exists within a world where it can have full knowledge of everything, and will have significantly less edge cases to worry about. Many racing and open world games do a great job at this, so it's not that it can't be done.
edit: Also hitting a pedestrian isn't a huge deal in a videogame.
FWIW, I got hit by cars a lot in my cyberpunk playthrough.
Fits the dystopian narrative I guess, but even in a dystopia people worry about scratching their car or an insurance nightmare so not too realistic experience.
Other than the game is very enjoyable on a PC, with some really enjoyable NPC action, interesting side quests and a great main story line. Also a great value compared to buying a movie or going to the cinema for a similar price - so far sunk 50h into the game.
> Which is weird, because my impression was that it was only truly broken on last-gen consoles (i.e. PS4, not 5), where it didn't really belong in the first place.
The game was announced 8 years ago and the last gen consoles were the main target. What do you mean it didn't belong there in the first place. The game came out now because it was delayed, otherwise it would have been out when we ONLY had the consoles where it "didn't really belong in the first place".
The main target was PC. You can tell just by looking at the controls. They were specifically designed to be played with a mouse and a keyboard (and they are terrible with a gamepad)
As a PC player I have the opposite reaction. Menus and input feels very console ported. I guess they decided on a compromise that would leave everyone feeling equally alienated.
This doesn't excuse the unplayable experience on consoles. If you're making a PC game, release it on PC. Don't advertise it or sell it as a console game.
When you watch footage of it on last-gen consoles, it looks nearly unplayable. It clearly wasn't optimized for those consoles at all, and definitely deserves to be refunded/pulled (not passing judgement on CDPR, just pointing out that it was very clearly developed for modern hardware and then shoe-horned backward)
I played it on PC. Honestly it didn't feel buggy at all. Especially compared to Skyrim or similar. You can get rare weird physics glitches, I had one situation where I seemingly teleported/blacked out (not sure if that is a quest) but nothing outstanding, and sometimes bodies don't fall to the ground in a proper way but generally it felt very smooth and bug free.
I am running it on a high end PC, maybe the bugs manifest more often on a lower spec PC?
RDR2 manages to offer a level of fidelity, detail on a larger scale and runs on these systems just fine. I don't think it's unreasonable for consumers to expect a game in development for so long to live up to at least the level of that game.
I honestly don't know what you're on about. What is detailed about RDR2? I played it, and its world felt mostly empty and devoid of variation. Even in cities, it severely lacks details, partly owing to the "mundane" historical period it is set in.
Cyberpunk has vastly more variation in NPCs, models in general, textures, light sources, and so on. In my playthrough, the largest crowd present in RDR2 was maybe 10 people on screen at the same time. Twenty at best. In my mind, the level of ambition doesn't compare, unless you were to limit your Cyberpunk experience to the Badlands.
To me it's not so much the bugs but the AI in general that seems to be worse than gta3's AI. It's an AAA game that's been hyped to death and delayed 3 times to deliver sub par results.
I like rockstars approach much better: very limited hype, limited numbers of trailer/videos, no crazy promise, &c. Release on a limited amount of platforms first and take your time to port it to others so that everyone gets a polished version (or at least as good as it gets given the hardware). Cyberpunk looks like your typical "over promise, under deliver" approach.
It's glitchy as hell on Ps4, but I'm loving every minute of it. The jankiness really adds to the whole cyberpunk aesthetic. Anyone complaining about buying a broken ass game based on a techno dystopian future will never be punk, let alone cyber.
If I could request one single upgrade though, putting user input fully onto a thread that isn't also responsible for rendering would be great.
I'm just confused why anyone buys day-1 games at all.
What would be the point of putting user input on its own thread, though? Do you letting the UI run at 60 if the 3D graphics are janky? Otherwise there's no point collecting input faster if the game isn't going to draw it until next frame.
> What would be the point of putting user input on its own thread, though?
Shooting things with a console controller becomes much easier. With a high power single shot weapon, you can sweep over your target and pull the trigger at the right moment. Works great for games that accurately record your input timing regardless of whether there's a frame drawn at the right moment or not. But once you learn this technique, playing games that require a frame to process input becomes very painful.
edit: Sure, it doesn't specifically need to be implemented as a thread if the controller events come with a timestamp, but my sibling comment indicates that in CP2077 the input event between frames might actually be lost.
Ironically, the released build for all consoles is made primarily for last-gen consoles. CDPR intends to release a patch for enabling "next-gen features" next year. So no, it runs like shit on last-gen because of poor/rushed engineering. Not because last-gen is "too dated".
Not sure if it’s comparable with Skyrim. Apparently the graphics are just broken beyond repair with the frame rate dropping below 15 on a lot of scenes in PS4 which is just insane;m, and which I simply doubt that any post-release patch is going to be able to fix at all. It is simply crazy that they released unplayable games at this state for those platforms.
Also bear in mind that this is the PS4 version that’s being pulled. Maybe that’s where your confusion came from. The proper PS5 edition is not released yet. The PS5 runs this PS4 version somehow fine... But that’s definitely not how it’s supposed to work in the first place.
We're kostly hearing people having troubles of course as they're the most vocal so it's hard to paint a complete picture, but I think it's in part from how fragmented console performances have become.
So you hear complaint from people with PS4 Pro and people with standard PS4 that swear they only have few issues but playable performances, which makes no sense unless the game is dependent on some less visible spec, like the performances of the media it has been saved to, which circles back to the original point, consoles are no longer this stable, uniform hardware that's hard to master but easy to support, and the requirement to target every hardware combination is anachronistic
I've played it for 12 or so hours on my non-pro PS4. Had to restart once because the controls stopped working ("mouse cursor" just moved to the bottom of the screen/huge delay in input) and one time a hint overlay got stuck and covered 1/3 of the screen and couldn't be closed. Savegame reload fixed it (the other bug required a restart).
The gameplay is fun and I don't regret buying it (physical copy). But I'm a sucker for the cyberpunk theme and Witcher 3 is probably my #1 console game of all time so maybe I'm willing to accept too much. Far from unplayable though and I don't really care for maxed out graphics so the look and feel is just fine for me.
This matches my experience. I played it for 50 hours on PC (and I am a very lazy gamer, typically I get tired of everything in one hour), and didn't encounter any breaking bugs. Overall, it's a very enjoyable story-driven game, although "AI is more A than I".
My explanation for the outrage is that in the past few years quite a few people made youtube careers bashing AAA games. Making outrage videos a lucrative business, apparently, and the new generation of wannabe game journalists jumped on the train.
I’m constantly wondering who even cares about the bugs, seeing as this “game” has hardly anything worth to be called gameplay. Imagine having to drive a tank through narrow back alleys while being drunk. That’s what the controls feel like…
Why people don't see other POV ? Maybe, Sony forced CDPR to release ps4 version as ultimate for ps5 release. Like than "CDPR, you want to ps5 release? So release both versions together.
So you think Sony did not notice the state of the game for ps4 and nobody in the Sony management did not aware of the problems? For most anticipated game of the year nobody at Sony warned, you kidding me.
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/