Besides the ocean of technical issues that are mostly fixed now, the game is not even a tenth of what Mike Pondsmith and CDPR drooled and parroted the whole decade prior to its release.
It’s a beautiful looking FPS with enormous production values, PS2 era AI, no joke Vice City has a more lively world, and it has Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s depth for it’s "RPG" systems. Even when you accept the puddle deep experience and try to like it for what it is, the game gives a huge "fuck you" with how offensively quick the game ends.
As someone who loves the CP TTRPG and was an idiot to trust Pondsmith and CDPR, hating on C2077 was something that came from inside me.
It really annoys me how companies started leaned into blaming "haters" for any kind of criticism. Especially considering how quickly some people turn on whoever says anything critical of something they are hyped for.
It blows my mind so many gaming podcasts I listen to glossed over that when it happened. Like, it was so freaking bad they removed the game from the store, inhibiting anyone from purchasing it digitally. And everyone in the industry covered it like it was just any other bad, poorly launched game. No, it was extremely bad; truly broken in myriad of ways.
To be fair, the "it wasn't that bad" line is a quote from the journalist, not CDPR. What the VP of PR actually said is ""I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received." His point probably being that the game wasn't as unplayable as the uproar would suggest if you played it on specific platforms. Obviously it was very bad on old-gen. The hate train was definitely as big as the hype train, both of which were ridiculous.
What? I had it on PC, and there were enough bugs in that it frankly was unplayable. The reception wasn't just a matter of "oh it has issues on PS4", come on, and it was absolutely deserved.
Epic bullshit. Hacking was missing, cyberspace was omitted completely, essentially half the content in a typical Pondsmith game was just not present. And most of the quests in the game just ended abruptly, indicating they were cut short.
CDPR, nobody is buying your bullshit. Just suck it up and move on and BE BETTER. Be like you used to be.
I booted up the game and tried to make a netrunner/stealth build, only to realize the closest you can get to an actual netrunner is “still standard FPS stuff but now you can do quickhacks”.
Game is borderline unplayable if you go for a focused netrunner build, especially early on.
Oh, to hell with anyone who has an attitude like this guy. Consumers stating their displeasure about an overhyped, incomplete game IS a “cool thing”. Taking advantage of consumers, and then framing yourself as a victim, IS NOT a “cool thing”.
The FTC needs to get on this. Promising something awesome, then selling a buggy, broken mess, should not be the norm.
Honestly, I'd say I actually enjoyed cyberpunk more because of the public backlash, because I had such low expectations that when I borrowed it off a mate - I was blown away by how fantastic it actually was
Man, I hate when companies play the victim and try to tell us why we did/didn't like something. I wasn't following a fad, I was reacting naturally!
You're allowed to rush out an incomplete game, destroy your reputation, and lie to your users; none of that is illegal. But I'm allowed to not like your game, vocally, and stop buying your products in the future...
Yeah. If they can literally pay for thousands of Ads saying the game is "X", why is it rude for us to claim (as a single individual) that is was not so.
Thing is they do it because it works most of the time. Most gamers have the memory of a goldfish and they'll read that statement and go "yeah I guess it wasn't that bad" and keep giving people that constantly lie to them money. That's unfortunately how it is.
As someone who never followed the marketing material and had a high end PC: I was expecting Witcher 3 in Night City, and that's exactly what I got
I understand that plenty of people were disappointed by the missing features and the stuff they outright lied about, but I had fun with it. Probably a 7.5/10 at launch for me.
I got it on PS4 as a gift, about a month after it came out. The biggest problem I had was that my PS4 wouldn't read the disc from the factory because it was dirty (???), and that I had to immediately update it. I didn't play the TTRPG, but I've played TTRPGs similar to Cyberpunk. I have enjoyed it immensely. I put it down before finishing it, because I maxed out my level, and even though there was still a ton of storyline and random quests, there was no more advancement. That was kind of a bummer, but that was the only reason I put it down. (Well, that and I've generally lost interest in video games.)
I'd put it at a solid 9 when I first got to play it; I didn't experience any game-breaking bugs, just some annoying things. I very much enjoyed the experience. I understand people being frustrated that they didn't have a solid netrunner experience, but that didn't bother me all that much.
Kinda wanted to see if I could go cyberpsycho though...
That was the part that killed my trust in the company, they lied about so much! And they kept lying with the video embargo, they didn't let reviewers use their own footage if the review came out before the game did. That's such a huge breach of trust. And that's not even accounting for the fact that the game was literally unplayable on PS4.
The game was fine and playable on PC albeit with a ton of weird glitches and broken systems, but I don't think I can give them a single dollar of my money going forward. I can't justify giving people like that my hard earned money.
I understand that the game had a troubled launch, and that's a super-relevant criticism of the game as it was when it came out. But the sky-high expectations fans put on CDPR are largely self-inflicted. It's not like this is the first game with questionable marketing decisions or pre-rendered trailers selling a fantasy the game never comes close to fulfilling.
If you just go "Hey, a CDPR game set in a cyberpunk future, let's check it out," it's by and large a fantastic game.
Nope, they promised us an innovative, highly flexible RPG with a massive amount of content with pretty much a decade of development time and instead gave us yet another buggy AAA dumpster fire on rails that didn't deliver. I have pretty much sworn off 97% of AAA games. I mostly play indies whenever I have time and energy to play.
This game is incredibly polarizing in that people playing on console tended to have a horrible experience (and rightly so), whereas it was not generally a buggy mess on PC at launch.
People should really learn to read more than just a catchy title that’s obviously meant to create controversy.
Quote: “I was personally not happy with how things turned out,” said Platkow-Gilewski of Cyberpunk’s initial reception. “I was not expecting that. I knew immediately that we had to come back.” They knew they needed to improve the game.
All he’s saying is that they knew they fucked up and had to fix this, but at some point it just became unreasonable hate. This thread is the perfect example. Don’t even read the article, just react with what’s “cool”.
Context and nuance is a thing, everything isn’t black or white… Pay attention to when he says ‘I’ and when he says ‘We’. He (“I”) thought the game was better then it was hated (personal taste). They (“we”) knew that it needed to be fixed.
So now we're on the "Blame anybody and everybody BUT ourselves" stage. Lovely. <s>Because OF COURSE the consumers are wrong to be unhappy about misleading-to-outright-false marketing selling them a product that didn't actually exist outside of the marketing pages (like a game that was playable on XB1/PS4. ZING!)</s>
Hype culture needs to die in a fire. Preferably one fueled by all the cash that's going to the marketing departments.
Shit I can't stand -- people fucking up, apologizing for it, and then later insisting they didn't fuck up. People plead guilty to shit in court then try to retcon it. People who write essays about their behavior and then later say they didn't do it. This shit here. They fucked up, they said they fucked up. The followup for this shit needs to be: Were you lying then or now?
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