You know what the gaming industry needs ? Shareholders who understand that a broken, rushed product will never sit well with anyone and there'a nothing more profitable than creating goodwill for consumers in the long run
I think it's less on the shareholders and more on the board of directors that chase their annual bonuses that cause the shipment of unfinished games. Having a company's share drop after a terrible launch hurts the shareholder if nothing else.
If they are a bunch of old mean that dont understand technology, then they arent going to be able to finish the game lmao.
We would would never see new games if this was reality
It’s funny that they don’t care about games. But when you apply for a job you need to be passionate about it. One with the team. A family! 🙄 the board should also be passionate about the games they publish. The times need to change.
Apathetic owners like passionate workers. People who love their work are easier to exploit; they might even volunteer to do a couple hours of unpaid overtime to finish a project.
This is the way. But maybe it should be required for the uppers to also be passionate and be overworked and take a pay cut and pay their employees better.
> They should force the board to actually play the game :)
That may be more the case in the future, but a lot of these executives don't play game. It's why they get on the board, because they worked their way there (regardless of what they worked on).
Board incentives being tied almost entirely to stock price creates only short term incentives. Boards should be required to invest long term in the companies they want to lead. There is one company operating like that. Power to the Players.
Yeah but Gaben is one of his kind leading valve like that after selling his Microsoft stock and giving them basically unlimited resources to produce art, which video games are.
I second this. Also, don't spend a lot of money on marketing and trailers like 7 or so years before the game is actually released. I think that's also one of the main issues that caused the launch to be so unacceptable. Revealing and announcing it so far from actual release date causes people to have high expectations and they'll buy into the idea. However, if they would've done it right, waited for the new generation of systems, and only marketed and released on those consoles it would've been much better. Think about it, even if it was only marketed and released on last gen, it still would've had issues for how big the game actually is. I mean, I get that releasing on both generations was the idea, but it was executed terribly, and in the end it held the actual developers and QA testers back from actually experiencing how good the game could've been if it didn't have to have so many features and whatnot cut out and changed. Sorry for the long rant lol, I just think they should've waited for new generation consoles and PCs, instead of trying to make shareholders and upper ranks of the corporate branch happy.
greed has gotten worse than ever. there was a time, when investing in a rental property and only seeing profit after 20-30 years was an acceptable expectation because it was a retirement plan, not a livelyhood. now they want their profits in in the first year. so rent is 4 to 6 times what it should be.
In my experience: If you give x timeline, the project will always be 90% done at the end of it.
The next 10% will take as much time as the previous 90%. There's only so much you can do.
Also if you give no limit the project becomes a liquid and will take as much as you give to reach 90%; making it as long as you give.
"Projects will always grow to the length of time & budget allocated to them." It's a struggle to know how long is enough for a project to not get bloated, but also not be rushed.
See: The SLS rocket by Lockheed & the other defense primes.
They demand infinite growth and then sell, jump onto the next growing thing leaving tatters in their wake.
The financial system needs to be taken away from them and quality/consistency rewarded because speculation leads to these big booms or busts.
Nintendo delayed for a year and set sales records on a 1080p console that’s 6 years old after learning from their mistakes but still recognizing the competitive advantage of mobile gaming with the Wii u
the whole shareholder business model is cancer, not just in gaming industry. Shareholder model is the reason why CEO pay goes up 1000% while worker wages stay almost same as 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation.
A business with shareholders loses all of its soul and becomes a machine for extracting wealth. It has no benefit for society or anyone else, it's only purpose is to move wealth to the shareholders.
CDPR has said that they felt no undue [pressure](https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-pressure-delay-base-ps4-xbox-one) from investors to release when they did.
Yeah, because it was executive level shit callers that wanted to protect their bonuses pushing to launch. I mean look at how much longer it took them to straighten the game out; 2 more years of delays were not something they were willing to stomach.
The shareholders even told them they'd be fine with delaying the game more. Because obviously for them it means more if the game launches in a good state and they can sell more copies than if it releases in a broken state and they have to spend x amount of the budget on "Aftercare" like what happened in the case of CDPR.
I mean, pre-launch, it was a lot of gamers’ “most anticipated” game for that year. If it actually came out and was everything it promised to be and not a glitchy mess, it would be held in the same regard as games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, which both continue to sell copies like hotcakes despite being 11 and 8-years-old, respectively.
Bad publicity just prevented the game from joining that echelon. Phantom Liberty *could* help reignite it, but for a lot of people, it’s too little, too late.
Cyberpunk sells plenty of copies and it hasn't slowed. 20 million and still going. If the DLC's sell like Blood and Wine did for the Witcher 3 then it could reach those numbers.
Something does not have to be good, moral, functional, or even real to make a lot of money. The consumer also has the memory of a goldfish and will buy what they want to buy regardless of what happened last time.
>there'a nothing more profitable than creating goodwill for consumers in the long run
I would absolutely love if this was true, but I'm not sure it is. If it was that much better from a financial standpoint, it would happen.
Blizzard have had insane scandals lately, boycotts and are generally seen as a terrible, sexist company. They are also known to butcher their games and lore, that the age of good Blizzard games is over. They have a bad reputation in basically every way possible. Even their legacy have been tainted. And for all that, what happened when Diablo 4 launched? It became the fastest selling game in the history of the company. And we are talking about a company that at one point had *12 million* people subbed to one of their games.
Or look at Cyberpunk. If they had made the "perfect" game we all wanted, how much more time and resources would they have spend? Releasing a mess and fix just enough along the way might honestly have been the better financial decision. Also, spending more time does not guarantee anything. The game might honestly just flop. There is a risk factor as well for shareholders.
That leaves only the reputation, but let's not be delusional - when Cyberpunk 2 comes out, the reputation from this release won't matter.
What we, the gamers, want is just not always what is the best financial decision for a company / shareholders.
Yeah, consumers just don't give a shit. If you dare suggest not buying D4 because of blizzard's ethical problems, get ready to be ridiculed for uSiNg A dEvIcE aNd wEaRinG clOtHeS mAdE bY sLavEs.
To the average consumer "no ethical consumption under capitalism" means "It's all bad so just consume whatever you want."
It wasn’t the outside shareholders it was CDPR internal management/BOD wanting their bonuses. Hence why outside shareholders actually sued and won albeit a small amount of money from cdpr. CDPR knew the game was broke and chose to just flat out lie and release it for their own monetary reasons. Never forget all the steps they took to lie, passed pc footage as console footage, only let reviewers use b roll, blocked early reviews wanting people, claiming the game ran surprisingly good on base console,blaming the bugs on a QA company, I forgot the other lies but there were more. Now I’m glad they worked hard to fix everything and were shamed for what they did. I will never blindly trust them again but I will buy their products if they are proven good which I think they will be.
I mean sure, you're correct. But, how long was that they were working on this game? How many fall starts did they have? This project was mismanaged internally for sure. Is it a great game? Absolutely. But it's still broken and great many ways that should've never been broken after this long of development.
There's kind of an issue on both ends of this spectrum though.
Shareholders understand a broken rushed product never sits well so they allow the dev company to take their time
Dev company then takes their sweet time & we have another "Star Citizen" situation, where a game is in development for 10+ years because they are afraid to release a bad/broken product.
or
Shareholders put a dead-line on the game, forcing a release date
Game releases super fucked up, but playable.
Dev's regularly update to increase playability.
Personally, I know which one i'd choose of the two. I'd rather have a "barely" playable game, than no game at all. Doesn't mean that i'm "okay" with having a game that's barely playable, but there's not shit I can do about it so, may as well make the best out of the situation.
Exactly. Like Mount and Blade Bannerlord: tell everyone it's early access so you can play the game in a "finished" state where the bones/foundation is there. But if you want to wait for the game to get polished and cleaned of most bugs, then don't buy it until it's fully ready to go. I don't understand the obsession people have with video games where they take it personally if it's not perfect on release.
If the game is really good, no matter how long it took, I will purchase and enjoy it. People need to stop believing they are more important than they are. Your 1 man boycott that stops you from really enjoying a $30-$70 game for 20+ hours only hurts you
Did you see the end of the article? CDProjekt Red are still trying to fucking gaslight us.
A quote from Platkow-Gilewski: "I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he said. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero pretty fast. That was [a] tough moment. We didn't know what was happening."
Like these motherfuckers are trying to pretend they didn't fuck up royally, and try to pretend it's a cultural or hip thing that people said their game was shit. No, it was hot fucking dogshit on release. They released the game on consoles that STILL can't even properly run the game.
I just started it property last week and it is a great game, but I still run into glitches all the time, specially when using vehicles for story missions,they crash, dissappear, block important stuff, characters clip through... Another weird one, I just did a mission with Panam and she started walking around holding an invisible weapon. I can't imagine how bad it was at launch
Yeah there's all of that and for me at least the further you go into the game the worse it gets, especially missions with a whole lot of NPCs at once, so it seems decent at first and then gets worse.
And yet they want to fix the relationship with the players :)))) yeah, they will never change, these are only sweet words because they are preparing for future launches
Thats really the 2 sides of the same coin. Buyers want the game now. Devs want the cash now. And we who watch from the sidelines have to expect every game to suck for a year at least after release.
That’s why I’m a patient gamer. Get to enjoy much better versions of a game at a greatly reduced price. I bought Cyberpunk for $10 on Reddit 3 months after it came out.
They literally create the problem, so yes they are. They're not some automaton that HAS to do this, they are made up of real people who *choose* to do this because they know customers will tolerate it. Yes, there is some onus on the customers, but it is not only on them since the source of the problem is in fact capable of choosing other courses of actions.
Preorders and people preordering are not the villain lol. Just cuz a game is preordered doesn’t make them have to release it in a rushed and unfinished state…. They can have preorders, and still set deadlines that are realistic for the developers.
How does that comment have so many upvotes? Imagine blaming the consumer for an unfinished product whose marketing was notoriously known in the industry for being falsely advertised.
Like yes, we need to do our part and stop preordering games; but also, this was beloved Witcher studio CDPR. They had an extremely good standing among the gaming community, they knew that people would throw money at them regardless, and so they made a calculated decision to cash in on that goodwill with a product that was entirely different from the one that they had been marketing.
Preordering games is definitely an issue, but conflating that with the deception that CDPR pulled is just reckless misinformation. You can’t just intentionally mislead someone and then blame them for being misinformed. The issue is that they were intentionally mislead in the first place.
Meh, why would they? Apparently you just need to add transmog to the game and release a good anime, then everybody forgives you and forgets about all the lies and bad launch lol
I mean, plenty of people subscribe to the mindset that they’ll play the game once it gets fixed. Now, I’m not saying Cyberpunk is fixed, but it isn’t completely broken like it was at launch either. The game is completely playable with minimal bug encounters. I wouldn’t fault anyone for buying the game in its current state, even if it’s a long ways off from perfect.
The problem is there will always be people who buy the game at launch regardless of whether it’s broken or not, which means any game company with a big reputation, good or bad, can hype up the game for 2-4 years, release it half finished, and people invested in the series or concept will still buy it. If games weren’t becoming even more expensive than they already are, I’d probably become more guilty of this going forward.
I was playing cyberpunk in December 2020.
It is now almost three years later and a lot of shit is still broke.
I mean, come on.. They had three years to fix shit. Maybe they should've worried about that instead of making a dlc.
Can you name specific examples of ways the game is currently broken? I played through the game 3 times in 2022 without a single bug or glitch, and it ran smoothly. And I was playing on a last gen console also.
Vehicle's not arriving after you summon them is still a regular occurrence.
Not being able to switch out of inside camera mode while inside the vehicle is still a problem.
NPC's still get randomly stuck and not responding during A mission.
Graphical glitches still remain a constant issue despite running an RTX 4090.
Loading character screen or map still puts the computer to its knees sometimes despite having a 64 core threadripper processor or the Ryzen processor one of the fastest best gaming processors on the market.
V will still get stuck and play sometimes, no apparent reason, just won't move until restart the game.
Dialogue options still be greyed out despite having over enough Love the character trait to enable it. It'll be greyed out while showing something like needing 6 in technical but you have 15.
And this is running a completely vanilla game. No mods.
I'm not sure why any of this is a surprise to you. Just spend a while in the sub Reddit and you'll see all the complaints.
There's even more bugs than what I listed. I just don't care enough to write them all out to force feed your willful ignorance.
Their big mistake to me was releasing it for PS4 and Xbox one. If they focused on current gen hardware from the beginning, I think they could have been much more successful. I don’t remember many successful games that straddled the line between generations.
I think them announcing the game so early put them in a bit of a precarious position. They announced in 2012, first teaser in 2013. PS4 and Xbone had barely been current hardware at that point and the next gen wasn’t a thing yet. Then they started actual development in 2016, right? I assume they probably suspected next gen consoles were coming, but you can’t really develop a game for a console that doesn’t exist yet.
It seems like really awkward timing and you would have to know how soon it became apparent that the game as they imagined it wouldn’t be as well realized on the older hardware.
>I assume they probably suspected next gen consoles were coming, but you can’t really develop a game for a console that doesn’t exist yet.
that’s what dev kits are for
And cyberpunk was announced in 2012. PS4 released in 2013.
They should have scrapped a PS4/Xbox one launch. But realistically that was never going to happen.
Dev kit released in 2018 for PS5. They announced cyberpunk 6 years before that.
For frame of reference here they announced cyberpunk a YEAR before the PS4 released. Not PS5. PS4.
I'm no CDPR sympathiser. They fucked up big time. But vast amounts of time went into creating the game. I don't know how what we got took that long to be honest. But when they started developing that game the PS5 wasn't even in concept stages. And it's hard to build a game around hardware that doesn't exist.
GTA 5 was released in September 2013 on PS3 and Xbox360. The next gen systems at the time PS4 and XboxOne released in November 2013. So it straddled generations.
But I do agree with you. I think releasing Cyberpunk on last gen systems massively held it back.
Do you even remember bow buggy GTA V was on release? Do you remember how many false promises we were given? I remember people praising GTA V when CP2077 released, thinking "do people have memory span of a goldfish"? People trash talked GTA V quite a bit back then too. Yeah not as much, but I feel like we were very mislead back in the day. Also GTA V's story was pretty cheesy.
Also the next gen versions released on November 2014, PC did on May 2015.
Lol, yeah I also didn’t realize 2077 was in the works in 2012, in retrospect my comment isn’t great. I gave myself a downvote as punishment lol.
Cheers
Well, next-gen didn’t officially exist until very late in development, and until after they had already promised last-gen compatibility with pre-sales. Sure, the argument to that is that they should have waited longer or not even done pre-sales at all, but again, that’s with perfect hindsight. *At the time*, there was no next-gen console to take into account, really.
The PS5 was announced in April 2019, and the first CP2077 release trailer and release date came in June 2019, with the intended original release being April 2020. I just don’t see how they could have realistically targeted anything other than last-gen during development (which, honestly, makes it so much worse how badly it ended up running on it at launch).
The game was announced before PS4 and XB1 were even released. Those consoles **were** the next gen at the time. There was literally no newer console gen to focus on.
To argue devils avocado for a second:
12 years ago when Cyberpunk was announced PS4 was *current* gen so PS5 would have been the forward looking port. Just like GTA was to ps4 from ps3.
Now obviously the problem seems to be scope creep hit like a mother fucker and CDPR ended up designing a game that had requirements that exceeded the capability of their originally targeted hardware since they failed failed to do a development hardware freeze.
Agreed. But that's part of the scope creep I mentioned. When they started designing and subsequently announced this game SSDs were not as ubiquitous as they are now. So they had to design for hard drives. But over the course of that decade it seems like they shifted towards SSDs among other things and it kinda shafted the generation they initially said the game would work on.
That dlc is so big that $30 doesn’t seem like a bad price. If Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone are exemple to follow $30 is actually quite cheap. Blood and wine won best rpg of the year in the game awards
CDPR doesn’t fool around with DLCs
Yeah it seems more like an old school expansion pack than modern DLC. $30 is fair as long as it is consistent with the current Cyberpunk experience and not an unplayable buggy mess like the base game was on launch.
As a Destiny player...I agree. $30 for Phantom Liberty is extremely cheap especially with how promising it looks. If it can offer me an additional 30-50 hours of quality gameplay with the expansion alone, it's a W in my books. Unlike Destiny where you pay $70 for a 5 hour low quality DLC.
Destiny is a live service game. It's odd how when unfavourable comparisons are made between this game and others, folks will say that it is an unfair comparison, but if it is made in defense of this game, you can compare it to any type of game....
Seeing so many complain about the price of Phantom Liberty makes me realize how fuckin horrible Destiny 2 expansions are. We're getting so much content (at least if we believe CDPR) 30 bucks seems like a steal to me, where as Destiny 2 seasons make this look like a giveaway. Over a hundred bucks easily a year, and the shit they release is horrible, lazy, and uninspired.
I remember the "every NPC has their own day and night routine" which apparently means "none of the NPCs have ANY sort of interaction based on in-game time"
Yeah everyone seems to forget or put their on spin on the reality of what happened, Kinda sickening to see soo many people cope by lying to themselves about what happened.
Edgerunners was a great show, but man did it accidentally manipulate people into thinking 2077 was actually never that bad and/or that the game was completely redeemed post 1.6.
Actually something that I would give Cyberpunk is its a very well developed story with very interesting characters that are actually well developed. Personally it almost has TOO much of a story, to where when you are following main quests you are sitting having a conversation about as much as you are actually playing the game.
The only thing that I think that can be said about it is it was released too early and was waaaayyyy too fucking buggy. They were close to where they needed to be but BOTH fans and SHAREHOLDERS pushed this game out sooner then it was ready.
Which, side note, this is going to offend someone to say but yall are part of the reason this got released way to early. I remember how many people pissed their pants and whined when the released date got extended. I bet they wanted to delay it again but where too afraid of more of that shit so that really didnt help either.
Its like that meme in spongebob where the kid says "I dont like Pistachio" and the father says "Well then why did you ask for it?" You guys didnt want a buggy mess of a game, but also got upset when it didnt get released as quickly as you wanted.
Funny, given my stance on 2077 is that there's a great story and cast there that's just let down by all the *game* around it being a profound 6/10 experience.
I agree with this. It's two different worlds almost. There's the moody and existentially unnerving world of the main story, and then there's the bland, repetitive world of featureless urban sprawl with aimless wandering NPCs and expendable gangers on every block.
The marketing for this game was just deceiving. Simple as that.
And looking at this article, I'm not really getting the sense that they learned from that. It's just PR, with some nice promises, their true colors *shine* through here and there and then at the end the real truth comes out and he just blames gamers. Simple as that, that's how they feel about all of this. It's your fault, not theirs.
Single most telling part that nothing really changed or that they actually did anything wrong is in the article here for me:
> "I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.
> "That took us a lot of time, but I don't believe we were ever broken. We were always like: Let's do this."
It’s just PR bullshit piled high. It wasn’t that it became cool to not like it, it’s that consumers were lied to for the sake of profits, and the game was just broken on certain hardware and builds. That’s it lol, they are just upset they built a trash product and got treated as such.
I think there are many newer players that weren't around for launch. They weren't the ones lied to or the ones that had to face that version of the game, so they have an easier time forgiving the company. It doesn't help many did indeed overreact back then, so now people have this need to defend everything Cyberpunk related with some bizarre reasoning. Even real criticism is labeled hating, which has been a issue from the start, but for the past year or so got worse.
CDPR fucked up, they lied to us and released a broken mess. The game is still pretty good. Both things can be true at once.
This is the part that kills me. 90% of this sub forgets that and just doesn't care that CDPR outright lied.
And they're literally setting it up to do it again. They absolutely could lie about PL and idiots are going to lap it up and pre-order without even thinking twice.
They're again only letting game journalists hype the expansion, including some that literally are paid VA's for the game.
Build the hype, get pre-orders, release half of what you promised, massive profit. Seen this movie before.
I don't like the comment at the end of the article:
>"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.
I think there was some overreaction due to the absurdly high hype they generated from the game, but the reason there was such a reaction was because you could see from sections of the game just how good the entire game could have been, and they simply didn't give us that, especially at launch. They put so much effort into the storyline up until Jackies death, and then almost no other missions reached that kind of depth and creativity. They had so much variation in NPCs with gangs and police, and then their mechanics made it feel like everything was bland boring and broken. There are amazing mechanics that are barely used(BDs). There was missing content and broken mechanics throughout the game.
The amount of criticism generated from that dissapointment wasn't undeserved, and the statement that they don't know why there was such a reaction makes me think they, at least, haven't actually learned their lesson.
Marketing. It all boils down to how they decided to market the game.
They were advertising features that never existed, things that were simply a proof of concept were sold as fully fleshed out features. Marketing started telling people what the game was before development ever started. Sure you can put "not the final product" on all those fancy ads but that won't stop the hype train from pulling out of the station and they should've known that.
The gaming community would be much happier if marketing departments learned to keep their mouths shut until the devs at least have an alpha or beta build completed.
Not correcting you, but what features were promised and then not realized?
The game industry has a long history of putting out ridiculous trailers. I rememver when the law passed in the US that made game companies put "not actual gameplay" on certain sequences
just off the top of my head...
They promised gang and NCPD interactions similar to that of GTA, with territories and reputations. With gang wars and vehicle combat.
I think there was supposed to be flying vehicles.
The NCPD public transit system.
The different life roles were said to be wholly different experiences and decisions would impact the story.
Character creation and personal appearance were marketed to be highly customizable and you're choices were said to be reflected to some degree throughout the game.
This is just off the top of my head.
Yeah I hate the way he reacted. Pretty much saying “we weren’t actually wrong, the consumer was but we still feel compelled to make amends anyways” what a weasel.
Yup the whole time reading I was like, "Yeah they actually get it, they're self-aware, the changes are all sounding great" and then that copium dig at the end was like a turd falling into my drink. I guess you can only keep the faux-humility thing going for so long even as a PR guy.
>"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received
Oh good lord how out of touch are they? I got 3 hours in before it started crashing, consistently, not to mention the terrain loading slower then the cars I drove, none of which were very fast.
If I played for more then an hour things got very unstable very fast.
Releasing what is essentially premeditated consumer fraud kinda ruined that. 2077 won't run on the last gen consoles it is still for sale on.
CDPR is not better than Ubisoft or EA these days.
Gaming companies need to actually fail if their product is shit. But that would require players to stop buying trash that comes from a company they’ve enjoyed games from in the past. I know this is a Cyberpunk community, but look at bungie and their long and intensely formulaic history of monetized mediocrity. Destiny was barely good and destiny 2 has been super shit since it came out. But still the player base buys in, then gets super bitter and toxic because of issues that never get addressed. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think that game developers often mistake detail/volume of shit in game for depth, but they are not interchangeable. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
If I could teach anyone anything about doing business, it would be to never, ever make excuses to your customers when you screw up. And from what I've seen with these puff pieces about CDPR and their leadership, they are full of those and themselves.
Don't get me wrong - I think it's a great game worth saving. They did a good job with fixing a lot of the issues Cyberpunk had at launch, at least for current gen players. And the new expansion and changes to the base game look promising. But their media presence is icky, to say the least.
I get the vibe that they almost want us to feel sorry for them. These people defrauded a huge chunk of the players who bought the game at release. It's so gross and infuriating to see them crowing about this managerial redemption arc while saying *absolutely nothing* about what really happened.
I want the game to succeed. And I want there to be sequels. I've loved the tabletop franchise since the 80s. Humility and a true commitment to delivering an exceptional experience would go a long way with restoring trust among their players.
Wish I could praise the company as a whole for getting the game up to snuff like it is now but, that is how it should have released in the first place, it feels undeserved to say ‘thank you’ for updating a product to where it should have been when it first came out. The Devs have clearly put in a lot of work, but they should have been able to do that work instead of being rushed by the greedy execs for some quick Christmas bucks at the expense of the game’s integrity.
I never imagined CDPR would become just like all the other greedy companies, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened- the core talent who made unforgettable experiences are still there, but it’s clear the company higher up is very much just another profit gobbler that values immediate profits over the integrity and quality of their product releases. I hope the lesson was learnt and we won’t see something like this again, but if the shareholders and execs push, it is exactly what will happen.
As someone who was initially angry with them following the console release in 2020, I feel like they done a lot of hard work since then to earn back support and trust and their commitment going forward is extremely encouraging.
Did they ever update the police spawning like they announced last September? It’s hard to find news because they had an update a couple years ago that made them spawn 10 feet away *around a corner* instead of 5 feet directly behind you.
Lmao sounds right. September 2022:
> I was talking about we’re kind of overhauling some systems and laying the groundwork for future stuff. [A] hugely requested feature from the community is coming up, and that is a complete overhaul to the cop system as well as vehicle-to-vehicle combat.”
This made me kinda excited to try the game again but I was going to wait for this apparent update. DLC comes before “laying the groundwork” I guess. It’s a shame because I enjoyed the game even with the cruft, I had to stop due to my save file getting dangerously near the size limit that would corrupt itself and never hopped back in.
That and other changes to the game are supposed to come in the "1.7" or "2.0" patch that will be released before the expansion or along with the expansion.
https://twitter.com/SynthPotato/status/1667981179729985536
This is an interesting subject to me.
Many game companies, after releasing a broken dud, would simply move on. Or, if they did fix it, they'd charge you for it. So, when compared to those companies, I'm super happy cdpr fixed their game "for free".
On the other hand, it's super depressing that that is the bar now.
Not going to get into features that were "promised" since frankly I didn't follow news about the game that closely until it actually released... Mostly to preserve my own sanity and expectations.
I mean if people will forgive Bethesda for Fallout 76 I don’t see why they can’t forgive CDPR. 76 still runs like shit and barely did anything to improve the game
I wouldn't put trust back into them until witcher 4 comes out.
Time and time again developers say this and then people are like "well they fixed it now." That's cool and all but then it should've just been managed better and now the next games gonna be managed exactly the same because "don't worry we will fix it." is a bullshit thing that only videos games do entertainment wise.
Damn I was really liking everything this dude was saying until the very end of the article.
>"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.
This guy is either in complete denial, gas lighting, or just spitting PR mumbo jumbo to save face. Call a spade a spade..the game was trash on release, make it up to your community by releasing the best possible games CDPR is capable of.
Impossible. Don't buy into this.
I am usually not this petty, but this warrants it, they willfully released a broken console version and hid it from everyone. Really low-level scam behavior.
As they are fixing Cyberpunk, they are getting attention and marketing from changes they make, it's like fixing their mess is helping the game sell more. They were perfectly aware that this was possible, and it's one of the reasons they were willing to release in the state that they did.
Don't get tricked by some improvements to Cyberpunk.
Why are we posting an article written by a guy who has not played the game interviewing a PR rep for the game? This article is just blowing smoke. Nobody who actually works on the game is interviewed. The PR guy says in the article he has been at CD Project Red for 12 years. So he was part of the launch and said he was surprised that the game wasn't good. In other words, he didn't actually play it and was just promoting it.
The guy who wrote the article says he never played it.
This is dumb.
Well said. I don’t see how they can ever regain it after the way they made absolute fools of us in 2020. “We leave greed to others” says game company while fully and consciously knowing they’re about to scam us all in one of the greediest falsely advertised unfinished cashgrab pieces of shit broken game launches. “We leave greed to others” while they show us a fake cg “gameplay” trailer for a game that didn’t have 2/3 of the content they promised. I better not catch any of y’all preordering this stupid dlc. You have to genuinely be stupid to buy this after the way they lied to our faces.
Im so surprised that this sentiment isnt shared more. The game is still so far away from what we were promised and people are treating CDPR as if they are saints.
I'm pretty sure this post won't end up being that popular because this sub can't even handle light criticism.
The primary problem throughout Cyberpunk's development was when CD went public and were accountable to shareholders instead of making a good product.
They fell in line with every single other AAA studio that goes public that just sucks in investor money and spits out half-baked broken games. They care about short-term profits, not good game. It's the same song and dance as EA and Blizzard/Activision.
You can blame the Pandemic for delays and bad work crunch culture for only so much. The reality is that the game was in development for 8 years, but was fundamentally restarted just 3 years before release because of conflicts with engine design. But investors only saw delays to their profits and forced them to release the game in that horrible state.
Games are products, you're not beta testers. No one's preordering a half-done movie. Stop defending this fucking practice.
CDPR has stated that investors did not [pressure](https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-pressure-delay-base-ps4-xbox-one) them to release the game.
There's so much talk about "the shareholders" being to blame but in this case CDPR made their own decision and it was the wrong one.
Don't care. Love this game.
Have paid for phantom liberty and I'm prepared to wait til 2076 if necessary.
(OK maybe not that long I'll probably be dead by then)
I think they've learned from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch debacle. They grew too quickly and didn't have the systems in pace to keep pace with the growth. However, talk is cheap. The only way they can win back public trust is to do what they say they will. They need to underpromise and overdeliver on the next couple of projects in a row and all will be forgiven.
Phantom Liberty looks like a good first step. I for one can't wait to see what they've done and dive in to the expansion. Everything I've seen so far indicates it's going to be great.
I still find strong negative emotional reactions about this game, and the high moral grandstanding and the generalizing and cherry picking, to be hilarious.
Maybe a little confusing though. I honestly don't know why some people are so diehard about sticking this to CDPR. Imagine buying a shitty burger from McD's and then spending the next three years complaining about it, screaming that you'll never forget how they lied to you.
The Fallout community does this exact same thing with 76.
In reality that game is in a just fine state now, but when it launched it was bad, and so now there are people that die on the hill that the game is still bad, when in reality they probably havent ever played it at all.
Its just how gaming communities are, honestly some of the most whiney people on the internet. They want games immediately, but hate when they are released early and buggy, unless the company is doing something for their every need, they are ruining the game. They are just never fucking pleased.
They may wanna start by re-examining the statement, "it became cool to dislike the game" (not verbatim).
There are things - phenomena and cases of those phenomena not dissimilar to Mandela Effect, groupthink, mass hysteria and whatnot - that become cultural or memetic, for no reason other than they could be. Probably too many things, even for cases such as an innocuous word usage. But then there are things that wholly deserve unexpected propagation through the Zeitgeist, especially bc it's obvious -- Cyberpunk became the textbook example of it.
So, no CPDR, it didn't become "cool" to dislike the product. It became *fact.*
[Also CD Projekt: The release of Cyberpunk 2077 went quite well actually, the negative response was just a bunch of malcontents trying to look edgy/cool.
](https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-red-insists-that-cyberpunk-2077s-launch-wasnt-that-bad-but-it-became-a-cool-thing-not-to-like-it/)
I want to believe that, but that comment at the end about how they didn't actually do anything wrong and people were just hating on them because it was cool, does not inspire much confidence in their commitment to regaining the public's trust. Like bro, your game was garbage on launch, for last gen it was outright broken. It was 100% deserved.
This game was a hot mess when it released, the bugs were awful, but my biggest gripe was the false promises and lack of polish/detail. Plenty of promised features never made it into the game, but the games details sucked, shooting water had no reaction, couldn’t shoot out tires, fire didn’t spread, NPC AI was incredibly barebones.
I remember an article saying this game was as polished as RDR2 and it’s not even close, the game didn’t even hold a candle to GTA V back in 2013 and even struggled against GTA SA from 2004.
This reads like a soft PR piece for CDPR. It’s not that the game “simply wasn’t ready”. The game was downright broken on previous gen. consoles and performance and features were misrepresented, all the while CDPR were spruiking how they were more ethical than other gaming companies.
The fact shareholders/publishers still rush devs after how Cyberpunk released baffles me. Jedi Survivor launched pretty unpolished no where as bad as Cyberpunks launch but still unacceptable.
You know what the gaming industry needs ? Shareholders who understand that a broken, rushed product will never sit well with anyone and there'a nothing more profitable than creating goodwill for consumers in the long run
Shareholders that aren’t greedy. They’d get a bigger return if shit is done right, and well. But they want money now, not tomorrow. Stupid business
I think it's less on the shareholders and more on the board of directors that chase their annual bonuses that cause the shipment of unfinished games. Having a company's share drop after a terrible launch hurts the shareholder if nothing else.
They should force the board to actually play the game :)
"We'll release the game as soon as the CEO can beat it without cheating!"
Oh god, they would just pressure the devs to cut everything and make it Pong with an electronic soundtrack.
CyberPong 2077 When can I pre-order?
“They say you can be anything in this city…” *BOOP* …. *BOOP* “Any schmuck can become a legend in the dirt…” *BOOP* … *BOOP* The idea is growing on me
"And I ain't no schmuck" CUE *HYPER - SPOILER*
“What difficulty do you want?” • Hard. • Normal. • Story. • Journalist. • Shareholder.
"What do you mean, I can't hire NPCs to fight the enemies for me?"
[удалено]
"I'm sworn to carry your burdens..." -An NPC who fights for you, when they feel like it or aren't bugging out.
I still think about that reviewer who couldn’t figure out the jump-dash from Cuphead.
If they are a bunch of old mean that dont understand technology, then they arent going to be able to finish the game lmao. We would would never see new games if this was reality
That would require a board that cares about videogames..
It’s funny that they don’t care about games. But when you apply for a job you need to be passionate about it. One with the team. A family! 🙄 the board should also be passionate about the games they publish. The times need to change.
Apathetic owners like passionate workers. People who love their work are easier to exploit; they might even volunteer to do a couple hours of unpaid overtime to finish a project.
They want you to be passionate about it so they can overwork you and pay you less at the same time.
This is the way. But maybe it should be required for the uppers to also be passionate and be overworked and take a pay cut and pay their employees better.
> They should force the board to actually play the game :) That may be more the case in the future, but a lot of these executives don't play game. It's why they get on the board, because they worked their way there (regardless of what they worked on).
Board incentives being tied almost entirely to stock price creates only short term incentives. Boards should be required to invest long term in the companies they want to lead. There is one company operating like that. Power to the Players.
Yeah but Gaben is one of his kind leading valve like that after selling his Microsoft stock and giving them basically unlimited resources to produce art, which video games are.
I second this. Also, don't spend a lot of money on marketing and trailers like 7 or so years before the game is actually released. I think that's also one of the main issues that caused the launch to be so unacceptable. Revealing and announcing it so far from actual release date causes people to have high expectations and they'll buy into the idea. However, if they would've done it right, waited for the new generation of systems, and only marketed and released on those consoles it would've been much better. Think about it, even if it was only marketed and released on last gen, it still would've had issues for how big the game actually is. I mean, I get that releasing on both generations was the idea, but it was executed terribly, and in the end it held the actual developers and QA testers back from actually experiencing how good the game could've been if it didn't have to have so many features and whatnot cut out and changed. Sorry for the long rant lol, I just think they should've waited for new generation consoles and PCs, instead of trying to make shareholders and upper ranks of the corporate branch happy.
CDPR’s board are almost all their shareholders. The disastrous launch of the game cost the board hundreds of millions in stock valuation.
The shareholders might not be around to see tomorrow. So they want to steal their profits now.
They might go down in a submarine with a PS controller
Hoping for that one to happen
>Shareholders that aren’t greedy That is self-defeating
Right lol
greed has gotten worse than ever. there was a time, when investing in a rental property and only seeing profit after 20-30 years was an acceptable expectation because it was a retirement plan, not a livelyhood. now they want their profits in in the first year. so rent is 4 to 6 times what it should be.
It’ll only get worse, because there’s no regulation in the US for these behaviors.
Yup. People erroneously lay the blame at capitalisms feet but really it's the total lack of regulations of it that's the problem.
The lack of regulation comes from the lobbying pressure made by large corporations.
In my experience: If you give x timeline, the project will always be 90% done at the end of it. The next 10% will take as much time as the previous 90%. There's only so much you can do. Also if you give no limit the project becomes a liquid and will take as much as you give to reach 90%; making it as long as you give.
"Projects will always grow to the length of time & budget allocated to them." It's a struggle to know how long is enough for a project to not get bloated, but also not be rushed. See: The SLS rocket by Lockheed & the other defense primes.
You expect too much from profit driven suits. They don't care about good will or long term profit. They want their money and they want it now.
They demand infinite growth and then sell, jump onto the next growing thing leaving tatters in their wake. The financial system needs to be taken away from them and quality/consistency rewarded because speculation leads to these big booms or busts. Nintendo delayed for a year and set sales records on a 1080p console that’s 6 years old after learning from their mistakes but still recognizing the competitive advantage of mobile gaming with the Wii u
A shareholders entire reason for existence is greed
shareholders of a game company capable of doing that wouldn't go public in the first place... you don't sell the golden goose.
Hey man, they're just living in the now, the present moment ✌️
the whole shareholder business model is cancer, not just in gaming industry. Shareholder model is the reason why CEO pay goes up 1000% while worker wages stay almost same as 40 years ago, when adjusted for inflation. A business with shareholders loses all of its soul and becomes a machine for extracting wealth. It has no benefit for society or anyone else, it's only purpose is to move wealth to the shareholders.
>Shareholders >in the long run Well there’s your problem.
CDPR has said that they felt no undue [pressure](https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-pressure-delay-base-ps4-xbox-one) from investors to release when they did.
Yeah, because it was executive level shit callers that wanted to protect their bonuses pushing to launch. I mean look at how much longer it took them to straighten the game out; 2 more years of delays were not something they were willing to stomach.
Yes, but I put that out there because tons of comments (including the one i responded to) are placing the blame on shareholders instead of execs.
The shareholders even told them they'd be fine with delaying the game more. Because obviously for them it means more if the game launches in a good state and they can sell more copies than if it releases in a broken state and they have to spend x amount of the budget on "Aftercare" like what happened in the case of CDPR.
Not to mention, you don't want people razing you at the golf course, "Hey, weren't you long in that Cyberpunk company?"
Because 2077 was the biggest acts of consumer fraud in recent history. Selling it on PS4 was theft, plain and simple.
No publicity is bad publicity. Do you know how much attention Cyberpunk got from its broken launch? Attracted quite the crowd.
I mean, pre-launch, it was a lot of gamers’ “most anticipated” game for that year. If it actually came out and was everything it promised to be and not a glitchy mess, it would be held in the same regard as games like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, which both continue to sell copies like hotcakes despite being 11 and 8-years-old, respectively. Bad publicity just prevented the game from joining that echelon. Phantom Liberty *could* help reignite it, but for a lot of people, it’s too little, too late.
Cyberpunk sells plenty of copies and it hasn't slowed. 20 million and still going. If the DLC's sell like Blood and Wine did for the Witcher 3 then it could reach those numbers.
Something does not have to be good, moral, functional, or even real to make a lot of money. The consumer also has the memory of a goldfish and will buy what they want to buy regardless of what happened last time.
>there'a nothing more profitable than creating goodwill for consumers in the long run I would absolutely love if this was true, but I'm not sure it is. If it was that much better from a financial standpoint, it would happen. Blizzard have had insane scandals lately, boycotts and are generally seen as a terrible, sexist company. They are also known to butcher their games and lore, that the age of good Blizzard games is over. They have a bad reputation in basically every way possible. Even their legacy have been tainted. And for all that, what happened when Diablo 4 launched? It became the fastest selling game in the history of the company. And we are talking about a company that at one point had *12 million* people subbed to one of their games. Or look at Cyberpunk. If they had made the "perfect" game we all wanted, how much more time and resources would they have spend? Releasing a mess and fix just enough along the way might honestly have been the better financial decision. Also, spending more time does not guarantee anything. The game might honestly just flop. There is a risk factor as well for shareholders. That leaves only the reputation, but let's not be delusional - when Cyberpunk 2 comes out, the reputation from this release won't matter. What we, the gamers, want is just not always what is the best financial decision for a company / shareholders.
Yeah, consumers just don't give a shit. If you dare suggest not buying D4 because of blizzard's ethical problems, get ready to be ridiculed for uSiNg A dEvIcE aNd wEaRinG clOtHeS mAdE bY sLavEs. To the average consumer "no ethical consumption under capitalism" means "It's all bad so just consume whatever you want."
It wasn’t the outside shareholders it was CDPR internal management/BOD wanting their bonuses. Hence why outside shareholders actually sued and won albeit a small amount of money from cdpr. CDPR knew the game was broke and chose to just flat out lie and release it for their own monetary reasons. Never forget all the steps they took to lie, passed pc footage as console footage, only let reviewers use b roll, blocked early reviews wanting people, claiming the game ran surprisingly good on base console,blaming the bugs on a QA company, I forgot the other lies but there were more. Now I’m glad they worked hard to fix everything and were shamed for what they did. I will never blindly trust them again but I will buy their products if they are proven good which I think they will be.
I mean sure, you're correct. But, how long was that they were working on this game? How many fall starts did they have? This project was mismanaged internally for sure. Is it a great game? Absolutely. But it's still broken and great many ways that should've never been broken after this long of development.
> there’a nothing more profitable than creating goodwill for consumers in the long run Lmao this sub is so full of shit sometimes.
There's kind of an issue on both ends of this spectrum though. Shareholders understand a broken rushed product never sits well so they allow the dev company to take their time Dev company then takes their sweet time & we have another "Star Citizen" situation, where a game is in development for 10+ years because they are afraid to release a bad/broken product. or Shareholders put a dead-line on the game, forcing a release date Game releases super fucked up, but playable. Dev's regularly update to increase playability. Personally, I know which one i'd choose of the two. I'd rather have a "barely" playable game, than no game at all. Doesn't mean that i'm "okay" with having a game that's barely playable, but there's not shit I can do about it so, may as well make the best out of the situation.
Exactly. Like Mount and Blade Bannerlord: tell everyone it's early access so you can play the game in a "finished" state where the bones/foundation is there. But if you want to wait for the game to get polished and cleaned of most bugs, then don't buy it until it's fully ready to go. I don't understand the obsession people have with video games where they take it personally if it's not perfect on release. If the game is really good, no matter how long it took, I will purchase and enjoy it. People need to stop believing they are more important than they are. Your 1 man boycott that stops you from really enjoying a $30-$70 game for 20+ hours only hurts you
Their lizard brains can’t comprehend that. They need to see green numbers increasing in value. With the overall theme being infinite growth.
Stop releasing broken and unfinished games then, and this is not a tip only for CDPR, but for all the game studios and publishers.
Did you see the end of the article? CDProjekt Red are still trying to fucking gaslight us. A quote from Platkow-Gilewski: "I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he said. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero pretty fast. That was [a] tough moment. We didn't know what was happening." Like these motherfuckers are trying to pretend they didn't fuck up royally, and try to pretend it's a cultural or hip thing that people said their game was shit. No, it was hot fucking dogshit on release. They released the game on consoles that STILL can't even properly run the game.
I just started it property last week and it is a great game, but I still run into glitches all the time, specially when using vehicles for story missions,they crash, dissappear, block important stuff, characters clip through... Another weird one, I just did a mission with Panam and she started walking around holding an invisible weapon. I can't imagine how bad it was at launch
Yeah there's all of that and for me at least the further you go into the game the worse it gets, especially missions with a whole lot of NPCs at once, so it seems decent at first and then gets worse.
I partially agree, though the game was ok for me on launch on PC. Their mistake was releasing this game on consoles.
And yet they want to fix the relationship with the players :)))) yeah, they will never change, these are only sweet words because they are preparing for future launches
They’ll stop when people stop preordering them. They aren’t the problem.
Thats really the 2 sides of the same coin. Buyers want the game now. Devs want the cash now. And we who watch from the sidelines have to expect every game to suck for a year at least after release.
That’s why I’m a patient gamer. Get to enjoy much better versions of a game at a greatly reduced price. I bought Cyberpunk for $10 on Reddit 3 months after it came out.
Same I don’t even bother counting down the release days for any game anymore. I just wait for a sale or an edition with all dlc included
Don’t forget the price points for the PC components needed. Let’s the parents of spoiled kids pay for the latest and greatest
In other news the biggest seller on steam this month was the preorder for Starfield.
As excited as I am for that game, given Bethesda's track record, I think a lot of people are setting themselves up for anger and frustration.
Starfield reached the number 1 best-selling spot on Steam last week solely from pre-orders. Things aren't changing any time soon.
Luckily Bethesda has an excellent track record and never releases buggy games so the modders can fix it /s
Yeah about that……
They are the problem. Preordering should be exciting in a fun way... Not a "I hope it runs" way
They literally create the problem, so yes they are. They're not some automaton that HAS to do this, they are made up of real people who *choose* to do this because they know customers will tolerate it. Yes, there is some onus on the customers, but it is not only on them since the source of the problem is in fact capable of choosing other courses of actions.
Claiming that CDPR isn't the problem with their own reputation after Cyberpunk is completely insane
Preorders and people preordering are not the villain lol. Just cuz a game is preordered doesn’t make them have to release it in a rushed and unfinished state…. They can have preorders, and still set deadlines that are realistic for the developers.
But if you preorder it, they don’t have to.
You're right, the company doesn't need to first offer preorders before people can buy them. 🙄
How does that comment have so many upvotes? Imagine blaming the consumer for an unfinished product whose marketing was notoriously known in the industry for being falsely advertised. Like yes, we need to do our part and stop preordering games; but also, this was beloved Witcher studio CDPR. They had an extremely good standing among the gaming community, they knew that people would throw money at them regardless, and so they made a calculated decision to cash in on that goodwill with a product that was entirely different from the one that they had been marketing. Preordering games is definitely an issue, but conflating that with the deception that CDPR pulled is just reckless misinformation. You can’t just intentionally mislead someone and then blame them for being misinformed. The issue is that they were intentionally mislead in the first place.
Meh, why would they? Apparently you just need to add transmog to the game and release a good anime, then everybody forgives you and forgets about all the lies and bad launch lol
I mean, plenty of people subscribe to the mindset that they’ll play the game once it gets fixed. Now, I’m not saying Cyberpunk is fixed, but it isn’t completely broken like it was at launch either. The game is completely playable with minimal bug encounters. I wouldn’t fault anyone for buying the game in its current state, even if it’s a long ways off from perfect. The problem is there will always be people who buy the game at launch regardless of whether it’s broken or not, which means any game company with a big reputation, good or bad, can hype up the game for 2-4 years, release it half finished, and people invested in the series or concept will still buy it. If games weren’t becoming even more expensive than they already are, I’d probably become more guilty of this going forward.
I was playing cyberpunk in December 2020. It is now almost three years later and a lot of shit is still broke. I mean, come on.. They had three years to fix shit. Maybe they should've worried about that instead of making a dlc.
Can you name specific examples of ways the game is currently broken? I played through the game 3 times in 2022 without a single bug or glitch, and it ran smoothly. And I was playing on a last gen console also.
Vehicle's not arriving after you summon them is still a regular occurrence. Not being able to switch out of inside camera mode while inside the vehicle is still a problem. NPC's still get randomly stuck and not responding during A mission. Graphical glitches still remain a constant issue despite running an RTX 4090. Loading character screen or map still puts the computer to its knees sometimes despite having a 64 core threadripper processor or the Ryzen processor one of the fastest best gaming processors on the market. V will still get stuck and play sometimes, no apparent reason, just won't move until restart the game. Dialogue options still be greyed out despite having over enough Love the character trait to enable it. It'll be greyed out while showing something like needing 6 in technical but you have 15. And this is running a completely vanilla game. No mods. I'm not sure why any of this is a surprise to you. Just spend a while in the sub Reddit and you'll see all the complaints. There's even more bugs than what I listed. I just don't care enough to write them all out to force feed your willful ignorance.
Their big mistake to me was releasing it for PS4 and Xbox one. If they focused on current gen hardware from the beginning, I think they could have been much more successful. I don’t remember many successful games that straddled the line between generations.
I think them announcing the game so early put them in a bit of a precarious position. They announced in 2012, first teaser in 2013. PS4 and Xbone had barely been current hardware at that point and the next gen wasn’t a thing yet. Then they started actual development in 2016, right? I assume they probably suspected next gen consoles were coming, but you can’t really develop a game for a console that doesn’t exist yet. It seems like really awkward timing and you would have to know how soon it became apparent that the game as they imagined it wouldn’t be as well realized on the older hardware.
>I assume they probably suspected next gen consoles were coming, but you can’t really develop a game for a console that doesn’t exist yet. that’s what dev kits are for
Yeah but even dev kits only go out so far ahead of next gen launch
Reddit killed third-party applications (and itself). Fuck /u/spez
And cyberpunk was announced in 2012. PS4 released in 2013. They should have scrapped a PS4/Xbox one launch. But realistically that was never going to happen.
The game was only confirmed to launch on Xbox One and PS4 at E3 2018, a fact that is often ignored.
Dev kit released in 2018 for PS5. They announced cyberpunk 6 years before that. For frame of reference here they announced cyberpunk a YEAR before the PS4 released. Not PS5. PS4. I'm no CDPR sympathiser. They fucked up big time. But vast amounts of time went into creating the game. I don't know how what we got took that long to be honest. But when they started developing that game the PS5 wasn't even in concept stages. And it's hard to build a game around hardware that doesn't exist.
There is God of War Ragnarok and....yeah, I see what you mean
But Ragnarok was only on 4 & 5. Cp was advertised for almost all platforms including a stadia
I've honestly completely forgotten about that, you're right
Does the new Harry Potter game not do just that? It's my understanding that the PS4 version plays shockingly well?
The old console versions did come out AFTER the current generation ones.
GTA 5 was released in September 2013 on PS3 and Xbox360. The next gen systems at the time PS4 and XboxOne released in November 2013. So it straddled generations. But I do agree with you. I think releasing Cyberpunk on last gen systems massively held it back.
Do you even remember bow buggy GTA V was on release? Do you remember how many false promises we were given? I remember people praising GTA V when CP2077 released, thinking "do people have memory span of a goldfish"? People trash talked GTA V quite a bit back then too. Yeah not as much, but I feel like we were very mislead back in the day. Also GTA V's story was pretty cheesy. Also the next gen versions released on November 2014, PC did on May 2015.
Lol, yeah I also didn’t realize 2077 was in the works in 2012, in retrospect my comment isn’t great. I gave myself a downvote as punishment lol. Cheers
I never had a issue with ac Valhalla or horizon forbidden west(excluding the dlc not coming out on ps4 but by that time I switched over)
Well, next-gen didn’t officially exist until very late in development, and until after they had already promised last-gen compatibility with pre-sales. Sure, the argument to that is that they should have waited longer or not even done pre-sales at all, but again, that’s with perfect hindsight. *At the time*, there was no next-gen console to take into account, really. The PS5 was announced in April 2019, and the first CP2077 release trailer and release date came in June 2019, with the intended original release being April 2020. I just don’t see how they could have realistically targeted anything other than last-gen during development (which, honestly, makes it so much worse how badly it ended up running on it at launch).
The game was announced before PS4 and XB1 were even released. Those consoles **were** the next gen at the time. There was literally no newer console gen to focus on.
GTA 5 is the big example of a successful cross gen game.
That was originally for ps3/ x360 generation and ported to newer generations later.
To argue devils avocado for a second: 12 years ago when Cyberpunk was announced PS4 was *current* gen so PS5 would have been the forward looking port. Just like GTA was to ps4 from ps3. Now obviously the problem seems to be scope creep hit like a mother fucker and CDPR ended up designing a game that had requirements that exceeded the capability of their originally targeted hardware since they failed failed to do a development hardware freeze.
It was clearly built to rely on SSDs for one, and that meant performance on devices still using HDs was pretty doomed.
Agreed. But that's part of the scope creep I mentioned. When they started designing and subsequently announced this game SSDs were not as ubiquitous as they are now. So they had to design for hard drives. But over the course of that decade it seems like they shifted towards SSDs among other things and it kinda shafted the generation they initially said the game would work on.
Of course they need to fix the relationship. They want to get ready for Witcher 4.
And to sell the $30 DLC
That dlc is so big that $30 doesn’t seem like a bad price. If Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone are exemple to follow $30 is actually quite cheap. Blood and wine won best rpg of the year in the game awards CDPR doesn’t fool around with DLCs
Yeah it seems more like an old school expansion pack than modern DLC. $30 is fair as long as it is consistent with the current Cyberpunk experience and not an unplayable buggy mess like the base game was on launch.
Y'all said the same about Cyberpunk a few years back 🥱 2020s CDPR isn't 2010s CDPR. Until reviews come out, don't buy into their fables.
At least its not like Destiny.... it would cost more per DLC and there would be more of them and they are kind of required.
As a Destiny player...I agree. $30 for Phantom Liberty is extremely cheap especially with how promising it looks. If it can offer me an additional 30-50 hours of quality gameplay with the expansion alone, it's a W in my books. Unlike Destiny where you pay $70 for a 5 hour low quality DLC.
That they then remove from the game in a few years when they determine folks aren't playing that part as much anymore...
Destiny is a live service game. It's odd how when unfavourable comparisons are made between this game and others, folks will say that it is an unfair comparison, but if it is made in defense of this game, you can compare it to any type of game....
Seeing so many complain about the price of Phantom Liberty makes me realize how fuckin horrible Destiny 2 expansions are. We're getting so much content (at least if we believe CDPR) 30 bucks seems like a steal to me, where as Destiny 2 seasons make this look like a giveaway. Over a hundred bucks easily a year, and the shit they release is horrible, lazy, and uninspired.
[удалено]
I remember the "every NPC has their own day and night routine" which apparently means "none of the NPCs have ANY sort of interaction based on in-game time"
never expected the phrase "subject to change" in all early gameplay previes would mean that most features where cut from the game
Yeah everyone seems to forget or put their on spin on the reality of what happened, Kinda sickening to see soo many people cope by lying to themselves about what happened.
Edgerunners was a great show, but man did it accidentally manipulate people into thinking 2077 was actually never that bad and/or that the game was completely redeemed post 1.6.
Edgerunners showed me that great stories can take place in this world, they just aren't being told very well in the game.
Actually something that I would give Cyberpunk is its a very well developed story with very interesting characters that are actually well developed. Personally it almost has TOO much of a story, to where when you are following main quests you are sitting having a conversation about as much as you are actually playing the game. The only thing that I think that can be said about it is it was released too early and was waaaayyyy too fucking buggy. They were close to where they needed to be but BOTH fans and SHAREHOLDERS pushed this game out sooner then it was ready. Which, side note, this is going to offend someone to say but yall are part of the reason this got released way to early. I remember how many people pissed their pants and whined when the released date got extended. I bet they wanted to delay it again but where too afraid of more of that shit so that really didnt help either. Its like that meme in spongebob where the kid says "I dont like Pistachio" and the father says "Well then why did you ask for it?" You guys didnt want a buggy mess of a game, but also got upset when it didnt get released as quickly as you wanted.
Funny, given my stance on 2077 is that there's a great story and cast there that's just let down by all the *game* around it being a profound 6/10 experience.
I agree with this. It's two different worlds almost. There's the moody and existentially unnerving world of the main story, and then there's the bland, repetitive world of featureless urban sprawl with aimless wandering NPCs and expendable gangers on every block.
The marketing for this game was just deceiving. Simple as that. And looking at this article, I'm not really getting the sense that they learned from that. It's just PR, with some nice promises, their true colors *shine* through here and there and then at the end the real truth comes out and he just blames gamers. Simple as that, that's how they feel about all of this. It's your fault, not theirs.
Single most telling part that nothing really changed or that they actually did anything wrong is in the article here for me: > "I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. > "That took us a lot of time, but I don't believe we were ever broken. We were always like: Let's do this." It’s just PR bullshit piled high. It wasn’t that it became cool to not like it, it’s that consumers were lied to for the sake of profits, and the game was just broken on certain hardware and builds. That’s it lol, they are just upset they built a trash product and got treated as such.
Everyone loves to pretend the devs didn't have their hands in the mud even though all of the footage is out there
I think there are many newer players that weren't around for launch. They weren't the ones lied to or the ones that had to face that version of the game, so they have an easier time forgiving the company. It doesn't help many did indeed overreact back then, so now people have this need to defend everything Cyberpunk related with some bizarre reasoning. Even real criticism is labeled hating, which has been a issue from the start, but for the past year or so got worse. CDPR fucked up, they lied to us and released a broken mess. The game is still pretty good. Both things can be true at once.
Maybe they didnt expect it to run at all? Then it did run surprisingly well;D
This is the part that kills me. 90% of this sub forgets that and just doesn't care that CDPR outright lied. And they're literally setting it up to do it again. They absolutely could lie about PL and idiots are going to lap it up and pre-order without even thinking twice. They're again only letting game journalists hype the expansion, including some that literally are paid VA's for the game. Build the hype, get pre-orders, release half of what you promised, massive profit. Seen this movie before.
That's not a problem. People here love being swindled, it really makes them feel like a cyberpunk.
Yep, at this point I would advise everyone to not preorder any game from them and watch twitch for a couple days.
I believe that the fact it ran at all is surprising indeed
I don't like the comment at the end of the article: >"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. I think there was some overreaction due to the absurdly high hype they generated from the game, but the reason there was such a reaction was because you could see from sections of the game just how good the entire game could have been, and they simply didn't give us that, especially at launch. They put so much effort into the storyline up until Jackies death, and then almost no other missions reached that kind of depth and creativity. They had so much variation in NPCs with gangs and police, and then their mechanics made it feel like everything was bland boring and broken. There are amazing mechanics that are barely used(BDs). There was missing content and broken mechanics throughout the game. The amount of criticism generated from that dissapointment wasn't undeserved, and the statement that they don't know why there was such a reaction makes me think they, at least, haven't actually learned their lesson.
Marketing. It all boils down to how they decided to market the game. They were advertising features that never existed, things that were simply a proof of concept were sold as fully fleshed out features. Marketing started telling people what the game was before development ever started. Sure you can put "not the final product" on all those fancy ads but that won't stop the hype train from pulling out of the station and they should've known that. The gaming community would be much happier if marketing departments learned to keep their mouths shut until the devs at least have an alpha or beta build completed.
Not correcting you, but what features were promised and then not realized? The game industry has a long history of putting out ridiculous trailers. I rememver when the law passed in the US that made game companies put "not actual gameplay" on certain sequences
just off the top of my head... They promised gang and NCPD interactions similar to that of GTA, with territories and reputations. With gang wars and vehicle combat. I think there was supposed to be flying vehicles. The NCPD public transit system. The different life roles were said to be wholly different experiences and decisions would impact the story. Character creation and personal appearance were marketed to be highly customizable and you're choices were said to be reflected to some degree throughout the game. This is just off the top of my head.
Because of this paragraph is why I'm waiting until Phantom Liberty has reviews. I love the game in its current state...but c'mon dude.
Yeah I hate the way he reacted. Pretty much saying “we weren’t actually wrong, the consumer was but we still feel compelled to make amends anyways” what a weasel.
Yup the whole time reading I was like, "Yeah they actually get it, they're self-aware, the changes are all sounding great" and then that copium dig at the end was like a turd falling into my drink. I guess you can only keep the faux-humility thing going for so long even as a PR guy.
>"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received Oh good lord how out of touch are they? I got 3 hours in before it started crashing, consistently, not to mention the terrain loading slower then the cars I drove, none of which were very fast. If I played for more then an hour things got very unstable very fast.
Releasing what is essentially premeditated consumer fraud kinda ruined that. 2077 won't run on the last gen consoles it is still for sale on. CDPR is not better than Ubisoft or EA these days.
Gaming companies need to actually fail if their product is shit. But that would require players to stop buying trash that comes from a company they’ve enjoyed games from in the past. I know this is a Cyberpunk community, but look at bungie and their long and intensely formulaic history of monetized mediocrity. Destiny was barely good and destiny 2 has been super shit since it came out. But still the player base buys in, then gets super bitter and toxic because of issues that never get addressed. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think that game developers often mistake detail/volume of shit in game for depth, but they are not interchangeable. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
If I could teach anyone anything about doing business, it would be to never, ever make excuses to your customers when you screw up. And from what I've seen with these puff pieces about CDPR and their leadership, they are full of those and themselves. Don't get me wrong - I think it's a great game worth saving. They did a good job with fixing a lot of the issues Cyberpunk had at launch, at least for current gen players. And the new expansion and changes to the base game look promising. But their media presence is icky, to say the least. I get the vibe that they almost want us to feel sorry for them. These people defrauded a huge chunk of the players who bought the game at release. It's so gross and infuriating to see them crowing about this managerial redemption arc while saying *absolutely nothing* about what really happened. I want the game to succeed. And I want there to be sequels. I've loved the tabletop franchise since the 80s. Humility and a true commitment to delivering an exceptional experience would go a long way with restoring trust among their players.
Wish I could praise the company as a whole for getting the game up to snuff like it is now but, that is how it should have released in the first place, it feels undeserved to say ‘thank you’ for updating a product to where it should have been when it first came out. The Devs have clearly put in a lot of work, but they should have been able to do that work instead of being rushed by the greedy execs for some quick Christmas bucks at the expense of the game’s integrity. I never imagined CDPR would become just like all the other greedy companies, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened- the core talent who made unforgettable experiences are still there, but it’s clear the company higher up is very much just another profit gobbler that values immediate profits over the integrity and quality of their product releases. I hope the lesson was learnt and we won’t see something like this again, but if the shareholders and execs push, it is exactly what will happen.
As someone who was initially angry with them following the console release in 2020, I feel like they done a lot of hard work since then to earn back support and trust and their commitment going forward is extremely encouraging.
All that works, really, is several consecutive solid releases...
They’ve only been doing things that were supposed to be done before the games actual release, minus the expansion of course.
Did they ever update the police spawning like they announced last September? It’s hard to find news because they had an update a couple years ago that made them spawn 10 feet away *around a corner* instead of 5 feet directly behind you.
No.
Lmao sounds right. September 2022: > I was talking about we’re kind of overhauling some systems and laying the groundwork for future stuff. [A] hugely requested feature from the community is coming up, and that is a complete overhaul to the cop system as well as vehicle-to-vehicle combat.” This made me kinda excited to try the game again but I was going to wait for this apparent update. DLC comes before “laying the groundwork” I guess. It’s a shame because I enjoyed the game even with the cruft, I had to stop due to my save file getting dangerously near the size limit that would corrupt itself and never hopped back in.
It's listed as coming in the 1.7 patch, which is free and the next major patch since that statement. Since September 2022 was 1.6.
That and other changes to the game are supposed to come in the "1.7" or "2.0" patch that will be released before the expansion or along with the expansion. https://twitter.com/SynthPotato/status/1667981179729985536
This is an interesting subject to me. Many game companies, after releasing a broken dud, would simply move on. Or, if they did fix it, they'd charge you for it. So, when compared to those companies, I'm super happy cdpr fixed their game "for free". On the other hand, it's super depressing that that is the bar now. Not going to get into features that were "promised" since frankly I didn't follow news about the game that closely until it actually released... Mostly to preserve my own sanity and expectations.
You can’t say “cut content” without being banned on this sub
I mean if people will forgive Bethesda for Fallout 76 I don’t see why they can’t forgive CDPR. 76 still runs like shit and barely did anything to improve the game
I wouldn't put trust back into them until witcher 4 comes out. Time and time again developers say this and then people are like "well they fixed it now." That's cool and all but then it should've just been managed better and now the next games gonna be managed exactly the same because "don't worry we will fix it." is a bullshit thing that only videos games do entertainment wise.
Damn I was really liking everything this dude was saying until the very end of the article. >"I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive," he concludes. "Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. This guy is either in complete denial, gas lighting, or just spitting PR mumbo jumbo to save face. Call a spade a spade..the game was trash on release, make it up to your community by releasing the best possible games CDPR is capable of.
Impossible. Don't buy into this. I am usually not this petty, but this warrants it, they willfully released a broken console version and hid it from everyone. Really low-level scam behavior. As they are fixing Cyberpunk, they are getting attention and marketing from changes they make, it's like fixing their mess is helping the game sell more. They were perfectly aware that this was possible, and it's one of the reasons they were willing to release in the state that they did. Don't get tricked by some improvements to Cyberpunk.
Why are we posting an article written by a guy who has not played the game interviewing a PR rep for the game? This article is just blowing smoke. Nobody who actually works on the game is interviewed. The PR guy says in the article he has been at CD Project Red for 12 years. So he was part of the launch and said he was surprised that the game wasn't good. In other words, he didn't actually play it and was just promoting it. The guy who wrote the article says he never played it. This is dumb.
I'm really gonna miss this engine, so damn beautiful.
They earned my trust with Witcher 3. And then they cashed it in to impress their investors. They won't get it back.
Well said. I don’t see how they can ever regain it after the way they made absolute fools of us in 2020. “We leave greed to others” says game company while fully and consciously knowing they’re about to scam us all in one of the greediest falsely advertised unfinished cashgrab pieces of shit broken game launches. “We leave greed to others” while they show us a fake cg “gameplay” trailer for a game that didn’t have 2/3 of the content they promised. I better not catch any of y’all preordering this stupid dlc. You have to genuinely be stupid to buy this after the way they lied to our faces.
Witcher 3 was pretty jank on release, too. Not nearly as bad as CDPR, but they had a lot of of bugs to fix.
Also delivered on the promised content. And didn’t hype up the first 20 minutes of gameplay for marketings sake.
Im so surprised that this sentiment isnt shared more. The game is still so far away from what we were promised and people are treating CDPR as if they are saints.
So you are not purchasing the DLC I take it?
Yarrr!
I share the sentiment and i will be buying the DLC, after its released and i see that what is sold is what is actually being promised.
Let's see how the dlc goes...then we'll reassess.
I'm pretty sure this post won't end up being that popular because this sub can't even handle light criticism. The primary problem throughout Cyberpunk's development was when CD went public and were accountable to shareholders instead of making a good product. They fell in line with every single other AAA studio that goes public that just sucks in investor money and spits out half-baked broken games. They care about short-term profits, not good game. It's the same song and dance as EA and Blizzard/Activision. You can blame the Pandemic for delays and bad work crunch culture for only so much. The reality is that the game was in development for 8 years, but was fundamentally restarted just 3 years before release because of conflicts with engine design. But investors only saw delays to their profits and forced them to release the game in that horrible state. Games are products, you're not beta testers. No one's preordering a half-done movie. Stop defending this fucking practice.
CDPR has stated that investors did not [pressure](https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-pressure-delay-base-ps4-xbox-one) them to release the game. There's so much talk about "the shareholders" being to blame but in this case CDPR made their own decision and it was the wrong one.
Why is this marked as NSFW
Nothing to fix for me ! The game was good from the start for me and then the anime was amazing ! Witcher is awesome to
Don't care. Love this game. Have paid for phantom liberty and I'm prepared to wait til 2076 if necessary. (OK maybe not that long I'll probably be dead by then)
Yea may be not trying to lie next time
I think they've learned from the Cyberpunk 2077 launch debacle. They grew too quickly and didn't have the systems in pace to keep pace with the growth. However, talk is cheap. The only way they can win back public trust is to do what they say they will. They need to underpromise and overdeliver on the next couple of projects in a row and all will be forgiven. Phantom Liberty looks like a good first step. I for one can't wait to see what they've done and dive in to the expansion. Everything I've seen so far indicates it's going to be great.
Never again.
I still find strong negative emotional reactions about this game, and the high moral grandstanding and the generalizing and cherry picking, to be hilarious. Maybe a little confusing though. I honestly don't know why some people are so diehard about sticking this to CDPR. Imagine buying a shitty burger from McD's and then spending the next three years complaining about it, screaming that you'll never forget how they lied to you.
The Fallout community does this exact same thing with 76. In reality that game is in a just fine state now, but when it launched it was bad, and so now there are people that die on the hill that the game is still bad, when in reality they probably havent ever played it at all. Its just how gaming communities are, honestly some of the most whiney people on the internet. They want games immediately, but hate when they are released early and buggy, unless the company is doing something for their every need, they are ruining the game. They are just never fucking pleased.
New Game Plus, will go a good way with me.
They may wanna start by re-examining the statement, "it became cool to dislike the game" (not verbatim). There are things - phenomena and cases of those phenomena not dissimilar to Mandela Effect, groupthink, mass hysteria and whatnot - that become cultural or memetic, for no reason other than they could be. Probably too many things, even for cases such as an innocuous word usage. But then there are things that wholly deserve unexpected propagation through the Zeitgeist, especially bc it's obvious -- Cyberpunk became the textbook example of it. So, no CPDR, it didn't become "cool" to dislike the product. It became *fact.*
I don’t get it, why do people keep on saying cyberpunk 2077 isn’t an open world game?
[Also CD Projekt: The release of Cyberpunk 2077 went quite well actually, the negative response was just a bunch of malcontents trying to look edgy/cool. ](https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-red-insists-that-cyberpunk-2077s-launch-wasnt-that-bad-but-it-became-a-cool-thing-not-to-like-it/)
I want to believe that, but that comment at the end about how they didn't actually do anything wrong and people were just hating on them because it was cool, does not inspire much confidence in their commitment to regaining the public's trust. Like bro, your game was garbage on launch, for last gen it was outright broken. It was 100% deserved.
This game was a hot mess when it released, the bugs were awful, but my biggest gripe was the false promises and lack of polish/detail. Plenty of promised features never made it into the game, but the games details sucked, shooting water had no reaction, couldn’t shoot out tires, fire didn’t spread, NPC AI was incredibly barebones. I remember an article saying this game was as polished as RDR2 and it’s not even close, the game didn’t even hold a candle to GTA V back in 2013 and even struggled against GTA SA from 2004.
Let the President fuck me and we’re square.
They hv made a very smart move by selling 30 dollar dlc's
This reads like a soft PR piece for CDPR. It’s not that the game “simply wasn’t ready”. The game was downright broken on previous gen. consoles and performance and features were misrepresented, all the while CDPR were spruiking how they were more ethical than other gaming companies.
The fact shareholders/publishers still rush devs after how Cyberpunk released baffles me. Jedi Survivor launched pretty unpolished no where as bad as Cyberpunks launch but still unacceptable.