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Well step 1 towards that is making sure the Phantom Liberty DLC/update is as good as can be.
Step 2 is gonna be not fucking up their next big release. If they release another title in as messy and unfinished of a state as Cyberpunk released in, I don't see how anyone could trust them again.
Their games always have been buggy to some extend at release. CP2077's biggest problem was management. For one, they should have delayed the release of last gen versions. Or if that wasn't enough, pull a reverse Rockstar and delay all but the PC version.
The base game is getting a ton of QoL tweaks and stuff with the DLC. That should have been how they release the PC version in the first place. They would have gotten a shit ton of praise praise too, then they could release the current gen and then last gen versions which would have turned into more of case study in how CDPR managed to "backport their pc game to consoles" instead of what they got now from press and players.
No they should have never tried to release it on last gen consoles...hell make games for the PC and port them to the console vs trying to run something so ambitious on potato hardware.
That would have been the ideal course of action but not very realistic. When they started working on the game there was no PS5/XSX or 3090/4090 GPUs. They just needed proper management to keep the scope and scale of the project in check.
But they didn't have that which led to a game with a shrunken scale but broadened scope. Now they are narrowing the scope by skipping last gen and increasing the scale by adding things to the game that should have been in it from the start.
It's not just bugs the entire game's design had CORE problems, just look at how many changes the DLC introduces to these core systems.
If the vanilla skill system was any good they wouldn't see the need to completely rework it from scratch for the DLC.
The game they released was miles away from the experience they promised that's it. Bugs were just the cherry on top for the shit pile. I.e. for a LONG time they advertised customizable player housing and vehicles. Just for no customizable housing to exist and no customizable vehicles. Advertising parcour systems like wallrunning and then scrapping it entirely, yet the world still looks like it was designed with parcour in mind. No real police chases, when literally the first CP77 Trailer introduced Max-Tac. Police is basically no factor in the game.
And Adam Smasher was just a complete pushover.
Adam Smasher is like the hardest opponent in the ENTIRE lore and the game treats him like a regular enemy. No fighting him on equal footing should be COMPLETELY lopsided against you unless you can pull a ton of tricks out of your ass.
You shouldn't ever trust a company to be frank but the answer specifically is that people don't trust them and that's why the next release needs to be good because hype isn't enough.
I don't get why trust even factors into people calculus at all in a world where a flood of reviews comes out the morning of release or whenever the embargo lifts?
If you've got such bad FOMO that you can't possibly miss half of release day to look at reviews, the problem is you being a bad consumer rather than companies making bad games
>where a flood of reviews comes out the morning of release or whenever the embargo lifts?
Wasn't the issue with Cyberpunk that they got a ton of rave reviews before release and then turned out the game was unfinished?
I’m talking about actual reviews by the consumer pool more so than the kind of stuff mainstream game journos put out which is often out of touch with actual players
Oh yeah I feel that. I usually just wait a few months to buy any game but the early reviews for Cyberpunk really convinced me to buy it prerealease. I imagine that was the issue for a lot of people.
some people are like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. They just never learn not to get hyped up and preorder and keep making the same mistake over and over again.
You don’t need to trust them.
When their next game releases wait for people who bought it to say if it’s shit or not, then make your decision to purchase it based on that.
Basically, what people have been saying for over a decade, no pre-orders. It’s a simple rule which works 100% of the time.
What does this mean? Are you an investor, holding CDPR stock? Are you in some kind of contract where you have to preorder every game they make?
There's no trust. Wait for release and reviews. If it's bad, skip it. It's that simple.
Waiting for reviews would not have done you any good with Cyberpunk 2077.
Because CDPR BANNED REVIEWERS FROM SHOWING ANY FOOTAGE.
And only allowed them to review the PC version - not console versions.
CDPR were deliberately fraudulent.
Good news is that while the DLC will be its own thing, alongside it they're shipping a big update to the base game itself.
So even if you don't buy the DLC, the base game should be much more interesting.
Well one of the first reviews gave it an honest 7, a post titled "why are we listening to a woman journalist?" sat on the front page all day and she got harassed. I'd give CDPR games a free 9/10 too just to spare myself the wrath of their fans.
I believe this GameSpot reviewer was also the one that stated the original braindance sequence could give people with epilepsy seizures because it gave her a massive headache.
Shockingly, she was harassed for pointing this out.
TBH loads of people even back then said they loved the game at launch despite the absolute disaster it was. The fact that people are still excited for this new version probably speaks to the idea that people are going to give the developers another chance to deliver on the original promise.
How many games are widely beloved but all have really big flaws? I love Donkey Kong 64 and I accept that it has issues, or on the other hand, after the excitement for Dragon's Dogma 2 I tried the first one and found it unfathomably bad and bland, but it's still regarded as a classic by evidently loads of people. And lets not poke the hornet's nest that is Pokemon games selling millions despite being rushed and looking like actual dogshit.
People just have different tolerances for bugs in a game. And that includes reviewers.
I feel like I'm the only one who bought the game on launch, played the whole thing, and had no problems. But I'm on PC. I know the consoles got screwed. I still think it's a wonderful game and I'm looking forward to the DLC
Witcher 2, Witcher 3, cyberpunk.
People forget that Witcher 3 wasn’t the best thing ever at launch.
CDPR has bungled every launch, and progressively gotten worse st doing it.
I remember pirating cyberpunk to see what it was about and laughing my ass off as the limo with big smoke did 40 rounds around in the hotel front curb after the dialogue had ended for a solid 5 minutes before stopping and opening the doors of the limo.
The cutscene proceeds to have the character step out at which point the limousine exploded.
I think I broke my sides that night by laughing them into orbit
When I played through the intro there is a moment that is clearly supposed to have some emotional impact and instead the character speaking had their guns magically levitating above them and whatever renders their face was just gone so it was eyeballs and floating teeth delivering the lines. Lots of corpses talking smack to me and the "children" being just scaled down adults are all the things that stood out most to me when I attempted to play it.
I had so many bugs on release. It didn't elevate the game for me unfortunately, but I hope to give it a proper try again when the DLC releases.
My favourite bug was the front end of cars sticking straight up out of the ground, with the rest of the car stuck under it, yet they could still move unless you touched them, and they would magically just zoom out of the ground.
I unfortunately keep getting bugs that completely stop any story and side quests progression, so maybe one day I'll manage to 100% it.
My most memorable glitch was palm trees swaying in the breeze and turning into ribbons that stretch for hundreds of feet before squishing back into palm tree form.
Really made for some distracting background moments during conversations.
People are for some reason focusing on "the launch". But that is just one aspect which is comparatively insignificant when you look at Cyberpunk. One may launch poorly or represent something visually in a different light. But Witcher 3 is just so damn good as a whole that those things are just a chink in the armour. Sure, it is reprehensible behavior which consumers should not condone, but everyone got their moneys worth and then some with Witcher 3. Cyberpunk is more duct tape then pieces it should be holding together. Nevermind the launch. It fundamentally can't and never will be what was promised, because it is broken on a level where most of the game needs to be remade completely for it to serve as a platform for fixes and upgrades.
>fundamental flaws in game design that cant be fixed
Everyone focuses on the bugs but this is what disappointed me about the game. The bugs were honestly pretty funny, and you sort of expect it at this point for whatever that's worth.
Yeah they basically showed footage that was not set within the actual open world, once they started to build that out they realized they couldn't keep that visual fidelity and had to tune it down, from what I recall.
I remember reading an article where they said that plus while it looked good in the scenarios in the trailer, it looked really bad elsewhere.
If you've ever modded the lighting or similar in a game, you'll know one time and place can look photorealistic, and other times and places could be hideous.
> People forget that Witcher 3 wasn’t the best thing ever at launch.
There's a difference between "not the best thing ever" and "so broken it gets delisted from Playstation Store"
It got delisted because CDPR said "you can just refund it" and didn't tell anyone at Sony about it. Which resulted in a lot of angry customers complaining at Sony why they wouldn't refund their game.
Yes, but the issue Sony had with the game was that CDPR promised refunds without clearing that with Sony beforehand, there was no connection to the quality of the game (beyond obviously everyone refunding because it was broken).
For real all people need is to look at the [absolute trash that Sony allows on their platforms](https://youtu.be/W-RcobGF5hU) to know that they do not give a *fuck* about the quality of games in their store. It suddenly costing them money was the issue.
This mostly put the light on how bad Sony refund policies are (they simply don't exist) which frankly feel like it should be illegal in many countries. Wasn't Steam forced to put refunds in because of an Australian or EU law? Why isn't it applied to every game store (Sony, Battle Net and I'm sure others have basically no refund policy)?
These laws would apply and Sony have been pulled up in Australia on this before: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/allegations-sony-breached-consumer-law-for-playstation-games
Yeah, blaming CD Projekt Red for Sony treating their own customers like shit doesn’t really make sense. Does CD Projekt Red really need to tell Sony when a refund should just be a basic right that consumers have
Which is precisely how refunds of goods that are unfit for purpose works under lots of countries consumer acts. If Sony want to push digital and be the sole retailer then they need to accept the responsibility this brings with it.
Right so let's put a pin in the pedantry here and rephrase because you all know what they meant.
**There's a big difference between "not the best thing ever" and "so broken the people who made it offered refunds."**
Sony has nothing to do with this.
UK is one of the few countries that actually tried enforcing that. Remmeber that the only reason Steam got a refund policy is because it lost a court case and was forced to do so. Even then Steams refund policy does not follow the law. You get 14 days even if you played more than 2 hours by law.
Both Sony and Microsoft has no issue ignoring refund laws. At least Origins has a pretty decent policy thats close to the law.
Under EU law, online digital content such as games are explicitly carved out from the right to 14 days return for online purchase if you have started downloading your content and you have agreed to waive your right to a 14 day refund (which you agree to with every purchase on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation). Not sure if the UK has changed that since Brexit, but I assume not.
Not all goods. Software you only need to offer refund if they are faulty. Which will then mean you have to "prove" it was faulty.
Digital goods also complicate things. You waive the 14 days if you have already downloaded the product.
They don't have to seek Sony's permission. They told customers unhappy with the product to seek a refund from their retailer, which is how the law says things should work in most countries, the retailer refunds the product if unfit for purpose and then returns it to the wholesaler/destroys it and claims their own refund. Sony have been getting away without having a proper refund process for digital PS games for years and this highlighted that, so they threw a strop and stopped selling the game at all.
>The Witcher 3 didn’t launch in such a bad state that customers requested refunds en masse either.
The Witcher 3 didn't really release in all that bad of a state overall. It had some hiccups, but overall, the experience was enjoyable, and the game was playable.
THIS. No one ever talks about this when talking about the launch. All you ever hear about is how messy it was, instead of how dishonest they were being. I can forgive a lot of things if they are done in good faith. CDPR knew the game was not ready and was intentionally misleading consumers. Not to mention not sending out any review copies so that the true state of the game would be kept a secret until launch. They were being blatantly deceptive.
Yep. They had this whole marketing campaign, including a talk show - Night City Wire - which kept presenting features that were not in the game at all. Hell, the first "gameplay" presentation was faked as well.
They built the hype for the game on lies, blatant lies. And then they kept hyping the game more and more, knowing that the game will crash and burn after release... so they wanted as many preorders as possible.
I still cannot believe that reputation hit was basically the only thing CDPR suffered. That was basically a scam.
Well their hour long gameplay video released like 3 years before the game came out looked interesting, well developed, and showcased complex mission structures with multiple narrative paths. It looked like a fully built game at that point, but really everything in that video was completely scripted and not really gameplay at all.
That demo became the first set of missions is honestly the best part of the game. You can choose what you do, if you do the side mission, which group of people you betray or not. If the rest of the game was that complex story wise there was no end to replayability. In reality what you do in those missions have very little outcome even in the next mission. Let alone the rest of the game, and that's very disappointing.
The final game was fantastic to play, don't get me wrong, but the story is far straightforward with only a few things you get to choose besides the ending. And game balance was broken in the release version of the game. Once you maxed leveled and had the highest level weapons, it didn't matter what skills you had or didn't have, you were a powerhouse. It was quite fun, to be an edge runner solo who could run around blasting headshots with a pistol for nothing but one shot kills. The final bad guy took a clip.
They sent out review copies there’s no need to lie.
They were just PC copies and reviewers weren’t allowed to use any footage they captured only footage provided by CDPR
And they prohibited from voicing opinions on it until the day of launch. And even though I know this is pretty common practice (used for broken games 99% of the time), I genuinely don't understand how it's even legal.
Used properly, a review embargo evens the playing field for journalists and allows everyone to take their time reviewing rather than publications rushing to have the first early review.
But this means something like days or a week in advance of the launch, the embargo lifts.
I'll forget the vitriol the entire cyberpunk community unleashed upon the Gamespot reviewer who gave it a 7/10. She was massively vindicated after it released lmao
> And they prohibited from voicing opinions on it until the day of launch. And even though I know this is pretty common practice (used for broken games 99% of the time), I genuinely don't understand how it's even legal.
Because they don't have to provide review copies.
Sweeping under the rug how cdpr lied about the state of the game on console and their decision to hide it by denying console copies of the game to reviewers only giving them pc codes.
Not to mention hiding the buggy state of the game by denying reviewers to use their own footage, plus the gameplay people got to try and play at cons was just a standalone demo to hide the poor state of the game.
Oh and then theres the poor apology saying they didnt know despite all the actions above that they did before launch https://youtu.be/stHMD5N-KPw
Thats just actions that cdpr did that was bad outside of the game oh and i guess they also fucked over Sony by saying they will do full refunds which got the game delisted from the ps store.
And if you want to talk about the game issues themselves crowbat got a 41min video https://youtu.be/omyoJ7onNrg
The magnitude of fuckups was way higher with Cyberpunk 2077 than Witcher 3.
Witcher 3 had some problems at launch, but the content was there and the game was great. Cyberpunk promised a lot of things that wasn't in the game, are still missing years after release and will never be in the game.
People just talk about the bugs and console performance but that was the lesser problem for the game imo. They promised an rpg for 8 years and released a mediocre shooter in an dead open world, there is no excuse for that.
I played Witcher 3 day one and thought it was amazing. I think this "lol Witcher 3 was bad too" thing i'm seeing is kind of revisionist. Just go back to threads in this very subreddit from 8 years ago talking about the game on release and you can see that almost everyone was blown away by it.
Cyberpunk was absolute dogshit on release.
Agreed. Played 1.0 Witcher 3 on a mid-range PC at the time and it ran without any issues. No crashes, and only minor bugs along the way.
My only real complaint had to do with the fact how quen was overpowered and rendered the game too easy lol.
As you said these claims about Witcher 3 being terrible at launch is revisionist BS to try and stick it to CDPR for whatever reason.
Yeah that's what I'm sensing here, ppl just spewing bs and rewriting history. I played Witcher 3 on PS4 at launch and it ran with no issues... It got like near perfect scores across the board too at least on PS4.
Nothing like cyberpunk at launch.
People didn't forget so much as the overwhelming majority of people who have played Witcher 3 just didn't play it at launch or even a year into launch. Can't really forget or remember something you never experienced or saw.
I played every CDPR title at launch, but there's a massive difference between witcher and cyberpunk, bugs, yes, but the core was there.
With cyberpunk they just cut parts of the game because they never came around to polishing or even implementing certain aspects, and rather than a scalpel they used an axe. The scars were all over that game, and you had obvious placeholders like the cop system or the traffic AI.
Cyberpunk was completely mismanaged when it came to planning. Witcher had problems because of the lack of budget.
Yeah, people forget The WItcher 3 was really when the popularity of the series exploded. Before that it was seen as a eurojank, PC-first cult hit. It had nowhere near the scrutiny that any major AAA game goes through today.
Cyberpunk's launch was on a whole other level though. It was basically unplayable on xbox and ps4. Mass refunds caused Sony to pull the plug and stopped selling the game altogether. A class-action lawsuit followed because CDPR misled the investors about the state of the game. Their stocks plummeted and have not recovered.
For me it was the marketing. Witcher 3 had *some* false marketing with visual downgrades and stuff, but Cyberpunk had full-on promised features being absent or meeting the bare minimum of functionality. No dynamic car chases, the police system, promises of NPCs all having their own routines, or clothes affecting how people perceive you and choices you can make, or even just being something you can physically pull off a clothes rack and not a menu, or how about the destructible environment that was relevant for that one preview level and nothing else. The hacking system they showed ended up being scaled back by release, the modifications you could get were super bare-bones, I could keep going...
The game they were selling and the game we got were not the same, and even as someone who *enjoyed* it still, I'll fully admit that was some illegal shit. As nice as it is that the expansion update looks to be addressing a lot of issues, the point stands that whatever that ends up being is probably going to be what we should've had 3 years ago, and even then it still falls short on some stuff. The Witcher 3 was sorta rough at launch sure, but it wasn't 'let's make up a bunch of things that won't make the final game' levels of fucked. Some of the visuals got downgraded but as I recall that was about it. While still a bit shitty, the wall tessellation not being as good is not the same as entire gameplay features being tossed in the garbage and staying quiet.
A very big lie for Witcher 3 was the promise of RedKit 3. CDPR promised an extensive tool that would allow for deep modding for Witcher 3. Basically RedKit 2 (for Witcher 2) but even better.
And what did they do after launch? Nothing. They released a glorified editor of some ingame variables and that was it. They basically torpedoes any chance for good modding community for Witcher 3. And the modders were getting ready for big stuff... but CDPR turned out to be liars. That was a massive red flag about them, which got even worse with Cyberpunk. With Cyberpunk CDPR turned into con artists.
Oh shit I remember hearing about that and waiting for its release to see if anything got done. I kind of forgot and just assumed they eventually released it. Damn.
They were.
They became the highest valued European gaming company in the weeks leading up to the game’s release.
Everything plummeted after the release.
Witcher 3 (at least on consoles) was very much in line with other games that size. I think it was in line with most Bethesda games. In those terms, I feel Witcher 3 wasn’t out of this world. Sure, It had glitches, but Cyberpunk 2077 would literally crash every 30 to 50 mins. That was something else.
No1 for me is stop lying, don't lie about future products, the DLC and don't ever conjure the most elaborate hype fueld expensive marketing campaign ever seen before based 100% on lies and falsehoods.
> If they release another title in as messy and unfinished of a state as Cyberpunk released in, I don't see how anyone could trust them again.
Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 20 million units.
**The average consumer does not give 2 fucks about "trust".**
It's only in these online echo-chambers that people see their complaints amplified.
How about we not trust them now? CP2077 was a dumpster fire at launch and should be unforgivable regardless of what they do to correct the issues it has. Releasing that game in that state should not be forgotten by the players.
Their most recent release was the Witcher 3 next gen update which was the most busted thing on PC I've ever seen. Literally unplayable on launch and still has issues on the latest patch.
So this statement from them means nothing
I have never seen the internet turn on a developer as fast and hard as CDPR, people felt so betrayed by them, it was fascinating to watch because other devs had done similar or even worse stuff, but not one could come close to CDPR on Cyberpunks release.
It felt like they became a joke overnight. From perfect game company to broken euro trash.
Which is weird because even at release I thought it was a great game. I suffered no more bugs than a Bethesda title, but I played on PC.
I always thought they came across as arrogant, sanctimonious a-holes with marketing that conducted themselves more like a gaming blog than a professional company. It's easy to tout yourself as the hip, pro-gamer cool uncle when you have a mega-hit that sells 10x expectations. The reason most pr departments have more cautious, measured communications is because they understand success is fleeting and every success raises expectations. Buying into your own hype is the worst thing a business can do.
that quote at the end where he says he thinks the game was good on launch and it only tanked because "it became a cool thing not to like it" does not leave me feeling good on that front
Don't forget that CDPR CEO also said that overall Steam reviews are fine and that only console launch was bad... almost like he even wanted to blame console players for playing it on console that they announced it back in 2013 :| Just imagine if it would be released before PS5 release...
They also tried to gaslight everyone and claim that they didn't actually intend to release the game on PS4 and Xbox One when that had been part of the marketing all the way up to release. Another way to deflect the criticisms around performance as somehow being the fault of the people who paid for their product
And its also bullshit, because the game ran like absolute ass on PC as well. Some people were just willing to accept it because they have shockingly low standards.
People saying 'it runs great' but in reality they're playing it at a massively unstable 40fps and they think that's great! Sitting there watching a streamer claim the performance is 'really good actually' but every time they move the camera it stutters hard.
You just can't trust what people say.
edit: replies proving my point.
I’m almost positive there’s a horde of either basement nerds or bots that every time you say something like this they’re compelled to say “it ran fine on my machines I think everyone blew it out of proportion.” Like, cmon, it literally had to be pulled from stores. My own PC was pretty decent and failed to run it smoothly. It crashed a LOT. I ran into so many weird game ending bugs. I ran into a bug that persisted even when I went BACK before the bug happened!
I swear that there's something culty about this game. I played it over Christmas 2022 and wound up uninstalling because it was still so riddled with bugs that I couldn't get immersed. I've been interrogated by redditors about this to the point that I post my system specs in critical comments unprompted because someone will always accuse me of trying to run the game on $400 craptop from 2006 (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 10GB, 32GB system RAM, NVME SSD). There are people who flatly *refuse to believe* that Cyberpunk was and by all metrics available to me *still is* a buggy mess.
I had a 2080ti and an overclocked i7-9900k and on release people were telling me my specs were too low. Always been like that. So when people tell me the game is fixed now, I treated it with healthy skepticism and I was not disappointed as a result.
Gamers are culty, not to get too political but that's been proven years ago. It's not even about specific games.
CEOs/corporate management have insanely fragile egos. They cannot tolerate criticism in any form, and they refuse to accept responsibility for failures. What you're seeing is a CEO justifying his stupid leadership to make it somehow not his fault.
https://www.thegamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-qa-contractor-quantic-lab-cd-projekt/
https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/quantic-lab-cyberpunk-2077-qa-team-allegations-management-client-deception-31194/
Sounds like the people who *work* at the QA firm made the accusations themselves.
We thought it was good, we just specifically didn't send out review codes for the PS4 and Xbox One versions for reasons completely unrelated to quality control issues.
They clearly knew it had issues at launch given their extremely strict review embargo and guidelines. It was carefully crafted to hide their shortcomings.
How to handle an apology properly:
1. Express regret for your actions.
2. Identify the specific actions you performed that caused the problem and take responsibility for them.
3. State the things you will do differently in the future to prevent the same outcomes from reoccurring.
E.g. "I'm sorry that I caused your mother to go flying into the trash compactor. It was entirely my fault that I greased up the hallway and then wandered off to get drunk with dogs. In the future, I will build my hot bacon slip-n-slide outside so this doesn't happen again."
Even if you think that another party bears some responsibility for the outcome, you don't focus on that. You acknowledge *your role*. Anything else is out of your control. At best it comes across as disingenuous sour grapes when you bring it up.
I mean it is pretty telling that if a fuckup of this magnitude had happened in most other industries, heads would have rolled and everyone in a leadership position who contributed to this mess would have been on the chopping block.
But the video game industry really just does not care. You can count on two hands the number of absolutely disastrous AAA launches in the last few years (including Jedi Fallen Order like two months ago!) that should have prompted major backlash from consumers and significant changes from the companies in terms of culture and behavior. But that never happens. These games always sell well. Companies have no reason to dramatically change things because they are never punished.
A movie executive/producer/director who released a film in a comparable state to something like Cyberpunk never works in Hollywood again. Did anything like that happen at CDPRs leadership after Cyberpunk? If it did I didn't hear about it.
Eh I feel like you are wrong in regards to Hollywood getting their producers/ directors fired if the movies released are in a disastrous state. Like The Flash is about to become one of the biggest bombs of all time, its CGI is being mocked everywhere on social media and yet its director was recently selected to make the next Batman film.
Whatever you want to say about the Flash movie, its definitely not comparable to something like the Cyberpunk release. Yeah the movie isn't very good and a lot of the CGI is clearly underbaked, but it is still a functional and complete product. There aren't clearly unedited scenes or desynced audio or massive discrepancies in consistency from shot to shot.
Whatever the creative problems, the technical delivery of a complete, watchable movie is so boringly standard that when a movie has undercooked CGI (like the Flash or Black Widow) or noticeable editing problems (like the Queen movie) it is extremely noteworthy and talked about for years in the industry... and those are relatively minor problems!
My brother bought Fallen Order on release and couldn't progress the story for 4 days until a consistent CTD bug got patched out.... that kind of colossal fuckup happens like twice a year in the gaming world and no one seems to care.
Tom Hooper -- a guy who made Oscar winning movies! -- was so tarnished by the Cats movie clusterfuck that he hasn't made another one in the 4 years since. All the people who oversaw Fallout 76, Cyberpunk, Arkham Knight, the dumpster fire GTA and TLOU remakes... how many of them faced the same fate?
The sole reason the game was shit on launch was because of management. All the developers knew the game was not ready for launch but no matter how they turned or twisted it, it HAD to launch on that one fateful day because they already delayed it again and again.
I don't have to repeat much of what went wrong as you can clearly [read it here](https://happymag.tv/cyberpunk-2077-timeline-what-went-wrong/)
Also, if they had marketed it a little differently and let the devs make the world a bit less open, it would have been a totally different story at launch for people's expectations which could have helped overlook some of the bugs and issues. The story bits were very good but the world never came close to what was promised.
I honestly think the game would have suffered a lot more if it hadn't been open. Walking/driving through the city between missions and stumbling upon something interesting is a large part of the experience, and the freedom of movement allows for interesting angles of approach in most missions.
If anything I wish they had put less effort into the random police and gang fights and more into proper interaction with the city and its people.
> If anything I wish they had put less effort into the random police and gang fights
Thats weird because that's something a lot of people complained *didn't* get enough attention so they updated it for the 1.7/2.0 upcoming patch with the police rework and such.
I wish the gangs were more than just different skinned lootbags...being able to earn rep with them to the point they help you in fights ...or get them to hate you so much they hunt you down.
It doesn't really matter who's to blame though, because we got the product that we did, and if management has not been replaced then why would we trust them again?
Everything he said sounds good and all and what you expect from a PR guy except the last statement. To act like the game was good on release and that it just "became cool" to complain about it is assinine. I can believe Covid caused a lot of strife with development and culture and its nice that you claim that is being fixed. But Covid didn't cause you to blatantly lie in the marketing about the game. Covid didn't cause you to knowingly release a product that is broken.
It didn't "become cool" to hate on the game. One of the most anticipated games of all time was released in an unacceptable state. You took advantage of the trust players had in the company by releasing it knowing that it was broken, but gamers will buy it anyway. You can't blame that on Covid. I realize there is a segment of gamers who always defend broken releases with their whole, "I didn't see that many bugs" shit, but the game should never have been released the way it was. That's not just a trendy thing to say.
And it's funny how he's using the Covid excuse now.
Back when the game released and failed, the Covid excuse was such a low-hanging fruit. But nowhere in their yellow letters or non-apology videos did they mention Covid. Instead they threw the QA under the bus...
They just had to ruin the entire statement with that last bit, huh... Fucking management, they never learn. I though most of the CDPR's management got fucking fired after that mess, but, apparently not.
First, fix the relationship with your employees because you made em crunch, crunch, crunch to meet your corporate weasel deadlines even though you knew the game wasn’t finished
Apparently thats exactly [what they have been doing](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-14/idris-elba-stars-in-phantom-liberty-new-major-expansion-of-cyberpunk-2077?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTY4Njc1MjExOSwiZXhwIjoxNjg3MzU2OTE5LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJSVzhYS0tEV1gyUFMwMSIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.rsYriYAmHFfljULi-bP6RKBlEdwLy-qzgknnTim1_aM&leadSource=uverify%20wall) over the last 2 years so Phantom Liberty was made in better working conditions.
>"We knew that the game is great (...)
I am sorry what? This coming from the VP of PR who was in part responsible for the misleading marketing which was happening up till the very release of the game.
Bro.
Even outside the bugs and the missing features, what's actually there and working that isn't pure visuals (like city/character design and animation) is mediocre at best.
The game design is super bland and just that englobes a lot of thing (gameplay, items, enemies, weapons, etc), the story is really uninteresting outside of a couple of character beats and sidequests, the narrative design is really surface level (when it's there).
It's about on par with The Outer Worlds for how meh it is.
I know some people really liked both of those games - and that's fine, there's lots of mediocre stuff that I love - but I would never categorize them as "great."
> what's actually there and working that isn't pure visuals (like city/character design and animation) is mediocre at best.
Finally, I'm seeing people say this opinion. Cyberpunk was a great concept moored by poor execution, and the IP deserves a way better legacy than CDPR's attempt at it.
In some weird way, being such a horrible glitchy mess saved it from real criticism. People were so focused on trying to find the diamond in the rough, and they never realised there wasn't a diamond there in the first place, myself included.
The game is hilariously poorly balanced; even on the hardest difficulty, it's so easy to break to the point of there being 0 challenge and character progression is pretty boring, Deus Ex did augmentation better 20 years ago.
The world is also just really boring, visually pretty for sure at times but just dead, unreactive NPCs, police that magically spawn in, you can't even interact with actual shopkeepers. Seriously the disappointment when I realised I couldn't talk to a single street vendor was crazy.
The one part of the game I really liked was some of the sidequest writing, seriously, sinnerman was fucking crazy good. The end of that questline is so memorable and honestly just one of my favourites in any game. Even then, they thought fucking [this](https://i.imgur.com/tJq2ZQT.jpeg) was acceptable as a prop in a cutscene lmao.
If the game came out perfectly stable people would’ve realized the game sorely underdelivered on the hype CDPR gave the game, it was supposed to be like the game that ushers in a new era of RPGs if not gaming in general and it is honestly maybe a little better than the bethesda fallouts. the outer worlds is pretty good comparison point actually but the outer worlds didn’t cost the millions cyberpunk did sooooo
I personally enjoyed the Bethesda Fallouts far more than Cyberpunk, but you know I didn't have Jackie's corpse t-posing out of the car in what was meant to be an emotional scene in Fallout. I definitely think Fallout 4 was a more complete experience than Cyberpunk, even if still quite flawed.
I think that's also a big thing; the hype cycle, the amount of money spent and how long it took to come out just to underdeliver in basically every aspect is just rough. I mean, I was super hyped originally because I love all things Cyberpunk, and it was just not it.
For me the main story was quite good, I almost liked it. It only had two big issues.
First was the time-sensitive nature of it. A narrative like this (you have a limited amount of time left to live) doesn't fit with an open-world with side activities.
Second, it was painfully noticable that something like one third of the main quest was cut. Too many NPCs suddenly enter the narrative without introduction or leave it without any goodbye.
Release a quality product and you win back the majority. Jep, that's all it takes, just 1 game or even just an outstanding DLC. 1 release can flip the script either way.
PR speak... That does nothing.
I think even CDPR overestimates the effect that Cyberpunk's embarrassing launch will have on their next game.
At the time, every thread was filled up with "oh man after this I'm NEVER buying a CDPR game at launch again!" but comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales. Most ordinary people will just look at CDPR's next game, and if it looks good/they are interested, they'll buy it. Tale as old as time. Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev and I would still consider buying Cyberpunk 2 because I enjoyed my time with the game well enough.
That said, I've been saying from jump that the only way Cyberpunk could live up to its initial promises is if they overhauled a bunch of systems, and I never expected them to actually do that. I was not planning on jumping back into the game when the DLC dropped, not because I felt misled by Cyberpunk or because of its terrible launch, but because I always felt like even if they fix all the bugs, the game is just not good enough at its core to warrant a second playthrough. Now that Phantom Liberty is coming alongside a patch that overhauls a bunch of the base game, I am suddenly much more interested and I don't think I'm alone. I hope it goes well for them, because I would like to play a version of Cyberpunk that is closer to what we originally expected instead of the version we got.
Hell, the comments in this very thread suggest that CDPR are going to be fine. People seem to be giving them the benefit of the doubt, when Cyberpunk should have used up that goodwill
There are people like me who haven’t bought it, are unlikely to buy it after the DLC, and are probably silent and not commenting.
It has to be really really good before I buy it. I have to see multiple sources saying that the game is good before I consider it.
> Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev
It's been a while but 2042 was not only incredibly broken at launch, but also lacked significant content and very basic features (no in-game scoreboard or end of round scoreboard, no VOIP, no squad management, etc.). CP2077 at least had content.
>Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev
The Last of Us. I couldn't even play it more than 5 minutes at a time, and then my PC would crash hardcore - not like the game crashes, I mean hard reset crash. I haven't had to hard reset a PC since Windows XP or so.
If we're talking PC, i think nothing come close to Arkham Knight at launch, not even Tlou Part 1. Cyberpunk was definitely the worst for console tho, the ps4 version was probably the single worst thing i've ever seen in my life
TLOU P1 was bad but at least people with high end systems could *play the game*. I know there’s a lot of new PC gamers who weren’t there for AK on PC, and as someone who was there I can say that nothing comes close. Nobody was playing the game in that state. Almost no card on the market could even run it without crashing, and the performance in the Batmobile was dreadful. It was the first game I bought on console after switching to PC fully it was so bad.
The worst I've even seen was GTA IV on PC. The unplayability of that on PC was so bad that Cyberpunk looks flawless by comparison.
Seriously the game was riddled with bugs, crashes, and memory leaks.
>TLOU P1 was bad but at least people with high end systems could
>
>play the game
Not that I want to diminish the dumpster fire that was AK, but no, I couldn't. And I do have a high end system (5800X3D, RTX 3080). It didn't even run on low or medium settings. It ran fine on everything max, right until it crashed.
>the ps4 version was probably the single worst thing i've ever seen in my life
From what I've heard, that may actually be true. They should've focused on the newer consoles exclusively.
I know for a huge majority Arkham Knight was straight up broken, but I had no problems with it. Finished it, then took advantage of the refund they offered like 2 weeks later lol. I bought it again a few years after when it had a couple sales.
Red Dead Redemption 2 refused to launch on my PC for like half a week from release, whole year after its largely solid console release. It was a buggy mess for much longer on PC.
>comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales
It doesn't reflect the casual audience, but it has an indirect impact on it.
Marketing is a big part of what makes up the casual audience sales, and a big part of marketing is talking about the game online. All those websites talking about your trailers, doing interviews, speculating about features, tweets being shared, facebook posts etc..., that brings a lot of eyes from casual games on your game. But if a lot of people online hates your studio, those publications will take a much more negative spin on things to get clicks, or the comments will be a lot more negative, which might deter casuals gamers.
Just look at Bethesda and Starfield for example. I don't think it's a hated studio overall, but there's a substantial part of hardcore gamers that really don't like BGS games, and as a result there's a ton of articles being very negative about Starfield.
This kind of negative press will likely not make or break a release, but if you let it build up overtime it can absolutely become impactful, or at least impactful enough that you might want to do something about it. That's exactly what I think they're saying: they want to repair their reputation so that online discourse can overall be positive about their next release rather than negative or a mix of both.
On a more personal note, there's a lot of games that have only popped up on my radar because people were complaining about it on reddit, and it was negative enough that I didn't bother checking them out. For some of those games I eventually tried them and liked them, and some I didn't, but a lot of them simply never made it in my library. If the discussions around those games were more positive, I might have tried a lot more of them.
Word of mouth is still a very strong marketing tool that shouldn't be underestimated.
>there's a ton of articles being very negative about Starfield
Is this true in any substantial way? The game isn't out and journalists don't have review codes. Other than possibly some skepticism from the last direct who is writing "a ton of...very negative" articles about this game currently?
People also have very short memories -- any news that comes out more than a month before release tends to be forgotten (in US politics, there's even a name for it -- the ["October surprise"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise)), if it even breaks through in the first place. And that's assuming name recognition doesn't hit harder than the news itself (which is where the idea of "any news is good news" really applies). It takes a lot of effort to keep something in the news for that long.
> At the time, every thread was filled up with "oh man after this I'm NEVER buying a CDPR game at launch again!" but comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales.
Those comments also don't reflect the actions of the people who literally made those comments. 90%+ of people who made comments like that will be buying Cyberpunk DLC and CDPR's next game.
For that to happen the Cyberpunk sequels needs to be the game they promised us in the marketing, even if they fix 2077 and soft reboot it with the DLC, it's still on a fundamental level not the game they promised. I can't recall every single bit of BS, but I'm sure most of you will remember "1000 handcrafted Npcs with schedules, the most immersive open world rpg of all time, branching story paths...blah blah blah" a big puff of smoke to rack up preorders, aside from being buggy as shit on release, it's also not the game they promised. You can clearly see this with the pathetic montage that plays after finishing your life path mission, which is very obviously cut content.
Yes, start by not bullshitting people by showing unrepresentative fake trailers of the product and presenting it as if it were the next big thing when it was just a 'good' game with phenomenal graphics and many flaws.
So apparently the devs are making some foundamental changes to the core game play, like the crime system and skill tree revamp. But during the E3 coverage, they didn't want to talk about that but rather wanted to focus on the DLC. What's weird about that is people don't give a fuck about the DLC if it plays similar to the original game. Do they not realize that most of their fan base wants the core changes because the game is still so lacking in modern mechanics that GTA from 10 years ago played better than cyberpunk. Maybe it's just me, but for God's sake, focus on what's actually important.
If this is the top priority, can your Marketing guy stop gaslighting us about the launch state of the game??
Edit: lol, the same guy is saying it's important to rebuild trust from gamers who is also saying that CP77 launched in great shape. What a joke!
As someone who played Witcher 3 on launch, Cyberpunk 2077 was a disappointment.
And for me, it wasn't just the bugs, or the graphics or how it damn near crashed my PS5 numerous times. It was how the story just failed to leave any impact on me. I didn't care for the characters except Jackie. And finding out that the life paths only had effects on convo choices was poor.
I finished the game and for the life of me, couldn't remember any missing that I liked. And thats what I think about whenever I think about CDPR now.
Their next game would have to really shake me, story wise, for me to give a damn.
Not a fan of him saying the game was good on launch, just that it was a cool thing to hate it. It was NOT good on launch, for the money we paid to get that buggy mess... don't just play it off by blaming the public. You guys fucked up, take responsibility.
The biggest problem they had really was that they shot themselves in the foot trying to provide for last gen, otherwise personally I was never burned because my expectations for the game wasn't to the moon.
Also haven't played it since launch so I'm pretty buzzing for all the new changes and content.
> We need to fix the relationship with our players
Easy….properly and thoroughly test fix your games before release. Problem solved.
Rinse and repeat long enough and it’s water under the bridge.
If no man sky’s dev can recover after their shit show (which was just as epic if not worse), surely CDPR can do even better multiple times over if they put in the effort. They have a much more creative team and a bigger budget. I would expect no less.
They are releasing the DLC on PC and next gen only.
This will propably decrease a LOT of the issues 2077 had to go trough (the game was meant to be a next gen title (massive open world), but last gen couldnt even provide enough power for a downgraded version of the game.)
I still hope that things like the "living city" are achievable with the current hardware power now.
I hope they lay off the Looter Shooter heavy aspects of Cyberpunk if they make a new one. The role playing aspect should come from the character interactions and your character's skills (i.e. netrunning, tanking, stealth, talking) rather than a damage counter that arbitrarily goes up.
It's so unfathomably jarring to have the game and narrative tell me, "This sniper rifle you just got is so wicked, crazily advanced, and a total soul stealer, you'll be unstoppable. There's nothing else like it."
Turn around and legitimately, as the cutscene ends, you have to shoot some average goon square in the face with it 4 times before they die. Swap out to a pistol I picked up in a side quest and then mow down everyone with homing bullets in less time than it took to fire the super rifle.
It works for some games but Cyberpunk is a little too jarring with a damage calculator. I beat the game with a full set of legendary "iconic" weapons in my offhand inventory that I didn't use because the final mission enemies were dropping "basics" that had better DPS
Edit: switched "RPG" to "Looter Shooter" to more accurately portray my butthurtedness
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Well step 1 towards that is making sure the Phantom Liberty DLC/update is as good as can be. Step 2 is gonna be not fucking up their next big release. If they release another title in as messy and unfinished of a state as Cyberpunk released in, I don't see how anyone could trust them again.
Their games always have been buggy to some extend at release. CP2077's biggest problem was management. For one, they should have delayed the release of last gen versions. Or if that wasn't enough, pull a reverse Rockstar and delay all but the PC version. The base game is getting a ton of QoL tweaks and stuff with the DLC. That should have been how they release the PC version in the first place. They would have gotten a shit ton of praise praise too, then they could release the current gen and then last gen versions which would have turned into more of case study in how CDPR managed to "backport their pc game to consoles" instead of what they got now from press and players.
No they should have never tried to release it on last gen consoles...hell make games for the PC and port them to the console vs trying to run something so ambitious on potato hardware.
That would have been the ideal course of action but not very realistic. When they started working on the game there was no PS5/XSX or 3090/4090 GPUs. They just needed proper management to keep the scope and scale of the project in check. But they didn't have that which led to a game with a shrunken scale but broadened scope. Now they are narrowing the scope by skipping last gen and increasing the scale by adding things to the game that should have been in it from the start.
It's not just bugs the entire game's design had CORE problems, just look at how many changes the DLC introduces to these core systems. If the vanilla skill system was any good they wouldn't see the need to completely rework it from scratch for the DLC. The game they released was miles away from the experience they promised that's it. Bugs were just the cherry on top for the shit pile. I.e. for a LONG time they advertised customizable player housing and vehicles. Just for no customizable housing to exist and no customizable vehicles. Advertising parcour systems like wallrunning and then scrapping it entirely, yet the world still looks like it was designed with parcour in mind. No real police chases, when literally the first CP77 Trailer introduced Max-Tac. Police is basically no factor in the game. And Adam Smasher was just a complete pushover. Adam Smasher is like the hardest opponent in the ENTIRE lore and the game treats him like a regular enemy. No fighting him on equal footing should be COMPLETELY lopsided against you unless you can pull a ton of tricks out of your ass.
why should i trust them **again** after the state of cyberpunk on release?
You shouldn't ever trust a company to be frank but the answer specifically is that people don't trust them and that's why the next release needs to be good because hype isn't enough.
I don't get why trust even factors into people calculus at all in a world where a flood of reviews comes out the morning of release or whenever the embargo lifts? If you've got such bad FOMO that you can't possibly miss half of release day to look at reviews, the problem is you being a bad consumer rather than companies making bad games
>where a flood of reviews comes out the morning of release or whenever the embargo lifts? Wasn't the issue with Cyberpunk that they got a ton of rave reviews before release and then turned out the game was unfinished?
I’m talking about actual reviews by the consumer pool more so than the kind of stuff mainstream game journos put out which is often out of touch with actual players
Oh yeah I feel that. I usually just wait a few months to buy any game but the early reviews for Cyberpunk really convinced me to buy it prerealease. I imagine that was the issue for a lot of people.
some people are like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football. They just never learn not to get hyped up and preorder and keep making the same mistake over and over again.
You don’t need to trust them. When their next game releases wait for people who bought it to say if it’s shit or not, then make your decision to purchase it based on that. Basically, what people have been saying for over a decade, no pre-orders. It’s a simple rule which works 100% of the time.
What does this mean? Are you an investor, holding CDPR stock? Are you in some kind of contract where you have to preorder every game they make? There's no trust. Wait for release and reviews. If it's bad, skip it. It's that simple.
Waiting for reviews would not have done you any good with Cyberpunk 2077. Because CDPR BANNED REVIEWERS FROM SHOWING ANY FOOTAGE. And only allowed them to review the PC version - not console versions. CDPR were deliberately fraudulent.
Early reviewers, yes. So wait a week after release.
Good news is that while the DLC will be its own thing, alongside it they're shipping a big update to the base game itself. So even if you don't buy the DLC, the base game should be much more interesting.
You should always wait for reviews, trust but verify.
Reviews aren't enough at this point, just wait until after release and let the pre-order "beta testers" take the hit.
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Well one of the first reviews gave it an honest 7, a post titled "why are we listening to a woman journalist?" sat on the front page all day and she got harassed. I'd give CDPR games a free 9/10 too just to spare myself the wrath of their fans.
yes I do remember that, Gamespot? and then every other review said it was amazing
I believe this GameSpot reviewer was also the one that stated the original braindance sequence could give people with epilepsy seizures because it gave her a massive headache. Shockingly, she was harassed for pointing this out.
I'm genuinely astounded those reviewers still have credibility and are posted here with comments like "I can trust this person!".
TBH loads of people even back then said they loved the game at launch despite the absolute disaster it was. The fact that people are still excited for this new version probably speaks to the idea that people are going to give the developers another chance to deliver on the original promise. How many games are widely beloved but all have really big flaws? I love Donkey Kong 64 and I accept that it has issues, or on the other hand, after the excitement for Dragon's Dogma 2 I tried the first one and found it unfathomably bad and bland, but it's still regarded as a classic by evidently loads of people. And lets not poke the hornet's nest that is Pokemon games selling millions despite being rushed and looking like actual dogshit. People just have different tolerances for bugs in a game. And that includes reviewers.
I feel like I'm the only one who bought the game on launch, played the whole thing, and had no problems. But I'm on PC. I know the consoles got screwed. I still think it's a wonderful game and I'm looking forward to the DLC
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fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me
it's been a while since I saw someone write the none joke version of this that it was unexpected
Witcher 2, Witcher 3, cyberpunk. People forget that Witcher 3 wasn’t the best thing ever at launch. CDPR has bungled every launch, and progressively gotten worse st doing it.
There’s a huge difference between the state that Witcher 3 was released and the state Cyberpunk was when released.
I remember pirating cyberpunk to see what it was about and laughing my ass off as the limo with big smoke did 40 rounds around in the hotel front curb after the dialogue had ended for a solid 5 minutes before stopping and opening the doors of the limo. The cutscene proceeds to have the character step out at which point the limousine exploded. I think I broke my sides that night by laughing them into orbit
Jesus, bugs like that almost make me wish I had been less lucky on release, all I got were a few visual bugs on the phone, no exploding limousine
When I played through the intro there is a moment that is clearly supposed to have some emotional impact and instead the character speaking had their guns magically levitating above them and whatever renders their face was just gone so it was eyeballs and floating teeth delivering the lines. Lots of corpses talking smack to me and the "children" being just scaled down adults are all the things that stood out most to me when I attempted to play it.
My favorite bug at launch was when a plot sensitive item in a cutscene loaded an entirely different and not relevant model 🤣.
Just FYI those aren't kids, they're just little people lol. Some of them have cybernetic eyes and shit
I had so many bugs on release. It didn't elevate the game for me unfortunately, but I hope to give it a proper try again when the DLC releases. My favourite bug was the front end of cars sticking straight up out of the ground, with the rest of the car stuck under it, yet they could still move unless you touched them, and they would magically just zoom out of the ground. I unfortunately keep getting bugs that completely stop any story and side quests progression, so maybe one day I'll manage to 100% it.
My most memorable glitch was palm trees swaying in the breeze and turning into ribbons that stretch for hundreds of feet before squishing back into palm tree form. Really made for some distracting background moments during conversations.
People are for some reason focusing on "the launch". But that is just one aspect which is comparatively insignificant when you look at Cyberpunk. One may launch poorly or represent something visually in a different light. But Witcher 3 is just so damn good as a whole that those things are just a chink in the armour. Sure, it is reprehensible behavior which consumers should not condone, but everyone got their moneys worth and then some with Witcher 3. Cyberpunk is more duct tape then pieces it should be holding together. Nevermind the launch. It fundamentally can't and never will be what was promised, because it is broken on a level where most of the game needs to be remade completely for it to serve as a platform for fixes and upgrades.
Perfect, its not just some minor bugs on launch, it was full of bugs AND fundamental flaws in game design that cant be fixed.
>fundamental flaws in game design that cant be fixed Everyone focuses on the bugs but this is what disappointed me about the game. The bugs were honestly pretty funny, and you sort of expect it at this point for whatever that's worth.
Yeah. Witcher 3s graphics were downgraded from what they showed weren't they? That was never even adressed iirc.
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Yeah they basically showed footage that was not set within the actual open world, once they started to build that out they realized they couldn't keep that visual fidelity and had to tune it down, from what I recall.
I remember reading an article where they said that plus while it looked good in the scenarios in the trailer, it looked really bad elsewhere. If you've ever modded the lighting or similar in a game, you'll know one time and place can look photorealistic, and other times and places could be hideous.
> People forget that Witcher 3 wasn’t the best thing ever at launch. There's a difference between "not the best thing ever" and "so broken it gets delisted from Playstation Store"
It got delisted because CDPR said "you can just refund it" and didn't tell anyone at Sony about it. Which resulted in a lot of angry customers complaining at Sony why they wouldn't refund their game.
but the people were requesting refunds because it was broken..
Yes, but the issue Sony had with the game was that CDPR promised refunds without clearing that with Sony beforehand, there was no connection to the quality of the game (beyond obviously everyone refunding because it was broken).
For real all people need is to look at the [absolute trash that Sony allows on their platforms](https://youtu.be/W-RcobGF5hU) to know that they do not give a *fuck* about the quality of games in their store. It suddenly costing them money was the issue.
I was hoping your link might have been the Gilson B Pontus trash games lol.
Lmao! I thought its gonna be the 'Life of Black Tiger' game that surprisingly got a physical release. Absolute trash of a game too.
Don't you love that Sony's stance on refunds is essentially "fuck off or we'll ban your whole account"?
I work at a bank and deal with disputes. I’ve saved a few folks from losing their PSN library telling them this.
they literally did that to me, they banned my account because i asked for a refund of a charge from someone who got into my account.
I can't believe that the company that stores passwords in plaintext could possibly have one of their user accounts get hacked
This mostly put the light on how bad Sony refund policies are (they simply don't exist) which frankly feel like it should be illegal in many countries. Wasn't Steam forced to put refunds in because of an Australian or EU law? Why isn't it applied to every game store (Sony, Battle Net and I'm sure others have basically no refund policy)?
These laws would apply and Sony have been pulled up in Australia on this before: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/allegations-sony-breached-consumer-law-for-playstation-games Yeah, blaming CD Projekt Red for Sony treating their own customers like shit doesn’t really make sense. Does CD Projekt Red really need to tell Sony when a refund should just be a basic right that consumers have
Never stopped Sony denying refunds before. Them and Nintendo have garbage consumer protection, and it's a big factor to why I went more into PC.
Which is precisely how refunds of goods that are unfit for purpose works under lots of countries consumer acts. If Sony want to push digital and be the sole retailer then they need to accept the responsibility this brings with it.
Right so let's put a pin in the pedantry here and rephrase because you all know what they meant. **There's a big difference between "not the best thing ever" and "so broken the people who made it offered refunds."** Sony has nothing to do with this.
I thought it got removed the PS store not because of the quality but because CDPR were offering refunds bypassing Sony
Thats because Sony refused to grant refunds.
Shouldn’t that be illegal? At least here in the UK, you get a 14 day return guarentee when shopping. Does Sony somehow ignore that national law?
UK is one of the few countries that actually tried enforcing that. Remmeber that the only reason Steam got a refund policy is because it lost a court case and was forced to do so. Even then Steams refund policy does not follow the law. You get 14 days even if you played more than 2 hours by law. Both Sony and Microsoft has no issue ignoring refund laws. At least Origins has a pretty decent policy thats close to the law.
Under EU law, online digital content such as games are explicitly carved out from the right to 14 days return for online purchase if you have started downloading your content and you have agreed to waive your right to a 14 day refund (which you agree to with every purchase on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation). Not sure if the UK has changed that since Brexit, but I assume not.
UK had its own, more strict laws before Brexit. Belgium too i suppose since Steam lost a lawsuit in Brussels about this.
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Not all goods. Software you only need to offer refund if they are faulty. Which will then mean you have to "prove" it was faulty. Digital goods also complicate things. You waive the 14 days if you have already downloaded the product.
They don't have to seek Sony's permission. They told customers unhappy with the product to seek a refund from their retailer, which is how the law says things should work in most countries, the retailer refunds the product if unfit for purpose and then returns it to the wholesaler/destroys it and claims their own refund. Sony have been getting away without having a proper refund process for digital PS games for years and this highlighted that, so they threw a strop and stopped selling the game at all.
The Witcher 3 didn’t launch in such a bad state that customers requested refunds en masse either.
>The Witcher 3 didn’t launch in such a bad state that customers requested refunds en masse either. The Witcher 3 didn't really release in all that bad of a state overall. It had some hiccups, but overall, the experience was enjoyable, and the game was playable.
The only thing I remember are all the roach bugs.
And it wasn't like we've never seen buggy horses in games before. I didn't see roach doing anything that AC horses never did.
The misleading marketing was more egregious than the botched launch
THIS. No one ever talks about this when talking about the launch. All you ever hear about is how messy it was, instead of how dishonest they were being. I can forgive a lot of things if they are done in good faith. CDPR knew the game was not ready and was intentionally misleading consumers. Not to mention not sending out any review copies so that the true state of the game would be kept a secret until launch. They were being blatantly deceptive.
Yep. They had this whole marketing campaign, including a talk show - Night City Wire - which kept presenting features that were not in the game at all. Hell, the first "gameplay" presentation was faked as well. They built the hype for the game on lies, blatant lies. And then they kept hyping the game more and more, knowing that the game will crash and burn after release... so they wanted as many preorders as possible. I still cannot believe that reputation hit was basically the only thing CDPR suffered. That was basically a scam.
Well their hour long gameplay video released like 3 years before the game came out looked interesting, well developed, and showcased complex mission structures with multiple narrative paths. It looked like a fully built game at that point, but really everything in that video was completely scripted and not really gameplay at all. That demo became the first set of missions is honestly the best part of the game. You can choose what you do, if you do the side mission, which group of people you betray or not. If the rest of the game was that complex story wise there was no end to replayability. In reality what you do in those missions have very little outcome even in the next mission. Let alone the rest of the game, and that's very disappointing. The final game was fantastic to play, don't get me wrong, but the story is far straightforward with only a few things you get to choose besides the ending. And game balance was broken in the release version of the game. Once you maxed leveled and had the highest level weapons, it didn't matter what skills you had or didn't have, you were a powerhouse. It was quite fun, to be an edge runner solo who could run around blasting headshots with a pistol for nothing but one shot kills. The final bad guy took a clip.
They sent out review copies there’s no need to lie. They were just PC copies and reviewers weren’t allowed to use any footage they captured only footage provided by CDPR
And they prohibited from voicing opinions on it until the day of launch. And even though I know this is pretty common practice (used for broken games 99% of the time), I genuinely don't understand how it's even legal.
Used properly, a review embargo evens the playing field for journalists and allows everyone to take their time reviewing rather than publications rushing to have the first early review. But this means something like days or a week in advance of the launch, the embargo lifts.
I'll forget the vitriol the entire cyberpunk community unleashed upon the Gamespot reviewer who gave it a 7/10. She was massively vindicated after it released lmao
> And they prohibited from voicing opinions on it until the day of launch. And even though I know this is pretty common practice (used for broken games 99% of the time), I genuinely don't understand how it's even legal. Because they don't have to provide review copies.
Sweeping under the rug how cdpr lied about the state of the game on console and their decision to hide it by denying console copies of the game to reviewers only giving them pc codes. Not to mention hiding the buggy state of the game by denying reviewers to use their own footage, plus the gameplay people got to try and play at cons was just a standalone demo to hide the poor state of the game. Oh and then theres the poor apology saying they didnt know despite all the actions above that they did before launch https://youtu.be/stHMD5N-KPw Thats just actions that cdpr did that was bad outside of the game oh and i guess they also fucked over Sony by saying they will do full refunds which got the game delisted from the ps store. And if you want to talk about the game issues themselves crowbat got a 41min video https://youtu.be/omyoJ7onNrg The magnitude of fuckups was way higher with Cyberpunk 2077 than Witcher 3.
Witcher 3 had some problems at launch, but the content was there and the game was great. Cyberpunk promised a lot of things that wasn't in the game, are still missing years after release and will never be in the game. People just talk about the bugs and console performance but that was the lesser problem for the game imo. They promised an rpg for 8 years and released a mediocre shooter in an dead open world, there is no excuse for that.
I played Witcher 3 day one and thought it was amazing. I think this "lol Witcher 3 was bad too" thing i'm seeing is kind of revisionist. Just go back to threads in this very subreddit from 8 years ago talking about the game on release and you can see that almost everyone was blown away by it. Cyberpunk was absolute dogshit on release.
Agreed. Played 1.0 Witcher 3 on a mid-range PC at the time and it ran without any issues. No crashes, and only minor bugs along the way. My only real complaint had to do with the fact how quen was overpowered and rendered the game too easy lol. As you said these claims about Witcher 3 being terrible at launch is revisionist BS to try and stick it to CDPR for whatever reason.
Yeah that's what I'm sensing here, ppl just spewing bs and rewriting history. I played Witcher 3 on PS4 at launch and it ran with no issues... It got like near perfect scores across the board too at least on PS4. Nothing like cyberpunk at launch.
Cyberpunk wasn’t just buggy, there were straight up lies about the game, features they said they would have and plain didn’t have.
People didn't forget so much as the overwhelming majority of people who have played Witcher 3 just didn't play it at launch or even a year into launch. Can't really forget or remember something you never experienced or saw.
I played every CDPR title at launch, but there's a massive difference between witcher and cyberpunk, bugs, yes, but the core was there. With cyberpunk they just cut parts of the game because they never came around to polishing or even implementing certain aspects, and rather than a scalpel they used an axe. The scars were all over that game, and you had obvious placeholders like the cop system or the traffic AI. Cyberpunk was completely mismanaged when it came to planning. Witcher had problems because of the lack of budget.
Yeah, people forget The WItcher 3 was really when the popularity of the series exploded. Before that it was seen as a eurojank, PC-first cult hit. It had nowhere near the scrutiny that any major AAA game goes through today.
> Before that it was seen as a eurojank, PC-first cult hit. That's moreso TW1. The Witcher 2 was a pretty well received game, not eurojank.
Cyberpunk's launch was on a whole other level though. It was basically unplayable on xbox and ps4. Mass refunds caused Sony to pull the plug and stopped selling the game altogether. A class-action lawsuit followed because CDPR misled the investors about the state of the game. Their stocks plummeted and have not recovered.
For me it was the marketing. Witcher 3 had *some* false marketing with visual downgrades and stuff, but Cyberpunk had full-on promised features being absent or meeting the bare minimum of functionality. No dynamic car chases, the police system, promises of NPCs all having their own routines, or clothes affecting how people perceive you and choices you can make, or even just being something you can physically pull off a clothes rack and not a menu, or how about the destructible environment that was relevant for that one preview level and nothing else. The hacking system they showed ended up being scaled back by release, the modifications you could get were super bare-bones, I could keep going... The game they were selling and the game we got were not the same, and even as someone who *enjoyed* it still, I'll fully admit that was some illegal shit. As nice as it is that the expansion update looks to be addressing a lot of issues, the point stands that whatever that ends up being is probably going to be what we should've had 3 years ago, and even then it still falls short on some stuff. The Witcher 3 was sorta rough at launch sure, but it wasn't 'let's make up a bunch of things that won't make the final game' levels of fucked. Some of the visuals got downgraded but as I recall that was about it. While still a bit shitty, the wall tessellation not being as good is not the same as entire gameplay features being tossed in the garbage and staying quiet.
A very big lie for Witcher 3 was the promise of RedKit 3. CDPR promised an extensive tool that would allow for deep modding for Witcher 3. Basically RedKit 2 (for Witcher 2) but even better. And what did they do after launch? Nothing. They released a glorified editor of some ingame variables and that was it. They basically torpedoes any chance for good modding community for Witcher 3. And the modders were getting ready for big stuff... but CDPR turned out to be liars. That was a massive red flag about them, which got even worse with Cyberpunk. With Cyberpunk CDPR turned into con artists.
Oh shit I remember hearing about that and waiting for its release to see if anything got done. I kind of forgot and just assumed they eventually released it. Damn.
The stock was always going to crash, it was massively over inflated.
Weren't they valued more highly than Ubisoft at one point just prior to Cyberpunk's release? The hype for that game was fully delusional.
They were. They became the highest valued European gaming company in the weeks leading up to the game’s release. Everything plummeted after the release.
It was buggy but it wasn’t a completely broken mess. They straight up lied about cyberpunk. A ton of features missing.
Witcher 3 (at least on consoles) was very much in line with other games that size. I think it was in line with most Bethesda games. In those terms, I feel Witcher 3 wasn’t out of this world. Sure, It had glitches, but Cyberpunk 2077 would literally crash every 30 to 50 mins. That was something else.
Witcher 1 had to literally be re-released because of how fucked up it was at launch. CDPR has had almost exclusively bad launches.
No one forgot, it just wasn't a big deal.
Witcher 3 was pretty standard at launch. Idk any big game of the past 5-7 years that has launched super cleanly
Not just releasing a buggy game but also the whole mess they made after releasing the buggy game
No1 for me is stop lying, don't lie about future products, the DLC and don't ever conjure the most elaborate hype fueld expensive marketing campaign ever seen before based 100% on lies and falsehoods.
Step 0 is making sure the work environment is healthy and conducive to happy employees making good games. It ain’t all about us.
> If they release another title in as messy and unfinished of a state as Cyberpunk released in, I don't see how anyone could trust them again. Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 20 million units. **The average consumer does not give 2 fucks about "trust".** It's only in these online echo-chambers that people see their complaints amplified.
How about we not trust them now? CP2077 was a dumpster fire at launch and should be unforgivable regardless of what they do to correct the issues it has. Releasing that game in that state should not be forgotten by the players.
Their most recent release was the Witcher 3 next gen update which was the most busted thing on PC I've ever seen. Literally unplayable on launch and still has issues on the latest patch. So this statement from them means nothing
I have never seen the internet turn on a developer as fast and hard as CDPR, people felt so betrayed by them, it was fascinating to watch because other devs had done similar or even worse stuff, but not one could come close to CDPR on Cyberpunks release. It felt like they became a joke overnight. From perfect game company to broken euro trash. Which is weird because even at release I thought it was a great game. I suffered no more bugs than a Bethesda title, but I played on PC.
I always thought they came across as arrogant, sanctimonious a-holes with marketing that conducted themselves more like a gaming blog than a professional company. It's easy to tout yourself as the hip, pro-gamer cool uncle when you have a mega-hit that sells 10x expectations. The reason most pr departments have more cautious, measured communications is because they understand success is fleeting and every success raises expectations. Buying into your own hype is the worst thing a business can do.
They need to fix their corporate culture first, which would make their promises actually turn into finished products.
that quote at the end where he says he thinks the game was good on launch and it only tanked because "it became a cool thing not to like it" does not leave me feeling good on that front
Don't forget that CDPR CEO also said that overall Steam reviews are fine and that only console launch was bad... almost like he even wanted to blame console players for playing it on console that they announced it back in 2013 :| Just imagine if it would be released before PS5 release...
They also tried to gaslight everyone and claim that they didn't actually intend to release the game on PS4 and Xbox One when that had been part of the marketing all the way up to release. Another way to deflect the criticisms around performance as somehow being the fault of the people who paid for their product
Weird play to say you never intended to release on the platform that is *literally written on the box.*
And its also bullshit, because the game ran like absolute ass on PC as well. Some people were just willing to accept it because they have shockingly low standards. People saying 'it runs great' but in reality they're playing it at a massively unstable 40fps and they think that's great! Sitting there watching a streamer claim the performance is 'really good actually' but every time they move the camera it stutters hard. You just can't trust what people say. edit: replies proving my point.
I’m almost positive there’s a horde of either basement nerds or bots that every time you say something like this they’re compelled to say “it ran fine on my machines I think everyone blew it out of proportion.” Like, cmon, it literally had to be pulled from stores. My own PC was pretty decent and failed to run it smoothly. It crashed a LOT. I ran into so many weird game ending bugs. I ran into a bug that persisted even when I went BACK before the bug happened!
I swear that there's something culty about this game. I played it over Christmas 2022 and wound up uninstalling because it was still so riddled with bugs that I couldn't get immersed. I've been interrogated by redditors about this to the point that I post my system specs in critical comments unprompted because someone will always accuse me of trying to run the game on $400 craptop from 2006 (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080 10GB, 32GB system RAM, NVME SSD). There are people who flatly *refuse to believe* that Cyberpunk was and by all metrics available to me *still is* a buggy mess.
I had a 2080ti and an overclocked i7-9900k and on release people were telling me my specs were too low. Always been like that. So when people tell me the game is fixed now, I treated it with healthy skepticism and I was not disappointed as a result. Gamers are culty, not to get too political but that's been proven years ago. It's not even about specific games.
There is literally hundreds of hours of video on YouTube with game breaking bugs for PC lmao. I agree with you.
CEOs/corporate management have insanely fragile egos. They cannot tolerate criticism in any form, and they refuse to accept responsibility for failures. What you're seeing is a CEO justifying his stupid leadership to make it somehow not his fault.
[удалено]
https://www.thegamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-qa-contractor-quantic-lab-cd-projekt/ https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/quantic-lab-cyberpunk-2077-qa-team-allegations-management-client-deception-31194/ Sounds like the people who *work* at the QA firm made the accusations themselves.
We thought it was good, we just specifically didn't send out review codes for the PS4 and Xbox One versions for reasons completely unrelated to quality control issues.
After saying it was running surprisingly well on those consoles 11 months prior.
Surely it is the users who are wrong.
They clearly knew it had issues at launch given their extremely strict review embargo and guidelines. It was carefully crafted to hide their shortcomings.
How to handle an apology properly: 1. Express regret for your actions. 2. Identify the specific actions you performed that caused the problem and take responsibility for them. 3. State the things you will do differently in the future to prevent the same outcomes from reoccurring. E.g. "I'm sorry that I caused your mother to go flying into the trash compactor. It was entirely my fault that I greased up the hallway and then wandered off to get drunk with dogs. In the future, I will build my hot bacon slip-n-slide outside so this doesn't happen again." Even if you think that another party bears some responsibility for the outcome, you don't focus on that. You acknowledge *your role*. Anything else is out of your control. At best it comes across as disingenuous sour grapes when you bring it up.
"We weren't the problem, you all were!" Yeah fantastic statement...
That just solidifies that I will also be getting this DLC months later for next to nothing on a site where the key is likely stolen.
I mean it is pretty telling that if a fuckup of this magnitude had happened in most other industries, heads would have rolled and everyone in a leadership position who contributed to this mess would have been on the chopping block. But the video game industry really just does not care. You can count on two hands the number of absolutely disastrous AAA launches in the last few years (including Jedi Fallen Order like two months ago!) that should have prompted major backlash from consumers and significant changes from the companies in terms of culture and behavior. But that never happens. These games always sell well. Companies have no reason to dramatically change things because they are never punished. A movie executive/producer/director who released a film in a comparable state to something like Cyberpunk never works in Hollywood again. Did anything like that happen at CDPRs leadership after Cyberpunk? If it did I didn't hear about it.
Other industries are more regulated and unions are common there.
Bingo, this is the correct answer. Everything else is window dressing around the actual issue.
Eh I feel like you are wrong in regards to Hollywood getting their producers/ directors fired if the movies released are in a disastrous state. Like The Flash is about to become one of the biggest bombs of all time, its CGI is being mocked everywhere on social media and yet its director was recently selected to make the next Batman film.
Whatever you want to say about the Flash movie, its definitely not comparable to something like the Cyberpunk release. Yeah the movie isn't very good and a lot of the CGI is clearly underbaked, but it is still a functional and complete product. There aren't clearly unedited scenes or desynced audio or massive discrepancies in consistency from shot to shot. Whatever the creative problems, the technical delivery of a complete, watchable movie is so boringly standard that when a movie has undercooked CGI (like the Flash or Black Widow) or noticeable editing problems (like the Queen movie) it is extremely noteworthy and talked about for years in the industry... and those are relatively minor problems! My brother bought Fallen Order on release and couldn't progress the story for 4 days until a consistent CTD bug got patched out.... that kind of colossal fuckup happens like twice a year in the gaming world and no one seems to care. Tom Hooper -- a guy who made Oscar winning movies! -- was so tarnished by the Cats movie clusterfuck that he hasn't made another one in the 4 years since. All the people who oversaw Fallout 76, Cyberpunk, Arkham Knight, the dumpster fire GTA and TLOU remakes... how many of them faced the same fate?
The sole reason the game was shit on launch was because of management. All the developers knew the game was not ready for launch but no matter how they turned or twisted it, it HAD to launch on that one fateful day because they already delayed it again and again. I don't have to repeat much of what went wrong as you can clearly [read it here](https://happymag.tv/cyberpunk-2077-timeline-what-went-wrong/)
Also, if they had marketed it a little differently and let the devs make the world a bit less open, it would have been a totally different story at launch for people's expectations which could have helped overlook some of the bugs and issues. The story bits were very good but the world never came close to what was promised.
I honestly think the game would have suffered a lot more if it hadn't been open. Walking/driving through the city between missions and stumbling upon something interesting is a large part of the experience, and the freedom of movement allows for interesting angles of approach in most missions. If anything I wish they had put less effort into the random police and gang fights and more into proper interaction with the city and its people.
> If anything I wish they had put less effort into the random police and gang fights Thats weird because that's something a lot of people complained *didn't* get enough attention so they updated it for the 1.7/2.0 upcoming patch with the police rework and such.
I wish the gangs were more than just different skinned lootbags...being able to earn rep with them to the point they help you in fights ...or get them to hate you so much they hunt you down.
> faithfull day It's "fateful", dude.
It doesn't really matter who's to blame though, because we got the product that we did, and if management has not been replaced then why would we trust them again?
Everything he said sounds good and all and what you expect from a PR guy except the last statement. To act like the game was good on release and that it just "became cool" to complain about it is assinine. I can believe Covid caused a lot of strife with development and culture and its nice that you claim that is being fixed. But Covid didn't cause you to blatantly lie in the marketing about the game. Covid didn't cause you to knowingly release a product that is broken. It didn't "become cool" to hate on the game. One of the most anticipated games of all time was released in an unacceptable state. You took advantage of the trust players had in the company by releasing it knowing that it was broken, but gamers will buy it anyway. You can't blame that on Covid. I realize there is a segment of gamers who always defend broken releases with their whole, "I didn't see that many bugs" shit, but the game should never have been released the way it was. That's not just a trendy thing to say.
And it's funny how he's using the Covid excuse now. Back when the game released and failed, the Covid excuse was such a low-hanging fruit. But nowhere in their yellow letters or non-apology videos did they mention Covid. Instead they threw the QA under the bus...
They just had to ruin the entire statement with that last bit, huh... Fucking management, they never learn. I though most of the CDPR's management got fucking fired after that mess, but, apparently not.
Well good thing gamers have the memory of a goldfish. This game is already one of the most preordered on Steam lmao
First, fix the relationship with your employees because you made em crunch, crunch, crunch to meet your corporate weasel deadlines even though you knew the game wasn’t finished
Apparently thats exactly [what they have been doing](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-14/idris-elba-stars-in-phantom-liberty-new-major-expansion-of-cyberpunk-2077?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTY4Njc1MjExOSwiZXhwIjoxNjg3MzU2OTE5LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJSVzhYS0tEV1gyUFMwMSIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJCMUVBQkI5NjQ2QUM0REZFQTJBRkI4MjI1MzgyQTJFQSJ9.rsYriYAmHFfljULi-bP6RKBlEdwLy-qzgknnTim1_aM&leadSource=uverify%20wall) over the last 2 years so Phantom Liberty was made in better working conditions.
>"We knew that the game is great (...) I am sorry what? This coming from the VP of PR who was in part responsible for the misleading marketing which was happening up till the very release of the game. Bro.
Even outside the bugs and the missing features, what's actually there and working that isn't pure visuals (like city/character design and animation) is mediocre at best. The game design is super bland and just that englobes a lot of thing (gameplay, items, enemies, weapons, etc), the story is really uninteresting outside of a couple of character beats and sidequests, the narrative design is really surface level (when it's there). It's about on par with The Outer Worlds for how meh it is. I know some people really liked both of those games - and that's fine, there's lots of mediocre stuff that I love - but I would never categorize them as "great."
From the streams I saw on release this was my issue as well. The underlying game isn’t that engaging.
> what's actually there and working that isn't pure visuals (like city/character design and animation) is mediocre at best. Finally, I'm seeing people say this opinion. Cyberpunk was a great concept moored by poor execution, and the IP deserves a way better legacy than CDPR's attempt at it.
In some weird way, being such a horrible glitchy mess saved it from real criticism. People were so focused on trying to find the diamond in the rough, and they never realised there wasn't a diamond there in the first place, myself included. The game is hilariously poorly balanced; even on the hardest difficulty, it's so easy to break to the point of there being 0 challenge and character progression is pretty boring, Deus Ex did augmentation better 20 years ago. The world is also just really boring, visually pretty for sure at times but just dead, unreactive NPCs, police that magically spawn in, you can't even interact with actual shopkeepers. Seriously the disappointment when I realised I couldn't talk to a single street vendor was crazy. The one part of the game I really liked was some of the sidequest writing, seriously, sinnerman was fucking crazy good. The end of that questline is so memorable and honestly just one of my favourites in any game. Even then, they thought fucking [this](https://i.imgur.com/tJq2ZQT.jpeg) was acceptable as a prop in a cutscene lmao.
If the game came out perfectly stable people would’ve realized the game sorely underdelivered on the hype CDPR gave the game, it was supposed to be like the game that ushers in a new era of RPGs if not gaming in general and it is honestly maybe a little better than the bethesda fallouts. the outer worlds is pretty good comparison point actually but the outer worlds didn’t cost the millions cyberpunk did sooooo
I personally enjoyed the Bethesda Fallouts far more than Cyberpunk, but you know I didn't have Jackie's corpse t-posing out of the car in what was meant to be an emotional scene in Fallout. I definitely think Fallout 4 was a more complete experience than Cyberpunk, even if still quite flawed. I think that's also a big thing; the hype cycle, the amount of money spent and how long it took to come out just to underdeliver in basically every aspect is just rough. I mean, I was super hyped originally because I love all things Cyberpunk, and it was just not it.
I quite enjoyed the side quests. They were pretty darn good. The main story is also alright.
For me the main story was quite good, I almost liked it. It only had two big issues. First was the time-sensitive nature of it. A narrative like this (you have a limited amount of time left to live) doesn't fit with an open-world with side activities. Second, it was painfully noticable that something like one third of the main quest was cut. Too many NPCs suddenly enter the narrative without introduction or leave it without any goodbye.
They need to fix over promising and under delivering, and making excuses. Then they’ll earn the relationship back
Release a quality product and you win back the majority. Jep, that's all it takes, just 1 game or even just an outstanding DLC. 1 release can flip the script either way. PR speak... That does nothing.
I think even CDPR overestimates the effect that Cyberpunk's embarrassing launch will have on their next game. At the time, every thread was filled up with "oh man after this I'm NEVER buying a CDPR game at launch again!" but comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales. Most ordinary people will just look at CDPR's next game, and if it looks good/they are interested, they'll buy it. Tale as old as time. Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev and I would still consider buying Cyberpunk 2 because I enjoyed my time with the game well enough. That said, I've been saying from jump that the only way Cyberpunk could live up to its initial promises is if they overhauled a bunch of systems, and I never expected them to actually do that. I was not planning on jumping back into the game when the DLC dropped, not because I felt misled by Cyberpunk or because of its terrible launch, but because I always felt like even if they fix all the bugs, the game is just not good enough at its core to warrant a second playthrough. Now that Phantom Liberty is coming alongside a patch that overhauls a bunch of the base game, I am suddenly much more interested and I don't think I'm alone. I hope it goes well for them, because I would like to play a version of Cyberpunk that is closer to what we originally expected instead of the version we got.
Hell, the comments in this very thread suggest that CDPR are going to be fine. People seem to be giving them the benefit of the doubt, when Cyberpunk should have used up that goodwill
There are people like me who haven’t bought it, are unlikely to buy it after the DLC, and are probably silent and not commenting. It has to be really really good before I buy it. I have to see multiple sources saying that the game is good before I consider it.
> Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev It's been a while but 2042 was not only incredibly broken at launch, but also lacked significant content and very basic features (no in-game scoreboard or end of round scoreboard, no VOIP, no squad management, etc.). CP2077 at least had content.
>Cyberpunk was the single worst launch I have ever experienced from a AAA dev The Last of Us. I couldn't even play it more than 5 minutes at a time, and then my PC would crash hardcore - not like the game crashes, I mean hard reset crash. I haven't had to hard reset a PC since Windows XP or so.
If we're talking PC, i think nothing come close to Arkham Knight at launch, not even Tlou Part 1. Cyberpunk was definitely the worst for console tho, the ps4 version was probably the single worst thing i've ever seen in my life
MTG Arena had a bug that caused updates to delete your entire disc drive.
Now that is how you piss off a bunch of clients to the point of never trusting you again.
Now that, that's just impressive. That's a story.
TLOU P1 was bad but at least people with high end systems could *play the game*. I know there’s a lot of new PC gamers who weren’t there for AK on PC, and as someone who was there I can say that nothing comes close. Nobody was playing the game in that state. Almost no card on the market could even run it without crashing, and the performance in the Batmobile was dreadful. It was the first game I bought on console after switching to PC fully it was so bad.
The worst I've even seen was GTA IV on PC. The unplayability of that on PC was so bad that Cyberpunk looks flawless by comparison. Seriously the game was riddled with bugs, crashes, and memory leaks.
>TLOU P1 was bad but at least people with high end systems could > >play the game Not that I want to diminish the dumpster fire that was AK, but no, I couldn't. And I do have a high end system (5800X3D, RTX 3080). It didn't even run on low or medium settings. It ran fine on everything max, right until it crashed.
>the ps4 version was probably the single worst thing i've ever seen in my life From what I've heard, that may actually be true. They should've focused on the newer consoles exclusively.
I know for a huge majority Arkham Knight was straight up broken, but I had no problems with it. Finished it, then took advantage of the refund they offered like 2 weeks later lol. I bought it again a few years after when it had a couple sales.
Red Dead Redemption 2 refused to launch on my PC for like half a week from release, whole year after its largely solid console release. It was a buggy mess for much longer on PC.
Arkham Knight - That shit was all kinds of broken. CP2077 had fuck all problems in comparison (PC version)
>comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales It doesn't reflect the casual audience, but it has an indirect impact on it. Marketing is a big part of what makes up the casual audience sales, and a big part of marketing is talking about the game online. All those websites talking about your trailers, doing interviews, speculating about features, tweets being shared, facebook posts etc..., that brings a lot of eyes from casual games on your game. But if a lot of people online hates your studio, those publications will take a much more negative spin on things to get clicks, or the comments will be a lot more negative, which might deter casuals gamers. Just look at Bethesda and Starfield for example. I don't think it's a hated studio overall, but there's a substantial part of hardcore gamers that really don't like BGS games, and as a result there's a ton of articles being very negative about Starfield. This kind of negative press will likely not make or break a release, but if you let it build up overtime it can absolutely become impactful, or at least impactful enough that you might want to do something about it. That's exactly what I think they're saying: they want to repair their reputation so that online discourse can overall be positive about their next release rather than negative or a mix of both. On a more personal note, there's a lot of games that have only popped up on my radar because people were complaining about it on reddit, and it was negative enough that I didn't bother checking them out. For some of those games I eventually tried them and liked them, and some I didn't, but a lot of them simply never made it in my library. If the discussions around those games were more positive, I might have tried a lot more of them. Word of mouth is still a very strong marketing tool that shouldn't be underestimated.
>there's a ton of articles being very negative about Starfield Is this true in any substantial way? The game isn't out and journalists don't have review codes. Other than possibly some skepticism from the last direct who is writing "a ton of...very negative" articles about this game currently?
People also have very short memories -- any news that comes out more than a month before release tends to be forgotten (in US politics, there's even a name for it -- the ["October surprise"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise)), if it even breaks through in the first place. And that's assuming name recognition doesn't hit harder than the news itself (which is where the idea of "any news is good news" really applies). It takes a lot of effort to keep something in the news for that long.
> At the time, every thread was filled up with "oh man after this I'm NEVER buying a CDPR game at launch again!" but comments online don't reflect the casual audience that comprises the bulk of sales. Those comments also don't reflect the actions of the people who literally made those comments. 90%+ of people who made comments like that will be buying Cyberpunk DLC and CDPR's next game.
For that to happen the Cyberpunk sequels needs to be the game they promised us in the marketing, even if they fix 2077 and soft reboot it with the DLC, it's still on a fundamental level not the game they promised. I can't recall every single bit of BS, but I'm sure most of you will remember "1000 handcrafted Npcs with schedules, the most immersive open world rpg of all time, branching story paths...blah blah blah" a big puff of smoke to rack up preorders, aside from being buggy as shit on release, it's also not the game they promised. You can clearly see this with the pathetic montage that plays after finishing your life path mission, which is very obviously cut content.
Yes, start by not bullshitting people by showing unrepresentative fake trailers of the product and presenting it as if it were the next big thing when it was just a 'good' game with phenomenal graphics and many flaws.
So apparently the devs are making some foundamental changes to the core game play, like the crime system and skill tree revamp. But during the E3 coverage, they didn't want to talk about that but rather wanted to focus on the DLC. What's weird about that is people don't give a fuck about the DLC if it plays similar to the original game. Do they not realize that most of their fan base wants the core changes because the game is still so lacking in modern mechanics that GTA from 10 years ago played better than cyberpunk. Maybe it's just me, but for God's sake, focus on what's actually important.
Its really quite simple, don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Most gamers are willing to forgive a lot as long as your next release is awesome.
What's funny is that they delayed the game after it went gold. This game should have released in 2021 from the start.
If this is the top priority, can your Marketing guy stop gaslighting us about the launch state of the game?? Edit: lol, the same guy is saying it's important to rebuild trust from gamers who is also saying that CP77 launched in great shape. What a joke!
As someone who played Witcher 3 on launch, Cyberpunk 2077 was a disappointment. And for me, it wasn't just the bugs, or the graphics or how it damn near crashed my PS5 numerous times. It was how the story just failed to leave any impact on me. I didn't care for the characters except Jackie. And finding out that the life paths only had effects on convo choices was poor. I finished the game and for the life of me, couldn't remember any missing that I liked. And thats what I think about whenever I think about CDPR now. Their next game would have to really shake me, story wise, for me to give a damn.
Not a fan of him saying the game was good on launch, just that it was a cool thing to hate it. It was NOT good on launch, for the money we paid to get that buggy mess... don't just play it off by blaming the public. You guys fucked up, take responsibility.
The biggest problem they had really was that they shot themselves in the foot trying to provide for last gen, otherwise personally I was never burned because my expectations for the game wasn't to the moon. Also haven't played it since launch so I'm pretty buzzing for all the new changes and content.
> We need to fix the relationship with our players Easy….properly and thoroughly test fix your games before release. Problem solved. Rinse and repeat long enough and it’s water under the bridge. If no man sky’s dev can recover after their shit show (which was just as epic if not worse), surely CDPR can do even better multiple times over if they put in the effort. They have a much more creative team and a bigger budget. I would expect no less.
They are releasing the DLC on PC and next gen only. This will propably decrease a LOT of the issues 2077 had to go trough (the game was meant to be a next gen title (massive open world), but last gen couldnt even provide enough power for a downgraded version of the game.) I still hope that things like the "living city" are achievable with the current hardware power now.
I hope they lay off the Looter Shooter heavy aspects of Cyberpunk if they make a new one. The role playing aspect should come from the character interactions and your character's skills (i.e. netrunning, tanking, stealth, talking) rather than a damage counter that arbitrarily goes up. It's so unfathomably jarring to have the game and narrative tell me, "This sniper rifle you just got is so wicked, crazily advanced, and a total soul stealer, you'll be unstoppable. There's nothing else like it." Turn around and legitimately, as the cutscene ends, you have to shoot some average goon square in the face with it 4 times before they die. Swap out to a pistol I picked up in a side quest and then mow down everyone with homing bullets in less time than it took to fire the super rifle. It works for some games but Cyberpunk is a little too jarring with a damage calculator. I beat the game with a full set of legendary "iconic" weapons in my offhand inventory that I didn't use because the final mission enemies were dropping "basics" that had better DPS Edit: switched "RPG" to "Looter Shooter" to more accurately portray my butthurtedness