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.
I waited for 2 full years to try it to wait for the issues to be fixed and it still didn't do it for me. I don't really like the mechanics of the game much. It's good looking but it doesn't feel good to play.
Nah. It was a mess on launch and it's still kind of a mess. It's full of dead ends and stuff that doesn't quite make sense from cut content, wonky bugs everywhere (play long enough and you'll see a bunch), and whole ass features missing. People need to remember that CDPR's magic is its writers, not its devs. The Witcher games, when compared with other 3rd person action focused games, aren't great. We're talking C+ to B- game design from my perspective. It's just that the dang stories and settings are so compelling.
There are dozens of games that do what Witcher or CP2077 do (gameplay wise) with vastly more polish and style.
Also I really hate the whole "yer dyin', V" conceit. It literally does not matter to the gameplay except for one tiny, hidden thing that a lot of players won't even see. Plus it serves no purpose in the broader narrative than serving as a reason to push V into action ... except he/she ALREADY HAS ONE. There's no need for second inciting event writers, you already wrote 3 of them, one for each background. So basically it's redundant and the way it's handled in the story feels like a cop-out. I hate it when the narrative and the game play aren't aligned; it just feels bad.
I actually kind of believe them. But not because the game was in great shape when it launched and everyone ignored it.
I played on release and it was rough. But I also played it recently and it was also extremely buggy even though people act as if the game was patched into perfection. Performance is still awful, although even at minimum the game looks amazing. Reflections in particular look "grainy" and awful unless you put Screen Space Reflections on Psycho or enable RT which murders performance.
On the other hand, the story is pretty good, the characters are outright fantastic and the secondary missions (that aren't just going somewhere and murdering everyone) are great.
Article absolutely doesn't go into why someone might've thought it was bad, nice meme
my opinion nobody asked for, as someone who played it:
think the main story is great and that it touches upon a lot of cyberpunk themes in a very faithful way, not personally into GTA type gameplay and openworld, so that was a loss for me, but in general the world felt empty (why i tend not to like openworld) and the combat basic especially in comparison to anything promised a year before launch.
It also had some cute sidemissions here and there, particularly the Ghost in the Shell easteregg is tragic, and I enjoyed the sentient car (though I wish I could've been hanging out with my AI car alongside my tulpa)
I will continue to argue to this day, Cyberpunk should have been a PC exclusive. Most of the performance issues were on consoles, consoles that hold back innovation and progress in gaming. I remember a time when PC games were always at the forefront of better graphics and new ideas. Now, we cater to the lowest common denominator.
FWIW, I had a good time with the game on release. I don't know what was promised and still don't, but the game that I played was solid and fun. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose.
Most of the performance issues were on consoles, consoles that hold back innovation and progress in gaming.
except cyberpunk didn't do anything special that the consoles couldn't handle, it was just a case of a game that was very clearly designed for pc (the UI makes it obvious) and didn't bother to optimize their game. consoles didn't hold back anything.
Even on PC it was crap though. Not only was it extremely buggy but also poorly optimized. Low and unstable FPS even on my NVIDIA 3090 / Ryzen 5900X rig. It took several patches (and over a year) for performance to get better.
The game shouldn't have been a PC exclusive, it should have been delayed by a year or two (and not released on older consoles at all).
It was better, in that it was a good game compared to a lot of shovelware that gets released.
But that wasn't the issue. The issue was that it didn't deliver on a lot of what was promised, and one of the versions they released was virtually unplayable, to the point it had to be pulled off shelves.
If they had pulled back expectations and not made the old-gen version, it probably would've been much better received. They did a lot of things they shouldn't of done that either confused players, frustrated players, or just broke any trust they had.
Was it? Is it, even? Still stuck on how you can make a game with the name "punk" and have one of the mechanics in free roam be... hearing police chatter, you jump in and kill a bunch of folk while knowing only the bare minimum of the situation, and getting paid. :thonk:
I still remember feeling so betrayed after pre-purchasing that game. They had a "gold certificate" or something saying it was working with minimal bugs. Cyberpunk is the reason why I don't pre-order anything ever.
We need to stop giving triple-a games the benefit of the doubt. These aren't some small struggling indie dev team, this is a huge corporation with a massive budget and almost a decade of development time. If they can't deliver on a technical level, they need to scale down. Hundreds of indie games release with lower budgets and development time that do far more with much, much less. Hell, there are even some big releases with no problems. Look at half life alyx: announced 5 months before it came out, released on time, and had few (if any) game-breaking or immersion ruining bugs. Hell, tears of the kingdom apparently got a year to just do QA and polish everything.
Did this dev even play the game on PS4 / Xbox? The current hardware it was developed for at the time? It run constantly sub 30 FPS, even dropping into 20s and below. Like I get the idea that it should of been a "next gen" only title, but copies of the game were sold with the expectation that it's would be payable, 20 FPS with poor frame pacing isn't acceptable
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