Cyberpunk 2077 faced a tough reception at launch, but with the Phantom Liberty DLC nearing launch, one CDPR dev feels the RPG was better than history records.
Not to mention the story was still very much on rails. Even if there were like what, 3 different outcomes? And on top of that, once you beat the game there is absolutely fuck all to do.
Honestly. I put about 50-60 hours into cyberpunk. I enjoyed every single hour of it. But once the main campaign was complete, there was just nothing left to do. I tried many times to jump back in and go do side quests or explore but the world is just completely empty.
I played for 60 hours or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. But they put a fatal design flaw into the game by forcing to you be V, and by putting a ticking time bomb in your head. That means that if you play logically, you'll follow the storyline quests in order to fix the big issue rather than spending the time slowly exploring the world they made. It also means that once you beat it, there's no fun in going back and doing it again, because you have to follow the same railroad tracks and go through the same story beats again. It cheapens the experience greatly.
Like you, the world holds no interest for me now that I have found a satisfying ending for V. The least they could have done was put in a "story mode," and a separate "open mode" where you can build any character (who isn't V) and live any life you choose, free from the main quest railroad.
I'll never understand why game designers would make an open world, and then slap on a "YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR LIFE HURRY UP!!! railroad quest as the main story. It's a lazy and utterly stupid design choice.
Counter point: Fallout 4 has you searching for your kidnapped son. I'm a father, in actuality. So to me that's an imperative too, but it didn't stop me from building skyscrapers in the interim. There was no real death clock, so I really don't get your criticism there.
Shit, final fantasy 7 is one of the greatest games of all time and that asteroid will sit there in the sky as long as you let it. You're reaching hard. The more I think on it, nearly every open world game has some imperative story point and they'll happily wait for you to get there. You get tuberculosis in RDR2 and you will live forever as long as you avoid the last mission. This isn't uncommon at all.
Whether there's a mechanical clock or not is irrelevant, this is about roleplaying and immersion. The player should be able to play in a way that makes sense in-world without being punished for it.
A good open world game should have lower tension moments sprinkled along the main story so it gives the player time to chill and explore the world.
I named two outstanding open world games recognized as being in the top 5 games of all time that utilize the exact same plot mechanic, either the criticism applies to them (and you aren't) or its invalid criticism.
You bring up immersion... rdr2 is considered the most immersive game ever. Rightly so. You still have imperatives you can ignore.
They do and i am, lots of games have this problem, which doesn't make it less of a problem.
Though my point was mainly that the fact that "nothing actually happens if you wait" isn't the issue, but rather the fact that it doesn't make sense for your character not to always priorize the main quest.
I haven't played fo4 because they neutered the dialogue, but in 3 there are similar stakes with you trying to find your father, and although that game isn't perfect about this either, there are times where the lead gets colder, and others where it's hotter, this counts as a shift of tension like i mentioned.
But that doesn't change the fact that narrative and gameplay are almost always at odds with each other in open world games. Even if dialogue or game state changes a little there's no need for you to actually follow the story if you don't want. Compared to Majora's Mask where there's a very real time limit to push you towards progress in each cycle.
Yet that doesn't mean developers should just give up trying to reconcile the two. There are ways to fit them together in a more satisfying manner and it's a valid criticism to point out when they are not
CDPR did something nearly every RPG or Open world game does. They made the main quest have a time count down that overwhelms/looms of side quests.
Skyrim does it. Why am I helping this dude recover his friend's bodies from a cave if Alduin the World Eater has returned and I'm the only one that can stop him. Fallout 4, is go find your infant son. BOTW, wtf am I doing fucking about when Gannon is on the rise? RD2, Arthur is imminently dying from TB but yet here I am romping around with no problem at all as long as I ain't doing the main story.
V dying from the chip is just like that, it's a flaw that many of these games have. Few games try to fix it, FNV has it so that the main quest factions that drive the story could do with your help/freelancing to put them in the best position. Morrowind makes it so you need to ingratiate yourself among the houses so you can be in a powerful enough political situation to deal with Dagoth Ur. This encourages you to do side quests.
I liked how this was handled in Spiderman 2018 - after major plot points, the main character would say 'looks like it'll take a while before the lab results (or whatever) come back, now's probably a good time to patrol the city', and the main quest wouldn't progress until you'd done at least one side activity - so if you wanted to just plow through the main quest it was just a small diversion, but it was also a great indicator that now was a nice time to spend some time playing around in the open world if you wanted to.
Both of the examples you gave are not counterpoints. They are examples of the exact same issue.
When I played FO4, I couldn't enjoy the building or storylines, because the game tells you that your son is all-important and that you need to rescue him from a world that is certainly going to destroy him. I'd have loved to sit around and carefully build the perfect post-apocalyptic town, but that stupid main quest was hanging over my head, and I'd have been a terrible virtual father if I let myself idly screw around instead of spending every ounce of energy searching for him.
It doesn't matter at all that the asteroid doesn't fall until you get to the spot you need to be, or that your son will never die and never age even if you play the game for 14 years, or that V lives forever because they never show him die in the game. It's an RPG, and it's specifically designed for you to immerse yourself in the game and "become" the character. A fake death timer is in some ways worse than a real one, because it breaks the illusion and reminds you constantly that this is a game.
The difference is, there was actually engaging content outside the main story quest in those games.
I'm at 67 hours in Cyberpunk and last time I logged in I spent 20-30 minutes just TRYING to find something to do. There was absolutely nothing that pulled you into the world. There's no base building mechanic. No fishing or hunting. Just.. empty lifelessness.
I'm not trying to say it's a bad game. The story was really fun. But if you are expecting some vast open world game that leaves you plenty to do outside the story... this just ain't it. At least in my own personal experiences. I dumped FAR more time into games like RDR2 and Fallout 4.
Not every open world game needs to be infinite, right? There was no base building mechanic... but why would it need one? There was one in Fallout 4, but it was pretty much entirely ignorable and only offered annoyance. A subset of people wanted to play the sims. There was no base building in GTA games either. Most open worlds don't have such a mechanic.
What I found it has is replay value. You can play that game multiple ways and it is markedly different. Same thing with Witcher 3, there's no infinite game mechanic. You start over and try different things. People loved that game and frankly CP2077 followed exactly the same framework, just "with guns". Why is it a problem with CP2077? Couldn't possibly be because there's a prominent trans character, or a pretty girl who won't sleep with your male character ...
I think the near clone that Cp2077 is of Witcher 3 really drives home the point. People didn't have a problem with the game, but certain groups have made it cool to nitpick one and not the other.
Why is it a problem with CP2077? Couldn't possibly be because there's a prominent trans character
Literally no one here is complaining about this, and you are the only one to bring this up. I have at least triple the time in Witcher 3 that I do in CP2077 and I never once completed the game in Witcher 3. Because there is so much more to do in that game. It is a more vibrant world, with more engaging side quests and little areas to explore.
There's nothing to explore in CP2077. It honestly feels like you are driving around in a vast wasteland for 90% of the game.
A lot of that is because there isn't a post game. So, you finish the quest lines and that's it. Witcher is the same way and it's fine, but Witcher was also a longer game with more interesting side content.
I'm torn because Skyrim was also a buggy mess. But it's my most played comfort game. The first few games, I couldn't finish the main quest. And it was soooo much worse than I ever experienced with cyberpunk. Both games I played within the first week of release.
One game, the dragon refused to be caught in Whiterun.
Another game, I caught him and he promised to let me ride him, but the guards never released him.
Another game, half the floor was missing from the floor of the greybeards manor. They were inside but there was a giant gap I couldn't cross over.
For the dark brotherhood, I couldn't complete that quest the first time when you hunt down Cicero because the room he was in also had no floor except for his area.
So many quests just wouldn't progress to the point I had the wiki open so I could use console commands to move quests forward.
I once got locked in during the werewolf quest when my companion was supposed to open the gate for me. He just stood there.
One quest where I fought three ghosts for the boss had a locked door behind me. I could never get that door to unlock with the fight. Sometimes I beat them all. Sometimes I could kill 2 and the third one just disappeared. The only fix was reverting to a save from before I ever entered the dungeon at all.
And so many more. Way more issues and game breaking bugs than cyberpunk. And yet I still hold Skyrim close to my heart. Especially as patches started coming and, more importantly, the Skyrim community patch mod. The modders are really what held up Skyrim.
It feels weird for me to hate what cyberpunk was when I live what Skyrim is.
If they hadn't over-promised things and straight up lied, it would have been received better. A lot of what they said was gonna be in the game still isn't, and likely won't ever be...
This is what it is. It's not the state that it launched in. It's that they literally lied about what the game was (I still swear that it's not even an rpg, because nothing you do matters, it's a story driven action adventure game) and kept promising features they KNEW were not present, but still kept doing it. Same as No Mans Sky. Just blatently lied repeatedly and then blame the fans "because it was cool to hate us" .... UM NO.
Honestly I felt it was pretty on par for an RPG game. Many quests have multiple outcomes, you get follow-up quests depending on how you handle certain things. You have about 3-4 separate endings to the game.
Most games don't have the kind of choices people actually expect and still get called rpgs. Skyrim for example has only a handful of quests with different outcomes and it's still considered a great RPG, although I myself have severe criticisms of it.
Keep in mind that at the time PS4/XBOne were still the main consoles, and people got a goddawful experience in them. So much so the PS4 version got delisted from excess refund requests. I believe the state it launched probably did more damage than overpromising.
To be fair to No Man's Sky, the devs realized their mistakes and have actively made the game better. They have consistently put out free updates that have made the game 100% better than how it started and continue creating new questlines to follow (most recent came out this month and is a four part series throughout the year). All of this for free, despite the game technically being old now. They even have VR capabilities. As a company, I appreciate that they've owned up that. CDPR, instead, are making a DLC, which is their right but definitely a different mindset concerning their customers' experience.
Yeah, this smacks of some PR spin. Now that some time has passed between the games release they want to fix their tarnished image.
I mean not only was the performance just awful across platforms, the game itself was only OK. It looked pretty but the gameplay was not at all what they promised.
We'll see how many outlets get paid and or suckered into this blatant PR move to try and retcon how bad they screwed up.
The game wasn't what was advertised. And once you finish the first section and you realize all the cool shit you thought you'd do happens in a cut scene you feel pretty discouraged.
It's also shitty that they shipped a buggy game to begin with. I don't care if you're CDPR, EA, Bethesda or Blizzard. Unfinished projects shouldn't be shipped.
It would have made so much more sense for the first act of the game being you and Jackie building your reputations. It also would have been the perfect time to have all those filler side quests, so then the time crunch the game says you’re under really would have felt like one.
And can you imagine the gut punch it would have been if Jackie died AFTER you’d spent hours really getting to know him and his mom and girlfriend?
Nevertheless, Platkow-Gilewski also says that he feels the original version of Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received.”
“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive. Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. We knew that the game was great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.
“That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like ‘let’s do this.’”
Yeah, I actually can get behind this. They got a lot of crap for the technical performance of the last-gen console version, partly because there was no current-gen native version. Having played it on PC day one my impression was that it was rough-to-normal (still better than day one Skyrim). Design-wise, the combat parts and open world design are the least interesting parts of it to this day, but even at the time I thought the narrative elements and obviously the visuals were great.
Just to sanity check this, even with the torubled launch the PC version reviewed with an average of 86 on Metacritic and sold very well. It was a technically rough launch and they should have delayed the console ports at the very least, but it's not a bad game.
I think on PC it was tolerable at launch. Definitely not perfect, but not a hot mess either. On consoles, I think I would agree with you though.
I got my fill before the first major patch hit....100%ing it and playing all paths of the main story I could find.
Exactly this, thank you! I had an amazing time with the game on release, and yes I DO remember launch day Skyrim and how broken it was. And how game-breakingly buggy it CONTINUED TO BE for over a year. There was a main story quest that I was unable to complete because of broken voicelines not being loaded! In comparison, CP2077 was a smooth as butter experience, and I had very few serious bugs. The one time I had them, a simple reload of my save fixed it.
The release of the game really hinged around the system you had at the time of launch. I really wanted to buy the game prior to launch, but I'm glad I didn't. All the promises CDPR made sounded awfully familiar to all those promises Hello Games made about NMS.
I didn't purchase the game until I had a PS5, and the Playstation Store put it back in their queue (PS4 version). I bought it on sale, yet a week later it was going for like $25 IIRC. I should have waited, but whatever. And there were minor issues, but the game was not broken like the clips I saw at launch. And I'll say it again, despite all the promises the studio made, a lot of the problems revolved around the specific equipment you were running.
The dev kind of does have a point, there was some overreaction, and seriously how many times are gamers going to continue to trust studios to deliver on their promises to these kind of games? However I believe he's painting a different picture at a critical point in the game's history where its first expansion is on the horizon.
And you see these same promises coming from the studio. The tone sounds so similar. Don't buy the DLC until after launch...I'm not. Wait to see the game reviews before buying. The only way publishers will stop making these overblown promises is when gamers stop pre-ordering games and expansions, regardless what carrots they dangle.
I think it's a good perspective but it rather downplays the biggest problem: Hype. He talkes about being "hyped up" and all this "hype surrounding us was big pressure" but it is one of the biggest reasons the game was recieved so harshly. It had been built up into being one of the greatest games ever made. In the end it was a good game but couldn't live up to the expectations.
Also while the game was better on PC, it really was a disaster on PS4 and Xbox One which is what drove it's bad reputation.
I like the game but to be honest I'm yet to finish it. The plot and narrative is good, but the open world is disappointing with far too much reliance on purely combat side missions, often with minimal associated narrative. The world would have felt much richer if they'd put in more narrative around the side missions and found other non-combat things to do in the city. I loved the Witcher 3 which has a lot of story around the side missions. I think CDPR could have take a leaf out of Bethesda's book for CP had multiple narratives running alongside the main plot.
But ultimately the game finishes unfinished - they promised too much to deliver at that launch, so kudos to them to being able to focus and deliver a good core game. It just could have been a great game if they'd managed to develop other elements of the game world.
Matches my experience too. Everyone I’ve talked to who had a horrendous experience on launch was not playing on PC.
Yes, it was overhyped. Yes, there were design calls which contradicted some claims. Is CDPR unique in that? Not at all. If we normalize it to other large launches, the PC version really wasn’t that botched.
Next-gen was broken from day one (xbox series s, in my case). It took months to get it to a reliable state. T-posing, broken missions, broken driving, terrible draw distance, progress resets, crowd/npc behavior. (Remember when it took them over a year to figure out how to make crowds behave realistically when a gun fight breaks out. Even then, most of them just dropped into a grab position with their hands above their hands, hiding behind nothing.) Even if we forget all of that, there's still the frequent crashing, with no rhyme or reason. You never knew what was going to cause it, and it was months before it was mostly reliable.
I missed your comment before mine, but this tracks with my experience. Thinking about it I did a stealth fists playthrough, with stealth being all about avoiding combat where possible... I thought I was just bad at the game, but maybe it was my inner reviewer telling me combat is not a fun way to play the game 😂
I'm old enough now that I accept it's fine to switch difficulty to be trivial in games where combat is not the point.
To be clear, combat in CP is still better than Witcher 3 combat, especially at launch of that game, but it's also not why I'm there. I'm there for the exquisitely rendered Keanu and the extremely granular, detailed story beats with unexpectedly affecting writing.
I'm glad you mentioned this because I almost never see anyone make the comparison, and skyrim didn't get nearly as much hate despite that fact. I remember if you were playing on PS3, walking into water would crash your game, and it was like this for the entire first year of the game on PS3. It also had a problem where save files that were too big would guarantee save file corruption. It was the definition of unplayable for lots of people.
Not saying cyberpunk is better than skyrim, just explaining how dire the launch for skyrim was, many people have forgotten just how rough around the edges skyrim was.
You did get screwed if you tried to play Skyrim on the PS3. The hardware limitations on the console caused obvious instability in the game that I don't think they ever fully resolved.
But I don't think most people played Skyrim on PS3 so they aren't going to have that same experience. I know I didn't.
The hardware limitations on the console caused obvious instability in the game that I don't think they ever fully resolved.
Except they released the game, in "enhanced" version, on the Switch, which is just old android phone hardware from several years back. The PS3 was totally capable of running it. The port simply failed - time constraint, investor pressures...doesn't matter. They chose to not make it better in the end when the hardware was perfectly capable of running the game.
But I don't think most people played Skyrim on PS3 so they aren't going to have that same experience. I know I didn't.
The number of people that play a game on console is vastly underestimated by pc-primary gamers when previous titles by a developer were PC only. Skyrim on console was big. Big enough that they decided to port it to everything they could. You don't waste that kind of developer time and not expect a return...
Except they released the game, in "enhanced" version, on the Switch, which is just old android phone hardware from several years back.
Specifics matter in this case.
My quick review of specs shows the Switch having a 4GB of RAM to work with. Not a lot, but enough that even with the OS, you shouldn't run into too many problems.
The PS3 had 512MB of RAM. But actually, 256MB was dedicated to video, so it only had 256MB for the game itself. Oh, and the OS used a chunk of that. So, the PS3 has less than 256MB of RAM that is usable by the game. And that's where you are running into issues, especially in a game like Skyrim that is heavily reliant on memory for the amount of state the game tries to keep track of.
The point is a bit moot, in that TES got big on consoles as soon as Morrowind. Oblivion was already a console headliner.
I do think fewer people went with the PS3 version because people knew it was broken, just like Bayonetta or Red Dead Redemption. I would bet it still outsold the PC version at the time (that balance may have shifted over the years of re-releases and giveaways).
New Vegas and Fallout 3 were borderline unplayable on PS3 when they launched too.
Old timers keep warning people not to buy on launch. But every time a 'big' game comes along, there are a lot of people who ignore the warnings and do it anyway.
Witcher 3 was the same. Roach(horse) on a roof was a meme at one point. But CDPR wasn't as famous then, so far less people played that on launch.
Oh, and while we're at it, Witcher 3 isn't a true RPG either. Cyberpunk is quite a lot like Witcher 3 IMHO.
How quickly we forget that the Witcher superfans were absolutely livid about CDPR having dumbed down the potion system. I mean, I disagreed then and I disagree now, but "they dumbed it down for consoles" was a bit of a talking point at the time.
Now, the atrocious input lag and having to shimmy for five minutes to pick up a thing werre always bad, and they aren't even great after their passive-aggressive option to make it slightly better under objection.
Still, I do think Witcher 3 is the better game, I was just suprised to find out how many of its strong points do carry over to CP after hearing all the online rage at launch.
People tend to forget how broken games were at launch once they're no longer broken, which is why these days you only get broken games.
I think studios need to reassess what is a showstopping bug these days, because restricting it to hard blockers is no longer enough, but that may require people having a different perspective on these things.
But yeah "the game will eventually get into an endless crash loop if you play too much of it" is a pretty high bar to meet in terms of launching a broken game, and since I did play Skyrim on PS3 first, I may have a bettter memory of it than others.
I think there's definitely some room for interpretation here, some games suffer from basically being brigaded, and this OP actually points that out. Some games are cool to hate. CP2077 was one of those. Skyrim wasn't. People forgave it for a lot because it wasn't cool to hate.
Look at Horizon Zero Dawn. Same story. That game has incredible game play, some of the most creative and new ways to do it. But certain people - ahem - brigaded reviews and made it cool to hate. Which sucks because that game has an amazingly unique combat system. Really nailed an action based trapping and hunting instead of just overwhelming force or stealth.
Conversely people adored MGS5 and to be completely honest it was generic at best. Go figure it featured a hot naked woman with jiggle physics who couldn't speak and would die if she put clothes on.
Wait, did they brigade Zero Dawn? I mean, my impression of it is that they're cursed as a franchise with the worst possible timing, having released against genre-defining competitors two out of two times. If anything the impression I get from people is that it's the "deserved better" franchise.
Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had "open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years" maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.
Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.
Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?
They still trying to gaslight lmao.
CDPR have good writers and terrible management. Cyberpunk 2077 was in development for 7 years, one of the most expensive games ever made and still released as a pile of shit marketed behind false promises. Where the money went and what happened during that time, only they know, but something went seriously wrong.
Lol nah. Game was a mess. Nowhere near feature parity with what they promised, bugs galore, awful police AI, and the last gen versions were literally unplayable to the point that they were removed from stores.
I dunno, I finished it which is rare enough for me nowadays. I didn't speed through the story like I did with Diablo 4, either; I found it compelling when I could immerse myself in the game world. Then again I play on PC, so I may have fewer bugs to contend with than console players?
This was my experience as well. I played the game on PC day one and it was fine in terms of bugs/glitches. Maybe some minor stuff but nothing that really took me out of the game and it ran perfectly fine, albeit I had a shiny new 3070 at the time.
I went back and played it again a couple of weeks ago on PS5 with all the updates applied and…yeah, it’s still bad. Graphics look nice but the gameplay is terrible. Loads of bugs still with random glitching through surfaces, NPCs glitching and doing random shit, gun-play still clunky as hell, still no police chases. The whole game just feels soulless and I personally don’t find any fun in playing it.
Ehh, I'd say they are maybe 20% right about that one, the gaming community just piled on top of it like it was the most irredeemable pile of trash ever.
The thing is the other 80% of that story is them telling upfront lies about the game, them intentionally hiding that it was literally unplayable on consoles, and even now years after its launch after numerous updates and bugfixes the game is still just a shadow of what it could have been.
It's a fun good game but the thing I think about most while playing it is usually about missed potential, "damn this could have been so much better". Maybe Phantom Liberty and the free update improves this, I really hope it does, but the game is a mess of gameplay mechanics, terrible progression loops and empty open world.
i don't think i've pre-ordered anything since bestbuy ended GCU. 20% off special editions (and in many cases a $10 giftcard for preordering)? sign me up.
$70 for a game that will probably be broken at launch and not fixed until it's a $20 game? no thanks.
sony's scummy practice of restricting steelbooks to the $150+ special editions (and not even including a physical disc to put in said steelbook) has completely killed any incentive to preorder a first party sony game. even outside sony, you see what atlus is doing where they'll re-release the game over and over again with new content and no upgrade path, or games that just outright disappoint like tales of arise, yakuza 7, etc. and it's VERY hard to justify a preorder in 2023.
I don't know why it's still a thing, especially on PC, where almost all games are digital. Even when I was still getting disk based games, I never actually ran into the issue of not being able to get hold of a copy.
I don't even want to play newly released games, since they're pretty much guaranteed to be broken for the first week at least.
This gane should have been released in 2022, not 2020. And it shows, the improvement over the years made this game into a full game and not whatever mess it was.
I'm glad that it seems like they've turned around on this game but they cannot be revisionist about the performance of the game at launch. It was quite bad and we have receipts to prove it.
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