CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2020/12/call-transcript_en.pdf

by rococode • 6 years ago

304 645 6 years ago

platz4• 6 years ago

So, what sales-related project management questions for the CD Projekt Management Board does this answer for the HN crowd?

Are people upset that this AAA game that is trying do everything on all devices for a huge audience doesn't perform well on the last-gen consoles on it's initial rollout?

jsnell2• 6 years ago

Oh, come on. This level of transparency is really fascinating. What other gaming companies, or tech companies for that matter, do you remember going into the details of a bad launch this soon after it happened. Or really even much later.

f6v6• 6 years ago

It doesn't seem like they address the main issues, like AI. I doubt you can treat the absence of major attributes of an open-world game, like car chases, as a bug. They're cleverly focusing on minor glitches and bugs in their talk.

unpopularopp• 6 years ago

Square Enix with FFXIV 1.0

They took full responsibility. Suspended the subscripton for months. People who subbed for at least 3 months before the shutdown got permanent discounted subscription in the new version. They changed the whole upper management of the division responsible of the game. And much more.

Honestly there are 2 games that had a remarkable turn around from a total disaster launch: FFXIV 1.0 and No Man's Sky. Not sure Cyberpunk can do it too.

goat_whisperer• 6 years ago

Last-gen consoles? If it wasn't for the most recent delay of release date, Cyberpunk 2077 would've been released before PS5 and the new Xbox were even available for purchase. You're acting like people are trying to play this game on an NES.

If the game ain't gonna work on a certain console, don't sell it for that console. Plain and simple. Or if you're going to release it anyway, at least let gaming critics review it and let the public make an informed decision, which CDPR deliberately didn't do.

I'm baffled as to why so many people are defending this incredibly shady business practice by CDPR.

platz4• 6 years ago

I'm using their own terminology.

tristor• 6 years ago

The complaints aren't about CP77 performance on Xbox Series X or PS5. They're about it's performance on non-X Xbox One and non-Pro PS4s. Which aren't just last-gen consoles, they're the lowest tier of last gen consoles. I don't think CDPR should have released the games on those platforms if they don't have their performance scaling right. I'm not defending their actions, but I think most people just have their expectations out of whack.

CP77 is the first AAA game released in a long time that was built for PC first and ported to consoles, instead of the other way around. Instead of PCs getting crappy ports hard-limited to 60fps no matter how much GPU you throw at it, and crappy control schemes, the dregs of last-gen consoles got really poor performance and visuals compared to people on PS4 Pros, Xbox One X, and the latest 2020 gen consoles. It's not acceptable, but it's also hard to imagine how you could have made people happy when they're that far underpowered from a hardware department for a game like CP77.

muststopmyths• 6 years ago

This is also on the console makers. They brought PC fragmentation to the consoles by making different versions of the same console over the decade.

To make it worse, they will not let a publisher publish just to PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. Your game has to work on all versions of the console.

It's beyond idiotic and I'm surprised it took so long for the consequences to be visible.

I'm glad Sony at least seems to have backed away from fragmenting their own platform in this generation.

CDPR should have done their due diligence, obviously, but the platform owners have done them no favors by adding another dimension to the testing matrix.

chmod7753• 6 years ago

The developers essentially transformed the game from a current gen to a next gen title between 2018 and 2020.

Compare the 2018 version to the release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogihi-OewPQ

They probably should've just come out and said they're not releasing the game for the last gen after all, and people would have been somewhat more understanding.

vmception• 6 years ago

Various AAA titles released over the last 4 years look better, perform better, and have better AI

Alternatively they could have reskinned the Witcher and people would have been content

This game will be good in 2021 when released again on the new generation of consoles

f6v6• 6 years ago

If you watch game footage, it's obvious it's half-baked. However, so many people violated the number one rule: no preorders. This is literally the only thing gamers can do to incentivise developers to not release buggy games. But here we are again.

notJim• 6 years ago

Eh, I always appreciate the early adopters who provide feedback and pressure on devs to fix the games so that I can play a much better game 6 months or a year later.

f6v6• 6 years ago

Well yeah, same here. But seems like CDPR is happy about preorders. That's too many adopters to be called "early".

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

is the inverted side of "no preorders" also "No epic games"? Something has to fund development and at a certain point investors will not risk the lack of sales. Versus a preorder is an actual sale.

TylerE• 6 years ago

That doesn’t make sense as most of the money is invested long before a release date is even announced.

aspaceman4• 6 years ago

Preorders aren’t used to invest development, but rather recoup some costs. They also provide a signal to publishers that allows delays to happen.

You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.

shaded-enmity• 6 years ago

Not really, I'm going to give the worst example of all - Star Citizen (aka Scope Creep The Video Game) - which was IIRC crowdfunded, and according to the wiki page below remains the most expensive game in terms of development cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

CivBase4• 6 years ago

These games rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Games are bigger and fancier than ever because they have reached mainstream appeal and accessability. It has nothing to do with preorders.

Preorders just allow them to release buggy games in a beta state and patch it later.

miemo23• 6 years ago

I've had zero problems with it on PC.

Fantastic game with maybe 2-3 bugs

mhh__6• 6 years ago

RDR2 is fantastic, 77 isn't that good yet.

I don't mean the performance, it's clearly just had so much stuff ripped out

claudeganon• 6 years ago

Larian does a great job with their early access releases, soliciting the community to report bugs, play testing etc. I put like 70 hours into the new Baldur’s Gate on different builds and it’s only like a third of the game. There were a lot of bugs and some crashes I reported, but has otherwise been a blast. Don’t understand why CDPR couldn’t have done the same.

IronRanger• 6 years ago

The major underappreciated factor for this release is the impact of COVID lockdowns - particularly enforced WFH - on the final development of this title.

For me this is the single factor which has lead to so many of the problems inherent in the game. You cannot just pickup a multi-hundred person digital interactive art project (ie. a video game) and shift it online overnight.

Still, I think CDPR were right to release the game. Its good enough, content is complete, and they need to have the product on shelves before Christmas and before people lose interest in last-gen consoles.

Having the product out there will motivate its staff - still stuck at home in Lockdown Poland - to work on the very public bugs.

Its also interesting that Poland seems to have had basically the same COVID case and death profile as Ukraine, despite Ukraine having a significantly less strict lockdown (bars, restaurants, workplaces never shut this Autumn or Winter).

jontaydev• 6 years ago

There is a theory that development was restarted several times, most notably in 2018 to incorporate Keanu into the main story. It seems like they couldn't stick to a singular vision and shifted goals too many times.

f6v6• 6 years ago

Which I never understood: how is an actor supposed to suddenly carry the whole game? I mean, he's got those cool movies(where he plays the same guy over and over again), but he's no Jesus to be worshiped like that.

TT3351• 6 years ago

I hope we get a sequel to Schreier's Anthem article for this game [he now works for Bloomberg]. Many repeating patterns.

https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964

rowanG077• 6 years ago

Yeah. It's pretty obvious. It's quite interesting how more games end up like that. Final fantasy 15 was restarted twice as well. And it ended up having potential but alas it was unfinished.

overgard5• 6 years ago

I really don't understand why they have Keanu in this. I mean the _character_ he plays is fine, and Keanu's performance is fine, I just don't understand the appeal/necessity of getting the likeness of a real world actor in a digital game. I imagine it also must have cost a fortune..

It doesn't detract from the game or anything, but it just seems like an odd way to spend a limited development budget.

Merman_Mike2• 6 years ago

FTA:

We have an internal QA department and we’re working with external companies as well. One thing that perhaps didn’t help us is COVID: internal testers are able to test the game working from home because we provide them with our own connected machines and so on, but external testers working for external companies were not able to test the game from homes –they have test centers and if they’re not there, they’re not able to work. So, we have seen a decrease in the number of testers, but I wouldn’t point to it as a major source of problems.

voter1012• 6 years ago

With how badly this game turned out, I can only guess that lack of testers and bug reports was last on the priority list of problems.

BitwiseFool2• 6 years ago

I still have no idea why all these big game developers are releasing new titles and still supporting last gen hardware. You would think games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Halo Infinite would be launch titles that would entice people to buy new consoles.

Guthur3• 6 years ago

Market reach, the new consoles have just released and are very hard to get.

Big AAA need plenty of market reach to be profitable unless they have some exclusivity deal.

InitialLastName• 6 years ago

Cyberpunk 2077 is ~2 years delayed and was marketed heavily as the pinnacle of what the last generation of consoles could do, to the extent that they released a limited edition Xbox One X bundle for the game [0]. They couldn't exactly do that and then not sell it on that console, could they?

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-one-x-1tb-console-cyb...

save_ferris• 6 years ago

Two problems with that. A) New consoles are pretty tightly supply-limited on release, so people won't buy the game until they know they can pick up the console. You've totally killed the preorder market.

B) You risk losing even more game sales towards the end of the console lifecycle, as soon as rumors start flying around about new hardware about to hit the market.

mdoms5• 6 years ago

You really have no idea? The number of people on previous gen consoles dwarfs the people on new console, especially in a world where new consoles can't even nearly keep up with demand.

rsanheim• 6 years ago

I imagine one very real reason right now is that most people cannot buy the new consoles right now, or at least don't want to play the in-stock game to try to snag one when they drop and are available for 5 minutes at retailers.

So lots of people who have the last gen hardware see that the new consoles are constantly out of stock, and decide that they are 'good enough' for now until you can actually just order a new console w/o hassle. That may not be till well into the new year.

pavon2• 6 years ago

The launch date for this game got pushed back multiple times. It was originally targeted for the then current gen consoles, and had many pre-orders on those consoles.

notional• 6 years ago

Wiki says Cyberpunk started development in 2016. Wiki also says hardware design for Xbox Series X started in 2018.

Wouldn't Cyberpunk team have been developing the game for 2 years before rumors even surfaced about the development of a next gen console?

The time lines don't seem like they line up to only building it for a next gen console that didn't have hardware architecture planned out yet.

spike021• 6 years ago

This wasn't originally meant to be only for the next-gen consoles. It was advertised as being for the current gen with improvements for the next-gen consoles once released.

On the other hand, there are still games being released now that work and look perfectly fine on PS4. Spider-Man looks and plays great on my base PS4 non-Pro. Miles Morales had some crashes and bugs but those were patched within two weeks and now that game works smoothly and looks beautiful on my older PS4.

You could argue that it's a first-party game and it gets better attention due to that.

I understand Cyberpunk 2077 won't look nearly as good on my PS4 compared to PC's or PS5's, but there's no reason it should have PS2-era graphics/pop-in...

MBCook• 6 years ago

There are only a few million of each new console sold. Even if you somehow managed to sell to 75% of the owners, that’s not many people.

Pfhreak12• 6 years ago

For me this is the single factor which has lead to so many of the problems inherent in the game.

This is absolutely not the case. The game was in dire straights long before Covid. (When did Poland lockdown?)

It's not clear to me that you can make the claim you made without providing some additional evidence as everything I've read about the project suggests that it has been in development for 8+ years, and has had a real rough go of things.

pavlov2• 6 years ago

This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of:

"CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1]

Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-...

CamelCaseName• 6 years ago

Doesn't sound much different than getting paid in equity at a startup.

pavlov2• 6 years ago

There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.

errantspark2• 6 years ago

I thought that was PascalCase and this is camelCase? Have I been wrong all these years?

aspaceman4• 6 years ago

If I got paid in tokens at a startup, I would riot. That’s some “company town” bullshit.

Closi2• 6 years ago

Lots of companies have a bonus which is a combination of 'corporate wide' bonus, 'performance' bonus and 'personal contribution'.

This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.

vsareto• 6 years ago

No reason to not give the bonuses when accomplishments are recognized then, instead of tying it to the team's success at a singular date (delivery). It forces everyone to work in overdrive. It's plainly not a personal contribution/performance bonus at all. If CDPR makes a bad hire that causes a delay (even outside of development, like marketing?), then everyone suffers for that from a lack of a bonus.

This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.

Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.

frakkingcylons2• 6 years ago

CDPR is paying their staff the full bonus for Cyberpunk 2077 due to the circumstances of the release.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-11/cd-projek...

Rapzid2• 6 years ago

Probably need them to stay and fix the bugs instead of rage quitting when their bonuses are withheld likely because decisions made outside their control.

Latty• 6 years ago

Making it less terrible after-the-fact, after tons of bad press and outside pressure, and when you desperately need the devs to stay on and fix the problems left after the launch they no doubt told you was not going to work… not sure that deserves much praise.

Don't get me wrong, it's better than not doing it, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue with the system there.

krainboltgreene• 6 years ago

I heard the bonuses were paid out prior to the last release bump, so they got much less than they could have.

Tade0• 6 years ago

Good practices in management are still developing in Poland, unfortunately.

Many companies around here do experiments like this one hoping to see improvements. Most of such attempts fail miserably.

I've seen my share of weird, counterproductive ideas from grades like in school to work logged down to the second.

My last company, even though it was over 500 people strong, was basically winging it.

ballenf• 6 years ago

I think the hardest part about running such "experiments" is ever knowing whether they were success or failures. Even here, we (and I doubt CDPR) don't know enough to really judge whether the tokens things helped or hurt. Or if it helped, whether it helped as much as a more traditional system. Except for small experiments that can be run many times (or in many similar departments in parallel), circumstances just change too much to ever compare apples to apples. (Here, devs may have loved this game's concept so much that they worked hard in spite of the tokens. Or didn't love the game concept but loved the tokens.)

Frankly it's why it doesn't make too much sense to veer very far from practices proven to work. But what's shown to work in a HBR studies may not apply in a different cultural landscape than the US.

All that being said, I'm sure there are many possible practices that are better than traditional approaches. It's just risky trying to find them.

alliao• 6 years ago

sounds like a sure fire way of baking in "low hanging fruits" in release, and heroically picking them to get the bonus :)

don't game the game devs man...

zionic• 6 years ago

On some level it makes sense:

-if we succeed massively, you should get an outsized portion of those winnings because of your immediately obvious hard work in the now that paid off later.

If not, then it literally doesn’t matter.

munk-a6• 6 years ago

CDPR sounds like a relatively progressively run game company tbh. A lot of game dev companies deny you overtime during the run up to a major release and massively layoff staff after releases.

Up here in British Columbia all technical workers[1] are overtime exempt because EA ran roughshod over our labour laws a number of years ago and people are too afraid to change them for fear of driving off businesses.

1. Vaguely defined - in practice includes anyone who uses a keyboard or has anything to do with the film industry.

908B64B1976• 6 years ago

Never understood why they tried so hard to be the destination for offshoring instead of fostering home grown studios.

That and pitching Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]. Is this something that Canadians approve?

[0] https://www.vancouvereconomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02...

CivBase4• 6 years ago

It's sad if that counts as "progressive" business practices in the games industry.

illuminati1911• 6 years ago

I'm not familiar with Polish labour law, but it could be that in Poland like in many other European countries concepts such as "denying overtime" are inherently illegal.

grouseway• 6 years ago

I believe those rules only apply to companies that are primarily tech companies (like EA of course). Tech workers at non-tech companies can get overtime.

tjpnz2• 6 years ago

Something similar happened in NZ too under the "Hobbit Law" bought and paid for by Warner Brothers. Now everyone in the film and game industry is considered an independent contractor by default and aren't subject to the usual rights and legal protections afforded to company employees.

SeanBoocock• 6 years ago

Not true of EA, at least in the United States. EA hires junior employees as non-exempt for their first couple of years. They are also in my experience among the most progressive big publishers when it comes to overtime and work/life balance. Not perfect, but certainly trying in a real way across most of its studios.

Source: Worked for, but not currently employed at, several EA studios over the last decade, including as a junior engineer paid overtime.

djmips• 6 years ago

Indeed, when I worked at EA in BC we were promised comp time for working 'coverage' (overtime) and I even got into trouble for refusing to work on Labour Day! The comp time fizzled into nothing because they fired the Development Manager of our group on the DAY of shipping the game. He just disappeared along with all of his promises. I alone got paid for the overtime because I refused to work TFT (temporary full time - which they pressured me to do) and instead was a true contractor.

esyir5• 6 years ago

I dunno, my impression is that for a game company, CDPR is fairly employee friendly. Of course that's relative to the rest of the gaming industry, which is a well-known employee welfare shithole.

eru• 6 years ago

Programmers in the non-gaming parts of the industry are treated better not because of any labour laws, but because of supply and demand.

teamonkey• 6 years ago

deny you overtime during the run up to a major release

This made me stop. Do you mean deny you paid overtime, because actively preventing extra work in the run up to a milestone is absolutely not normal for the games industry. The opposite is far more common.

EA Vancouver might be more carefully watched, but one way of avoiding regulations like this is to make sure employees are only logging normal workday hours - if at all - regardless of how long they actually work.

spamizbad• 6 years ago

Why is this sort of practice so common with video game studios but not elsewhere in the technology industry?

Godel_unicode4• 6 years ago

This is well-trod ground, but it's common with any job where the supply/demand ratio is severely in the employers favor.

Not a ton of those jobs in tech, but the dynamic is frankly pretty similar to professional cheerleaders. Lots of people want the job, relatively few of them, and the skill floor isn't all that high.

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

Because they have a line of people wanting to work for them despite everything.

SkyPuncher• 6 years ago

It's common in tech two.

Of the places I've worked that promise some form of bonus, I have only been paid a single one - $172.

In my experience, bonuses are almost solely a carrot to hang over people's head. They rarely actually get paid out even if the company is doing well.

Stock and options have there downfalls, but at least their terms are in writing.

cbozeman8• 6 years ago

Awful? This is miles ahead of nearly ever other game studio out there. How do I know?

One of the people I served with aboard the USS Honolulu is a game designer for Darkpaw Games. They have nothing like this. Not even close.

Another person is a high-level executive at Activision-Blizzard. He has compensation that is generous, but it took him 17 years to get there.

Yet another personal friend is a junior developer at Obsidian Entertainment. They don't have anything like this, at his level.

Maybe their system isn't perfect, but its a hell of a better than nothing.

tgtweak• 6 years ago

Changing the terms post-hoc is pretty scummy. Logically you would assume having something is better than nothing, as I assume most would - simple math. The reality is anticipating more than you actually receive can be more detrimental. You make sacrifices you normally wouldn't if you are lead to believe there is a reward. Perhaps you turned down another job offer since you had been factoring those extra projektbucks and then they suddenly devalue at the end of the race. Maybe you treated yourself or your loved ones to a gift as a small token of appreciation for the effort spent on this rather than them. That $2000 in fairy-bucks turns out to be $500 and those extra hours amount to less-than-legal-minimum-wage.

Regardless of whether it's better than nothing - there is a tangible risk to having something accounted for that turns out to be short.

The game development industry has been a cesspool for worker exploitation for the longest time and this adds to a long list.

xenihn• 6 years ago

Obsidian is downright abusive towards any of their staff that isn't part of the old guard, and doesn't compensate any more to make up for it.

source: three people I know who worked there

Impossible• 6 years ago

I worked for a game studio that did this. Tokens could be used for a raffle. It was kind of a silly thing though and wouldn't be considered compensation, there were normal bonuses and stock grants. It also (usually) wasn't tied to crunch. The tokens were handed out by peers

oliwarner• 6 years ago

That seems far more like being paid for the windfall of hard work than most (eg) executive bonus schemes, where you're disproportionately rewarded for the work of others.

But no, they should absolutely also pay overtime.

dusted2• 6 years ago

If getting anything at all for overtime and crunch is your definition of shittiest, you've not seen shit :)

Merman_Mike2• 6 years ago

Hi, this is Michał Nowakowski – the second question; would having more developers help deliver the game on old-gens? In terms of delivering the game at a certain point, it’s really not about the number of people; it’s not like throwing in – in the last month – 200 or so people would actually help. So, the answer is no; this is not related to the fact that we could have thrown 300 or 500 more people into the fray and things would have happened differently.

This is interesting info for someone like me that doesn't work in this field. It's something that I can understand intuitively, but it's nice to see that confirmed.

polishdude203• 6 years ago

Yeah it confirms the sort of teachings of the mythical man month.

niea_112• 6 years ago

There is a maxim from the essay "The Mythical Man-Month" saying that adding people to a late software project makes it later.

It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

lozaning• 6 years ago

Two copies of MMM is a great gag-ish gift to your manager on Christmas that i highly recommend.

easton• 6 years ago

That wasn’t really the analyst’s question though. He wondered given the size and complexity of the game, should more people have been on the project from the ground floor (not added in the last month once they weren’t going to clear the bug tracker), or was it a organizational/management issue that they couldn’t get something good from the talent they had?

Guthur3• 6 years ago

I've come up with what I think is reasonably relateble analogy.

If I want to build a 1000 brick wall and it takes a bricklayer 1 sec to lay a brick will getting 1000 brick layers allow me to build the wall in 1 sec?

If you analyse this analogy you see where you might be able to get some scale, such as pipeline and starting on different parts, but it highlights challenges there such as alignment and communication.

xiphias2• 6 years ago

Maybe the speedup is not linear, but thinking back to the hospital built in a few days in Wuhan, you can speed up building by employing lots of people.

simlevesque• 6 years ago

The old adage is that 9 women cannot make a baby in a month,

cgrealy2• 6 years ago

The problem with that adage is that it assumes you want only one baby (which, to be fair, most people do, at least initially) :)

dotdi• 6 years ago

I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now.

It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†.

The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it.

† Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?

sleepybrett• 6 years ago

I'm generally in the same place as you but I gotta say combat is pretty shit. The AI is bonehead stupid, I've killed a guy (not using a silencer) that was standing three feet from another guy and his partner didn't alert. Meanwhile 5 guys from outside the building did, rushed in the building then stopped dead and didn't ever shoot.

wil421• 6 years ago

So far on PC I’ve had a crash right after the character editor that caused the game to crash every time I open it. The next day a patch was pushed that fixed it. I could’ve even play on Day 1.

Dum Dum followed me around until I met Keanu’s character. He would move in front of people during cutscenes and I couldn’t even tell what was going on. Sometimes he would attack Jackie during combat and other times help us.

The first scene with the ripper doc was scrambled. Cutscenes played out of ordered or repeated.

Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.

deeviant2• 6 years ago

Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.

And removed any semblance of a working cover system.

pier256• 6 years ago

Combat is like someone took Mass Effect 1 and combined it with a bunch of Bethesda bugs from Fallout and Skyrim.

Totally agree with you.

In terms of gunplay, there are ancient PS3/Xbox 360 era games that are so much better. Deus Ex HR, Far Cry 3, MGS IV, Bioshock, etc.

Edit:

This gameplay from almost 10 years ago is way better than Cyberpunk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3eszAJWHKY

bseidensticker• 6 years ago

Haha, I had the same Dum Dum glitch as you.

briga• 6 years ago

I mean, that's great for you, but people are bashing CDPR for a good reason: the last-gen console versions are unfinished buggy messes. In a few hours of playing I've had multiple crashes, constant bugs, drops to 15 FPS, just generally terrible performance. I've literally never played such a buggy game before. For a game that had 8 years of dev time the state of the game is pretty egregious

deeviant2• 6 years ago

I actually think the bugs/performance issues are helping CDPR right now. Everybody is talking about them rather than how bad the game actually is.

The combat is simplistic. The AI opponents are basically broken. The quickhack system does indeed feel like a quickly hacked together game mechanic. V is stuck in a weird state between existing background (a la witcher) and player action defined: I didn't get the feeling of any player agency in what my character is, but neither did I get the warm feeling of learning/experiencing Geralt's(Witcher series MC) life. Life paths, also, are basically devoid of any meaningful relevancy to the storyline.

Sohcahtoa822• 6 years ago

If it runs well on PC and current gen consoles, then they should have delayed the release on previous gen consoles.

I'm going to guess that they released on all platforms at once because of contractual obligations.

avianlyric4• 6 years ago

Not wrong about the bugs and crashes, I've been experiencing a lot of them on my Xbox. But despite that, the storytelling and game play is so compelling that I'm just ignoring the crash every 1.5 hours etc

I think that huge testament to quality of the story and game in general. Even if it's sorely missing a decent final polish, I'll be excited to play it second time in 6 months time once all the patches are out.

ineedasername9• 6 years ago

I've literally never played such a buggy game before

Pff. You kids. When I was your age, I once played a game so buggy that when my character walked back & forth to school he had to do in the snow & up hill both ways. Now get off my lawn.

TheGallopedHigh3• 6 years ago

Side question: how do you find the quality of GeForce Now? What games have you tried?

e1g2• 6 years ago

FWIW, I signed up for both GeForce Now and Stadia, and find Stadia to be both easier to use and better-looking. For comparison, I ran Cyberpunk side-by-side and killed the GeForce Now version after a few minutes.

madhato• 6 years ago

I've had Geforce Now for over a year now and have completed The Witcher 3, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, and Death Stranding on it. I use an Nvidia Shield to play it on my TV. I've never had any problems with the streaming quality or latency. I could see that depending on location though, I'm playing in West Coast Canada. Some of the games I've been disappointed with the performance, Assassin's Creed Odyssey for instance couldn't hit 60 fps even after lowering the graphic settings. Cyberpunk 2077 has been amazing though, high fps and maxed settings, including ray tracing.

A few other things of note. 1080p is the max resolution. Unlimited Internet is probably a requirement as its about 10gb per hour. After 6 hours the session ends and you need to save and relaunch the game. Your entire Steam library is not available, its up to publishers to allow their games on it.

nickthegreek• 6 years ago

I got it on Stadia and it’s blowing my mind. I can play it on my Tv or projector thru chromecast ultras, or on my pc seamlessly and it looks great. I got to try it on the iPad Pro next. I love it. This is the breakout game for cloud computing.

polishdude203• 6 years ago

How do you find the latency?

chrisjarvis• 6 years ago

Thanks I was wondering about what hardware stadia is running the game on and if they would have the same console issues. Im planning to buy stadia for this game.

endgame2• 6 years ago

General-purpose computing is slipping from our grasp quickly enough as-is. Why would you accelerate this trend by buying on streaming services?

mhh__6• 6 years ago

If you don't game much you made be blind to the fact that the gameplay is a poor, and the AI is about 15 years behind the cutting edge (GTA SA was more advanced)

fctorial• 6 years ago

"Cutting edge" isn't a very good role model these days tbh. Also I don't remember SA having an AI. It looked like "if (enemy visible) { shoot; } else { run towards enemy; }". Everything else was scripted.

leetcrew3• 6 years ago

I don't know if that's entirely fair (or maybe I haven't played long enough to realize how bad it is). the combat model is pretty different from GTA; it's more of a shooter/rpg hybrid (similar to mass effect 1) than a straight-up shooter. it's not perfect; but I'm five hours in and already consider it the best AAA title I've played recently.

the most annoying thing I've encountered so far is the way doors work. there are a lot of points where the door is supposed to automatically open. I feel like it always opens about 100 ms after I expect it to, making me wonder if I'm supposed to open it myself. maybe this is "working as designed", I dunno.

CoolGuySteve• 6 years ago

The PC version has an 89 on Metacritic after 62 reviews and those reviewers play a lot of games, I'm guessing.

kharak2• 6 years ago

I personally haven't seen a single FPS beating the AI of FEAR back in the day. I honestly don't expect anything anymore. It's been so long. Cyberpunk 2077 is a bit worse than other FPS of our time. But all are worse than FEAR anyway.

This comment doesn't include things like traffic AI. Only combat.

sirn3• 6 years ago

It has been working well for me as well (on a PC). I love the story and the visual. However the combat system is simply broken. Police spawns out of nowhere when a crime is reported[1]. Really bad reticle drifting behavior[2]. Enemy sniper can 1-hit kill you even when they are far away enough for the game to not render them. Enemy spamming Overheat from behind a wall (even with all cameras disabled, which is game-breaking on Very Hard), and much, much more.

I wasn't even looking for them, but they managed to find me. I still enjoy the game a lot, but combat has been nothing but frustration.

[1] https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/10/22167436/cyberpunk-2077-w...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kbwpps/retic...

dawnerd3• 6 years ago

The overheat thing is absolutely the most annoying thing in the game for me. It's way to hard to tell where its coming from, and with everything else going on it's just too much. And there doesn't seem to be a cooldown so the moment the effect wears off you're hit again.

Theres a part where you're upstairs and you can hear the ai trying to attack you from the floor below. The game is fun but only barely and I think the novelty is going to wear off quite quickly.

PragmaticPulp• 6 years ago

You're not seeing the issues because you're not playing the affected versions. Notice how all of the positive anecdotes are coming from PC players?

IGN went so far as to split their Cyberpunk 2077 review into two separate reviews: One for consoles, and one for PC. Quote from the console review:

The Xbox One/PS4 version is nearly unrecognizable compared to the PC version.

The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.

They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible. I suspect console gamers are requesting refunds in droves due to the issues, which is surely going to impact their long-term sales projections.

FridgeSeal6• 6 years ago

I’ve been playing on PS4, and while not particularly pretty (not that I expected it to be) it’s been surprisingly fine, especially after the 1.0.4 patch.

mike_d2• 6 years ago

The PC version scored 9/10 and the console version scored 4/10.

CD Projekt games historically have been PC with console ports after launch. They probably would have done the same here if not being pushed to be a launch title for "next gen" consoles.

I think Sony/Microsoft are just as much to blame. They also had to QA the game and sign off on it.

ashtonkem2• 6 years ago

... shouldn’t consoles be an easier target to develop for, since they’re more consistent and stable?

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

They also concluded that console gamers should request a refund from CDPR as soon as possible.

Refunds are actually up to the seller in question. They clarified how there's no refund arrangement with CDPR and Microsoft/Sony and that all refunds are subject to normal Microsoft/Sony refund policies. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are failing to get their games refunded.

blub2• 6 years ago

I'm playing on the PS4 slim and yes, there were some crashes and some graphics bugs, but so far the game's at least a solid 8 for me. I was actually worried while downloading and reading all the comments from the doomsayers on reddit, but I figured that they will eventually fix the bugs and I do like Deus Ex-style games so I don't really have much to lose by getting it now.

If one liked Deus Ex: Mankind divided they will like Cyberpunk 2077.

pier256• 6 years ago

My experience on a mid range PC has been good in terms of performance and bugs.

The game has some truly amazing aspects such as writing, characters, music, etc, but IMO it falls flat in terms of gameplay. Gunplay, stealth, hacking, open world mechanics, driving... it's all very mediocre even poor at times.

kodt• 6 years ago

I felt the same but after spending more time, things are starting to click.

Stealth for example is not nearly as good as Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or The Metal Gear Solid series. The tutorial seemed alright but when it came to real gameplay I felt like stealth just didn’t work and I just resorted to guns blazing. But after more effort and getting a better hang of quick hacking I have found stealth to be viable actually. You really do need to make heavy use of quick hacking though. Also that game is very visually busy which makes it easy to miss a camera.

Driving feels pretty good, but not as good as GTA. So far driving really seems to be a way to get from point A to point B and not a core gameplay mechanic like it is with GTA. The NPC driving AI and Cop AI is downright bad compared to GTA but besides being a little immersion breaking it doesn’t seem to affect the actual gameplay much. GTA is very focused around driving and avoiding police, most of the missions involve it in some way. Cyberpunk doesn’t really rely on driving so I can give it a pass on those faults.

Gunplay really bothered me at first. It felt chaotic and a bit clunky. Other FPS/RPG hybrid games have suffered the same issues. Shooting powerful or higher level enemies will just feel bullet spongy. Some of that just needs to be accepted as “this is an RPG, not a shooter”. The cover system isn’t very sophisticated or obvious either. However the more I play the more I get the hang of it and I have found the gunplay to actually be quite satisfying.

esyir5• 6 years ago

That sounds like the Witcher 3 to me.

Great art, great story, great character/music.

I hated the gameplay. I don't know why, but it felt horrendously clunky, even after the rework.

lock-free2• 6 years ago

I'm playing on a Ryzen 3800x, a GTX 2060 Super with 32GB of 3600 MHz Ram. I think the game looks bad (with playable settings) and hasn't been compelling enough for me to sink that much time into it, while the missions are pretty grindy.

I'd say play GTA V and the Witcher 3 for a comparison in immersive open world story telling and high caliber graphics. I haven't played Spiderman (2018, 2020) but in gameplay footage (which is only on console) it looks much better as well.

I feel like I'm crazy when I say that the graphics are incredibly underwhelming. It looks good, and there's neat stuff. But I don't care how pretty a shadow looks when the hundreds of NPCs walking around look so rough.

rashkov• 6 years ago

I think it may really depend on what settings you have going. The developer really needs to optimize this game for older hardware, but I'd think there's a set of settings that'll get it to look good on your actually very recent machine. Could be wrong of course, but have you seen how good it can look at the top end? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZp8fXLXgqg (Digital foundry's visual tech tour of the game)

ineedasername9• 6 years ago

I disagree on the gameplay/grindy part, but yeah the game isn't pretty. I've heard it justified as deliberate: It's a futuristic dystopian city overrun by constant advertising, corporatism, and crime. That doesn't make for a pretty environment. Of course if that was a deliberate artistic decision then maybe they should have gone a different way.

jasondigitized• 6 years ago

Just get a copy of Ghost of Tsushima and enjoy a top rate open world gaming experience.

speedgoose3• 6 years ago

Playing on a RTX 2070, I have to decide between having a very low framerate, a blurry picture, but good graphics thanks to raytracing, or low framerate and very normal but disapointing graphics.

elorant• 6 years ago

Combat absolutely sucks, and it's the one thing I loathe about the game. You have to empty two magazine clips in any given opponent to take him down. I've never seen a game with such weak weaponry. It feels unrealistic.

mciancia• 6 years ago

Seems similar to borderlands

Jarolis2• 6 years ago

It's an RPG, not a tactical sim shooter. What's with this criticism?

zemo10• 6 years ago

you're really going with "it works on my machine" as justification for why it's good enough ... on a programming forum?

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

Take away the bugs and cosmetic performance problems; the game is just lousy. Every mechanic it implements is lousy and half-baked. From the driving, to the shooting, to the looting, to the AI, it's just mediocre.

Try this tonight: make sure you're absolutely alone and shoot someone. A cop will spawn behind you. No AI, no chase, no nothing, just bloop here's a cop.

The game has destroyed the reputation of this company overnight.

XorNot2• 6 years ago

I mean I'm pretty sure the cop spawning itself is a placeholder mechanism they just never got around to. If you think about, the crime-notification probably calls a "spawn law enforcement" handler which basically just runs the spawn economy and drops them in, with a comment along the lines of "TODO: waiting on NPC driving mechanics" (which are also missing).

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

chip in

;)

I've also had zero crashes but I do notice quite a few minor bugs. They're a little annoying but I've still sunk 30 hours in. I also can't remember the last open world game that didn't have similar bugs.

rootlocus3• 6 years ago

I found the following bugs which are very likely not related to the platform:

1. Friendly NPC left behind in mission area which was scripted to become inaccessible. Couldn't reach the NPC to finish the mission. 2. Killed an NPC two times: once in a side mission and once in a main mission 3. The player goes to sleep perpendicular to the bed and with the bottom half side of the body outside the bed. 4. Friendly NPCs start to shout randomly during stealth missions. 5. There's no driving AI, all machines follow predefined paths sometimes going through one another as if there's no collision.

And probably lots more I didn't remember. And these exclude the physics and rendering bugs and I encounter every 5 minutes.

hertzrat• 6 years ago

That’s interesting: a lot of releases seem to sell up to 2-3x more in console than pc, but approx 60% of their sales are for pc. Is that because of Covid, or is it a trend?

d1egoaz• 6 years ago

Game wasn't ready for consoles, they just lied about it. And it looks like even the PC game feels incomplete "It's all style but no substance.". https://steamcommunity.com/id/outxider/recommended/1091500/

"Janky. If I can describe it with one word.

8 years of hype to launch what looks like an Early Access game.

It's glitchy, it's buggy, it doesn't run well unless you have an RTX card and DLSS enabled. And that's barely passable.

But those can eventually be fixed.

The core of the game, the massive open world, is incredibly superficial, with nothing to do in it. CDPR crafted a beautiful, detailed world, with braindead AI and overly simplistic gameplay.

There's no roleplaying involved like you would find in Deus Ex. There's no extracurricular activities that doesn't involve shooting a bunch of bad guys like you would find in Red Dead Redemption 2. You won't find tight gunplay like you would see in Destiny 2.

The AI completely lacks any sort of intelligence. Enemies rush you without the sense of self-preservation. Oftentimes standing there letting you blast them in the face. Cops spawn literally yards behind you without any chase, or any threat. Walk a block down and they completely forget you exist. No bounty on your head, no search and apprehend procedures. But stand next to them for 3 seconds and they'll shoot you on sight.

Really, there's not much to do except shoot things. Guns feel impactful enough, if you use revolvers or tech weapons, and melee combat is passable. You can go for a stealth or hacking approach, but those don't feel as good as just pulling the trigger on some thugs. Hacking is just pointing your reticle at someone, and then make a selection from the menu. And depending on what you chose, sparks just fly out of their head. That's it.

The story is engaging, yet forgettable. This is a cyberpunk setting, but it's in appearances only. There's all these talks about megacorporations taking over the world, but only one corporation takes center stage. There's no political intrigue, no conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true, no investigation into a greater mystery. Keanu Reeves is literally taking your breath away and you go out to make sure that doesn't happen.

Your personal backstory is forgettable. It's literally 20 mins long, and your entire introduction to Night City is a montage. CDPR failed the show, don't tell aspect. They could've squeezed in a few good hours of character development and worldbuilding with the opening hours. Instead, you get taken straight into Night City, told to care about certain things, and want to have this lofty ideal of becoming a living legend for some unknown reason. You don't have a story to tell, there's a story being told to you.

The characters definitely carry the narrative, from Silverhand's personal vendetta, to Panam's sense of belonging, and Takemura's strong honor code.

Regardless, I did enjoy this game. But there's so many glaring flaws that becomes hard to ignore.

So it pains me to say, I do not recommend this game. The numerous technical issues make this equivalent to an Early Access title. But the gameplay loop, the promise of an immersive experience, a sandbox for you to get lost in are totally nonexistent. It's a beautiful world CDPR created, but it's just a glorified loading screen going from one mission marker to another.

It's all style but no substance."

platz4• 6 years ago

Cyberpunk 2077 review: dad rock, not new wave - Polygon

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/22158019/cyberpunk-2077-revi...

mdoms5• 6 years ago

The core of the game, the massive open world

Maybe it's just me, but I definitely wouldn't consider this the core of the game. For me the core is the single player story ("main quest" I guess). Maybe this is because I have played every CDPR game and The Witcher 3 is the only one so far with an open world and, and even there it was clear that the main story line was the crown jewel.

kart23• 6 years ago

I think you're ok feeling that, especially with your CDPR experiences. But a lot of the promotional material heavily emphasizes 'night city' and the whole worldbuilding aspect. They even coin it as 'the next generation of open world adventure' at the end of this trailer. I think the promotional material definitely focused more on the setting rather than the characters and their stories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8lX3hDU30

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

That review hits home for me. The game was ok. It can be beautiful at times, but everyone has done it already and did it better ( GTA, Fallout, Deus, Skyrim, Half-life ). For some reason, I decided to try out Stadia version and it was an acceptable experience for me.

But the part about the immersion breaking over ridiculously bad AI, shallow world... Yeah.

I read the transcript and based on what I saw, there is no way there is not a CYA email saying something along the lines of 'it is not ready. if you release it, it will bomb'. I wonder whether board members will be removed.

edit: Well, now I am annoyed. I can't mow down children in car ..sigh

leetcrew3• 6 years ago

It's glitchy, it's buggy, it doesn't run well unless you have an RTX card and DLSS enabled. And that's barely passable.

I haven't found this to be true. it took a bit of playing around with the settings, but with dynamic fidelityFX, I am getting great image quality on my 1080 ti at 4K, sitting right around 50 fps.

theSIRius2• 6 years ago

The whole project feels terribly mismanaged. Even from the character editor it is obvious the game had to be scaled down in the last year to even ship. Considering the amount of crunch, it is heartbreaking it ended like this for every interested party.

I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.

Strom• 6 years ago

I do get a sense of mismanagement as well, however the platform situation is a bit complicated.

Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK.

The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360.

The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne.

It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either.

I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.

theSIRius2• 6 years ago

I mean, they could ideally go PC and Stadia (since it is basically PC with fixed specs) -> Xbox One/PS4 -> Xbox Series/PS5. It wouldn't hurt the contract with Google and it would help with the terrible technical state on consoles.

I've personally tried the game on Xbox One X and only problems I've found were graphical glitches but it still is not a great experience. It's honestly pretty sad it ended like this with the amount of crunch and the token system the developers had.

ineedasername9• 6 years ago

release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first

It is only released on last gen consoles. There's no native PS5 or Xbox series X/S version you can buy. You buy the PS4/Xbox One version and play it via backwards compatibility. Apart from video resolution or low FPS, have there been significant problems on the last gen consoles in terms of bugs that aren't on the new gen?

_cs2017_5• 6 years ago

Wasn't it obvious to anyone who play-tested on last-gen consoles that the game is nearly unplayable and so will receive horrendous reviews? Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year?

After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions.

"Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors.

"We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.

pavon2• 6 years ago

They overestimated how much they could fix in the time between the initial delivery and the day-one patch.

ObsoleteNerd• 6 years ago

Yeah it reads to me more like they were pressured to release it quickly before the holidays by investors, and the decision makers didn't listen to those below saying that it just couldn't be done (to the quality everyone expected).

I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.

pojzon• 6 years ago

CDPR is owned in 66% by investors. And investors want ROI and there is nothing better than holiday season for that.

They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4 and released it either way because “money>everything”.

Its really that simple.

_cs2017_5• 6 years ago

I'd think this was worse for the investors than not releasing in December and delaying until ~March? Stock price down over 30%.

corytheboyd• 6 years ago

100% the truth right here, to believe anything else requires a bit of gymnastics.

908B64B1976• 6 years ago

I noticed a lot of extremely successful companies were employee-owned for a significant fraction of their early growth.

I'm thinking Valve (still is!) and Microsoft. Wonder if there's a correlation.

asdfasgasdgasdg• 6 years ago

I don't know how the Polish corporation works, but at least in my country, nebulous "investors" would have a lot of difficulty pushing through random product decisions in a public company.

Hamuko4• 6 years ago

They also knew about how bad the game runs on PS4

If by "they" you mean investors, I'm not sure if that's correct.

CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński has praised Cyberpunk 2077's performance on PS4 and Xbox One in an investor call.
Speaking earlier this week on Wednesday (and transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Kaciński said that Cyberpunk 2077's performance on the base PS4 and Xbox One consoles is "surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world." The CEO went on to say that although the performance on these base consoles is lower than their "pro" counterparts (the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X), it's still surprisingly good.

https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-runs-surprisingly-...

Aunche• 6 years ago

Blaming investors underplays how much CDPR messed up. Basically all AAA games are funded by investors, so it's not an excuse for a bad release.

Investors were told that the game would release in April, which is why many of them invested in the company in the first place. It's reasonable to expect them to finish 7 months later.

aspaceman4• 6 years ago

Besides other reasons I think management thought they could get away with it.

Reviewers were given the PC version, so I imagine it was a calculation of “how many reviewers are willing to wait on traffic, just to review old consoles?”

It just didn’t work out for them.

dogma11384• 6 years ago

Yeah I don't get it, TW3 was unplayable for quite a while on base consoles, sub 30 fps throughout most of the game, and CB2077 is a game with much bigger scope the base consoles couldn't handle the NPC rich areas in TW3 so no matter how much optimization they would do I don't understand who thought that this game will ever be playable on the base previous gen consoles.

BoorishBears• 6 years ago

People who saw a game sold for their platform assumed it was fit for purpose.

I don't understand who tries to complicate that with sentiments like "they should have known better"

allarm• 6 years ago

This point is incorrect. If they’re releasing the game for current gen, it should be playable on it.

p1necone2• 6 years ago

Isn't not quite consistent 30fps basically the norm on PS4/Xbox one?

pier256• 6 years ago

So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year?

The game should have been delayed until Xmas 2021 but CDPR probably had contracts they couldn't break with Sony, Xbox, or maybe even Nvidia.

Arelius2• 6 years ago

There may have been contract issues, but more likely the cost of an additional year of development vs getting holiday profit made a lot of the decision.

calibas2• 6 years ago

It's because of Christmas, that's pretty much the whole reasoning for why they released when they did.

Ygg22• 6 years ago

Well, yes and no.

The more you delay, the more it costs and you have to restart the marketing machine to drum up the hype.

zemo10• 6 years ago

Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management.

it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers, so if anything I would assume the opposite is true: that it's an environment where the QA staff is chronically underpaid, lives in perpetual fear of dismissal, and is told that working on the biggest game ever is the honor of a lifetime.

freeflight12• 6 years ago

it seems pretty clear that they're terribly abusive employers

How so? They changed the revenue based bonuses to be paid out regardless of review averages [0]. They at least tried to make a commitment to less crunch, while over at Rockstar the amount of crunch for RDR2 was something the co-founder publicly bragged about [1].

Now people on forums are citing RDR2 as an example for "How to make a great open world game!", while at the same time lynching CDPR for not living up to their attempt to minimize crunch, after several delays.

The double standards at play here are mind-boggling.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-developers-will-be-pa...

[1] https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/the-making-of-rockstar-games...

ineedasername9• 6 years ago

Management may very well have had little or no choice in the matter. The game had already been pushed multiple times and there was half a $Billion in pre-orders alone waiting to be collected.

Estimates put the dev budget a little over $300 million [0]. After retailers & Steam take their cut and given that a lot of sales were full-cut direct through GOG, that puts the game around break-even status before it even hits normal retail sales.

Given this picture, it is highly likely that investors forced through this decision to go forward as much or more than management did. Push the game again and you'll really start losing pre-orders, and the next time a release date comes around people will be even more hesitant to drop $60 before release.

(As a side note, I'm playing the game on low-end gaming hardware and it works fine. Occasional graphical glitches, 1 crash. It's hard to live up to the hype, but it's still a great game. Feels like a mashup of GTA V with heavy RPG elements set in a future dystopia. Small hints of Assassin's Creed stealth, maybe more if you build your character in that direction.)

[0] https://www.altchar.com/game-news/cyberpunk-2077-set-to-beco...

blihp• 6 years ago

Don't think for a second that employees 'are not afraid to convey such bad news'. Between the massive years-long hype, delays and bad press about crunch time around the title, not to mention being the most lucrative time of year for a game release, it's very likely that management egos were fully engaged in this release. When that happens reality is no longer driving, or even on, the bus. There may have been one or two brave souls who spoke up and when no good came as a result of speaking up (at best they were disregarded, at worst it was a career limiting move), everyone else tends to fall in line. So when management holds their various last minute go/no go meetings, people tend to nod their heads in agreement recognizing the futility of trying to point out the obvious.

cghendrix• 6 years ago

Oh man.. I have personally been a victim to the results of management ego aka my first and only death march project.

ajkjk• 6 years ago

I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.

zimpenfish• 6 years ago

Not just game companies where this happens - I've worked at more than a few places in normal software development where management ego rather than cold hard reality drives the bus and yeah, speaking up is definitely a career limiting move.

Arelius2• 6 years ago

Don't underestimate the ability for people to dilute the impact of bad-news as it moves up the chain. I'm sure people play-tested it and tried to raise alarms, but bad news regularly get's softened, maybe to accept less blame/responsibility?

rvba• 6 years ago

If you are in management of a company that literally publishes one game, it would make some sense to actually play this game.

Probably they knew what is up: investors told them to publish, so they published.

nvrspyx2• 6 years ago

I saw someone post a synopsis on Reddit (forgot the sub) of the actual recorded phone call and these were the points mentioned:

- QA was limited and done in-house, thus remotely by people working on the game

- Overestimated their ability to fix the problems before launch

- Reviewers didn't have access to last-gen console versions because they were still working on the last-gen versions through the certification process up until launch day

Of course, I don't put much weight on any of these. However, I'm sure there was a fair bit of pressure from investors to release during the holidays considering some of the questions asked during the call, like how "sticky" the game was despite the problems and whether they would still receive their full cut regardless of the refunds.

jay_kyburz• 6 years ago

Question remains, why did Microsoft and Sony certify them?

kuu2• 6 years ago

This was the call: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/kde2jj/cd_projekt_re...

dandare• 6 years ago

Good catch, the root of the word Underestimate is estimation and it shall not be confused with Underrate.

blub2• 6 years ago

I'm playing on a PS4 slim and the game is fine, I really don't understand all the negativity (v 1.0.4). I had 2-3 crashes and saw some bugs like objects hanging in the air or the weapon not being visible.

Performance is fine. Bought the game a couple of days after launch and after reading the reports about horrible performance while downloading, I disabled everything under graphics, but then after a crash it reset its settings (yeah, I know) and it seems to work fine even with all settings on.

climb_stealth3• 6 years ago

I find it interesting but maybe not entirely surprising that games can actually crash on consoles. It still surprises me when it happens on my Nintendo Switch.

Though my last console experience before that was on a Nintendo 64 and I don't think any game ever crashed on it.

djeiasbsbo• 6 years ago

My assumption is that all of this doesn't matter when the share holders and investors pressure the company... it's not an easy to decision whether to delay the product again, especially when there is already a negative public reaction to the multiple delays.

blunte• 6 years ago

It has been years since I worked for an AAA game company, but at least at that time (and probably still) the pressure from publishers to release in time for Christmas season is beyond intense.

The revenue difference between selling at Christmas (even if reviews are awful) vs selling around Easter, the next available "good" retail holiday, is huge.

And since these days, patches are the standard - as in, release with known deficiencies and patch your way to "OK" - it is very likely that from an overall financial perspective, releasing now was the right answer.

If a game studio wants to maintain a very high level of quality, they have to be willing to lose a publisher by rejecting this. Unless that studio is already so well established that they are in demand, they just cannot afford to fight their publisher.

vkou4• 6 years ago

So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year?

Because there isn't a single other major December release.

madeofpalk• 6 years ago

Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management.

I do not think this is a safe assumption to make. You're assuming each person passes this higher and higher up in the chain for a decision to be made.

TheRealSteel• 6 years ago

I'm shocked nobody else has pointed out the responsibility of Microsoft and Sony here - the whole job of a console maker is to keep crap like this off their box so you never have to stress about whether it runs properly or not. It's supposed to be the whole advantage over having a PC.

It was their job to refuse certification and say "Nope, come back when the game runs properly" and they failed. That's part of what they get their money for when we pay more for console games than PC.

TheGuyWhoCodes3• 6 years ago

Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance. You can't even customize anything past the creation screen, no car paint jobs no hair cuts and no body modification, no transmog system..

They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...

Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen.

Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game.

They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.

throwaway98765t• 6 years ago

I’m playing on first gen threadripper and a 580rx card with no major issues, the game is gorgeous and I am having a blast. I agree that the AI is horrible and the UI is a pain, especially when you want to do things like sell a lot of items

sniglom• 6 years ago

I fully agree. It's mostly a fancy light show and not much more. Gameplay wise, this reminds me of games from the Xbox 360 / PS3 era.

syndoch• 6 years ago

The game has an overwhelming amount of very detailed content in the main job and side jobs, and also provides plenty of flexibility in combat if you explore the various upgrade systems. It's an evolution of the Witcher 3, not Grand Theft Auto. Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.

dawnerd3• 6 years ago

Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.

The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.

kharak2• 6 years ago

Playing it on PC and I'm really enjoying it.

There seem to be two factions: Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed. But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.

Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.

meddlepal• 6 years ago

PC here, agree it's fun and I think some people are definitely expecting GTA from a developer that has absolutely no experience making something like GTA.

GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.

But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.

There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.

Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.

I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.

Gamers are so cranky.

sivakon• 6 years ago

These were the expectations set by CDPR and their marketing team. Open world mechanics are a joke in this game. Pedestrians look same. Driving mechanics are janky.

lm28469• 6 years ago

Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed

I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.

Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad

CivBase4• 6 years ago

that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...

EA gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it's important to recognize their behavior is typical of all major players in the games industry. The whole thing is rotten and you shouldn't trust any of them. They certainly haven't earned it. Always wait for reviews.

TheGuyWhoCodes3• 6 years ago

I'm not saying it's all bad. The art style is amazing, the sound track is awesome. The lips sync, facial expressions and body movement are pretty damn good. Yes there some nice side missions and the main story line is ok I guess but it's not really cyberpunk or really engaging. They advertised it as a cyber punk open world RPG and promised so many things and then literally changed the marketing of the game to an action shooter after the game came out...

ineedasername9• 6 years ago

* it's not really cyberpunk*

Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.

enraged_camel• 6 years ago

The game has a different take on the cyberpunk universe and I think that is okay.

Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.

cbozeman8• 6 years ago

So fortunately I've never played any open-world game except for Skyrim, which just didn't really hold my interest... or maybe it was the fact I lost my save game due to a faulty SSD, I dunno.

At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SNES game and Shadowrun Returns. However, I've talked with hardcore Cyberpunk pen & paper players, and they say its un-fucking-believable how well CDPR has brought to life the Cyberpunk universe in this game.

Yes, there are bugs. I have every confidence though that CDPR will iron all this shit out like they did with The Witcher III. This will be a great game by mid-to-late 2021, in every sense of the word.

I genuinely hope in Cyberpunk 2077 II that they'll be able to flesh out the game world, because I really love this game and this world.

pbourke• 6 years ago

I played the pen and paper way back in the day, and I agree. They have absolutely nailed the aesthetic: a dusting of kitsch and campiness that isn’t over the top. I’m also enjoying the story and game mechanics. It’s my first open world AAA title, so I don’t have much to compare it with, but I’m having fun!

winrid• 6 years ago

Sure, maybe it will be a great game in six months.

But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car" - you have expectations when you put the money down...

freeflight12• 6 years ago

Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance.

That really depends on individual expectations. With many people treating the game like the second coming of gaming Jesus a lot of the disappointment was pretty much guaranteed.

Personally I didn't expect anything like that, I was hoping for an open world Deus Ex like, with a more "colorful" setting, and that's pretty much what I got.

not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.

AMD has been the "current gaming king" only since Zen 3 desktop release, which happened just last month, most of these CPUs are still completely impossible to buy at actual MSRP.

Regardless of that even Zen 2 is mostly performing very well with the game [0], which the HEXedit fix will only improve once it's patched in officially.

In that context this complaint sounds very much like still complaining about the lack of an epilepsy warning; Sure it's not great to overlook something like that, but it's inane to act as if these are unfixable and nonredeemable issues, particularly in an industry where "games a service", releasing early access products, has become the new low-key norm even for much bigger publishers.

[0] https://youtu.be/-pRI7vXh0JU

SulfurHexaFluri• 6 years ago

AMD has been very popular in gaming PCs for the last 3 years now. The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip at a fraction of the cost and it completely blows away intel in non gaming workloads so its what most people picked unless spending an extra $300 for 2fps is your thing.

zeouter• 6 years ago

I've seen it summarised as maybe a mile wide and an inch deep, that there aren't particularly interesting systems at play, there isn't actually much meat to the pretty bones.

29athrowaway5• 6 years ago

There are game companies where salaries are not paid until a release is delivered.

mdoms5• 6 years ago

No there aren't.

29athrowaway5• 6 years ago

Yes there are, in Europe. e.g.: Crytek.

https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees...

A much better situation than CD Projekt, which is also a European company (from Poland).

cgrealy2• 6 years ago

Not really. You might have a big bonus tied up in a release, but unless you're a self-funded indie dev (typically with single digit employees), you have to pay your staff.

People aren't that desparate to work on games.

dysoco• 6 years ago

Is this even legal? I guess it depends on the country but doesn't sound legal at all where I live.

29athrowaway5• 6 years ago

The most common form of theft is wage theft. It is very common around the world.

Contractors especially get ripped off all the time.

"Hey, that tile is slightly off, I am not paying for any of this".

zemo10• 6 years ago

that's the sort of claim that really needs to be substantiated with any sort of evidence whatsoever.

mikenew• 6 years ago

we’ve actually shown console footage, but never on the last-gen consoles. The reason is that we were updating the game on last-gen consoles until the very last minute, and we thought we’d make it in time. [...] That was not intended; we were just fixing the game until the very last moment.

This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.

tolbish• 6 years ago

It's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

There is also the lesser known axiom: it's better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.

zero_deg_kevin• 6 years ago

It’s better to not be caught committing fraud than to be caught.

pvg• 6 years ago

Related from Wired/Cecilia D'Anastasio

https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/

elgatonegro5• 6 years ago

I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment- and my biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. It feels like a throwback to the dumbest action games of the 90s: here's a main story and a bunch of quests that you'll be completing on railtracks. Your choices don't really matter, the world is empty and soulless, the writing is lazy and you can't stop but keep thinking how superficial everything feels.

There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account.

Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.

akhilcacharya3• 6 years ago

My biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined.

What are some modern games that are like this?

I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.

elgatonegro5• 6 years ago

The Witness was great as was The Talos Principle.

SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.

voter1012• 6 years ago

New Deus Ex games (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided) are pretty good.

ddoolin2• 6 years ago

NieR: Automata is like that.

0x00000000• 6 years ago

a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined

At a surface level it is very reminiscent of the Deus Ex games, but if you go in expecting something profound you will be disappointed

overgard5• 6 years ago

It really feels like a mashup of GTA 5 and Deus Ex, except without GTA's sense of humor and Deus Ex's feeling of personal agency. That said, I am really enjoying it, I mean a mashup of those two things is very compelling even if it doesn't quite manage to borrow the charm of either.

willis93614• 6 years ago

I got serious DX vibes, but as soon as the surface is scratched you can see that it’s not an ice cream sundae but a shit sandwich.

zemo10• 6 years ago

I completed it twice ... There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable

getting some really mixed signals here

Pfhreak12• 6 years ago

People can play games for reasons other than fun or enjoyment. Spec Ops: The Line isn't a 'fun' game, but holy shit I couldn't stop playing it.

CivBase4• 6 years ago

I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment

You should familiarize yourself with the concept of a "sunk cost"[0]. You'll probably be happier for it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

vadansky• 6 years ago

Honestly thank you for saying that. I felt like I'm going crazy, I can't figure out how people are enjoying this game, I tried to find a redeeming quality and "pretty lights" is all I can think of.

Edit: Scrolled down and found great r3view that put what felt into words better then I can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436061

mdoms5• 6 years ago

How can you claim you don't like a game but also complete it twice in the space of about a week?

elgatonegro5• 6 years ago

The main story is short and as I said, you're on railtracks. It's not like you can get lost in the world like in GTA or RDR, there is no world for you to get lost in. It's all smoke & mirrors. Also, pandemic lockdown in my country has left me with plenty of free time.

The game offers you three "life paths" at the beginning so after I finished it once I had to see if a different path would be better.

Well it turns out life paths change nothing besides the introduction. It's still the same dumb game with the same railtracks and the same story. Your choices don't matter and you realize that you've been swindled since the promises and descriptions of the immersive and emergent open-world nature of the game turned out to be a bunch of lies.

Hearing all the stories about refunds being hard or impossible to execute, one has to wonder if legal action is justifiable here. The CP2077 that CDPR framed and advertised gameplay-wise has very little to do with the end result that they delivered. And I'm not even talking about the bugs, but the game itself.

It goes without saying that I'm done with them and my intuition tells me that the CDPR brand will be poisonous to a lot of gamers out there after this fiasco. Bugs are one thing, but blatant lies quite another.

Jack000• 6 years ago

It doesn't sound like you gave it much of a chance tbh. If you only play the main quests it might be possible to do 2 playthroughs since launch. I'm at 43h in and haven't finished the first playthrough yet, on normal difficulty.

The gameplay is pretty much identical to w3, which is what I expected going in. If you expected more than that you were bound to be disappointed.

elgatonegro5• 6 years ago

It took me around 20 hours to finish it the first time. Second time was a lot faster since I was essentially playing the same game and I could fly through the same situations and dialogs. It's a hollow experience, pretty but zero substance.

I know there are additional endings and side quests, but the problem is that game has no depth whatsoever so I'm not exactly motivated to spend more time. It's mindless action with a few variations on the quests that keep repeating themselves. After playing the game for a few hours, the shallowness and superficiality of it all starts weighing on you.

chmod7753• 6 years ago

Wait a second... how did you "complete" the game twice in less than a week?

I've put more than 40 hours in and I'm nowhere close to completing it even once. I'm pretty sure all the dialogue alone adds up to that much.

Even completing the main story, gigs and side-missions is probably going to take me around 100 hours. Maybe someone faster could do it in 40, or maybe 20 if you skipped all of the dialogue and played on a low difficulty. I spend/wasted a lot of time just exploring the city and surrounding areas, doing 'bounties' or climbing on random places to see if there's something interesting/loot to be found.

I suppose you mostly played the main story line on a low difficulty, ignoring all the side activities (which do impact the main story and vice-versa) and likely rushed through or past everything else.

If you were looking to have a good time you didn't exactly set yourself up for success. A bit like reading a book and skipping all of the chapters that follow minor characters for world-building purposes.

I agree that the life paths don't have major consequence, which is a bit disappointing, but saying "choices don't matter" as a blanket statement is just factually incorrect, considering there's a long list of choices that have a lasting effect on the game world, and there are at least 3-5 different endings depending on the choices you made earlier in the game.

There's a list of (so far known) major choices here if you want to spoil yourself: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/Choices_and_Consequ...

chmod7753• 6 years ago

IGN removed that page a few hours ago. Looks like their wiki is still very much work-in-progress.

Here's the most recent google-cached version I could find, archived via archive.is: https://archive.is/DFb7d

rossmohax• 6 years ago

No Mans Sky devs turned failure into a big win in a year or so after release. Miracles do happen, I hope CDPR can pull it off too.

thepete22• 6 years ago

"we started with a score of 70, but now it’s 79. If you filter those who have played 10 hours or more, the score is 85 –so the more you play the more enjoyment you feel."

Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours

mattnewton2• 6 years ago

Came here to post this. The obvious conclusion is that you are at the very least filtering out people who stopped playing because of game breaking bugs.

tester342• 6 years ago

did he actually lie?

he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.

tester342• 6 years ago

did he actually lie?

he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.

thepete22• 6 years ago

Maybe lying is the wrong word. But the conclusion that "the longer you play the more you enjoy the game" is very misleading.

uncomputation2• 6 years ago

Why is everyone just talking about last-gen consoles? My partner has been playing on the PS5 and it still crashes at least every hour. Sure, not every 10 min but nothing to gloss over either. This doesn’t even mention the texture glitches, clipping, unachievable quest glitches, animation bugs, etc

ThatPlayer2• 6 years ago

Most people still only have last-gen consoles, so that's where the majority is.

miloignis• 6 years ago

The next gen version isn't out yet, the PS5 is playing the PS4 version, so their complaints and yours are indeed for the same version.

uncomputation2• 6 years ago

Can’t believe I missed that, thanks

jwiley3• 6 years ago

CD Project forced their employees to crunch to get a game out, missed deadlines, and shipped a game that is buggy on some definition of last-gen hardware. Assuming all that is true: how is this news? This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. As someone who tearfully tried to play Doom on a 286, I have some sympathy but the level of outrage is hard for me to understand.

In my experience playing the game on a PS4 Pro (does that qualify as a last-gen console? Not sure), I have experienced no game breaking bugs or performance issues that warrant the level of criticism here. Instead I have been blown away by the level of detail and beauty of the world they created and I personally am over the moon with the fact the game that I had been eagerly awaiting exceeds my expectations for it.

Congrats CD Projekt, take a vacation, give some bonuses, let people upgrade their 5 year old hardware and chill out.

willis93614• 6 years ago

This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years.

This is news because the quoted statement is false. In fact, the opposite is true. Every genre defining game of the past 35 years has had a genre defining gold print. CP2077 is a dumpster fire. It will never be considered a great because of its launch.

jwiley3• 6 years ago

I assume you’ve actually played the game on a console, and experienced game breaking bugs? Or maybe you subjectively consider the quality to not match your well thought out expectations previous to purchasing it? Can you please expand on your personal experiences with the game that led you to the dumpster fire conclusion?

I’m also curious about your statement that every genre defining game has had a genre defining gold print. Can you point to one or more similar games that launched flawlessly across all platforms, on time, without negative reviews?

zaptheimpaler• 6 years ago

After 3 delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game. We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles. It was the wrong approach and against our business philosophy.

Management at game dev company ignores all team feedback about timeline and quality, instead promises an arbitrary release date and pushes to crunch to meet deadlines. What a shocker ;)

shmerl• 6 years ago

Incumbent consoles hardware refresh cycle is so horribly long due to lack of competition, that it holds the whole industry back and damages progress.

I tried the game on Linux (Wine + vkd3d-proton). Thanks to CDPR for at least giving the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance, even though they could make a native Linux release already due to all the Stadia work.

mgarym• 6 years ago

I've had the misfortune of interacting with some of the engineers at CD Projekt Red in the course of my job in the past. There is a serious competence issue. It's not surprising in the slightest bit that they have this many problems with their release. On top of that, those engineers were arrogant AF when I talked to them.

FeistySkink• 6 years ago

I'm genuinely curious, do you have more details?

tylermenezes• 6 years ago

They barely answers any questions. If the leadership team is not tracking the metrics they'd need to answer questions like "roughly how have last-gen console sales compared to expectations" or "are you seeing lots of refund requests", it's really no wonder they're in this situation.

overgard5• 6 years ago

I'm really enjoying the game on PC, it runs reasonably well on my GTX 1070. I'm staggered how many bugs there are though. I run into one about every five minutes. So far off the top of my head:

- NPCs floating in space

- NPCs walking through solid objects

- NPCs randomly spawning in view

- I have a gun that wont fire if I use a scope on it

- I have another gun whose model disappears in car chases

- Some objects have meshes that duplicate (cigarette floating in space while the character is also holding it)

- Randomly getting flagged by the cops for a crime when im literally just walking around with my weapon holstered

- Quest goals not registering/having to repeat certain actions

None of these are like a huge deal, sometimes it's even really funny, but dear god is it incredibly buggy.

plasma• 6 years ago

I'm curious how this could be happening, like do we think there is some 'job subsystem' bug that just causes game-tasks (whether its loading an image, or processing a message, ...) just randomly gets dropped and not processed?

It sounds like such a systemic issue its not like a particular component (eg AI or rendering) is the issue.

meibo2• 6 years ago

Seems to me they have a lot of "show this at that time" bugs - I relatively often see UI elements that shouldn't be there or active layered on top of each other as well.

Additionally to hands and props disappearing at random.

overgard5• 6 years ago

Just some guesses:

- I'm figuring floating NPCs and walking through solid surfaces might be from incorrect navmeshes. IE maybe they baked them, moved some stuff around, and forgot to rebake. Or forgot to mark some objects static, etc.

- Meshes disappearing.. not sure, thinking maybe theyre using some fixed size arrays to avoid reallocations but maybe theyre hitting a fixed size limit and things get evicted.

- Weird spawns. Guessing this might be something like a broken line of sight calculation. Maybe similar to the theorized navmesh thing -- occluders could be wrong too

mekkkkkk3• 6 years ago

I'm having the same experience. I thoroughly enjoy the game, mostly because I'm a sucker for world building. The universe is fantastic, albeit a bit too pubescent and "edgy" at times. It also runs fine on my 1660 super. I don't really mind the "shallowness" of the gameplay mechanics. Horses for courses, I suppose.

But man, oh man, is it buggy. I've never been soft locked this many times in a game before. As a software developer, it's honestly a bit amusing to find the obvious cases where the individual sub systems trip each other up.

Primary offender is the scripted mission system vs. telephone. You get a phone call just as you enter a scripted cutscene? Two calls coming in simultaneously? You start a yellow dialogue while on the phone? Welp, time to reload.

lmilcin• 6 years ago

I was once to CD Projekt here in Warsaw, almost 20 years ago. I got a defective Baldur's Gate CD and got option to have it mailed or take it in person. As me and my friend wanted to play very badly we just went for a free HQ tour:)

They were very nice about it.

rappatic• 6 years ago

I play PC with a pretty good rig (RTX 2080S and i7-9700) and performance has been fine. I do struggle to hit 1440p60 at high settings in certain scenes (driving in populated areas etc.) but the game has been pretty bug-free for me at least. I had some bad crashes on D1 but after the 1.04 patch I had no problems at all besides a single isolated animation bug where a single character's glass would hover six inches to the side of her hand. Maybe this is just me?

I've been loving the game. I completed it and am starting my second playthrough. Honestly, my only complaint is that it's too _short_, and I think CDPR took comments about the Witcher 3's long length a little too much to heart. I would not have complained for a second if it was double the length or more.

bwang292• 6 years ago

we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.

bwang292• 6 years ago

“ we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.”

artellectual• 6 years ago

As someone who works as a leader of a tech team building a financial engine, from my personal experience. When teams are doing overtime it means some bad management happened somewhere. Either someone under-estimated the scope and was never adjusted / communicated, or someone couldn't keep promise of not changing things as a result the developers and final product suffer.

Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new.

After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out.

This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product.

Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made.

How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?

vlunkr• 6 years ago

It seems like in the games industry they really want to advertise release dates or at least a release window for marketing purposes. Which results in the bad cruch periods, since you can only delay so much once you've stamped that date on it. This happens all the time, but this is an exceptionally bad example.

On the one hand, I wish companies wouldn't do this kind of crap, but on the other hand, the consumers need to be more responsible. This game has already made back the development costs, so all this backlash will probably amount to nothing. It's harsh to say, but gamers will seemingly believe anything the marketing machine tells them hook line and sinker.

swat535• 6 years ago

Exactly and this whole thing really solidifies the concept of never giving out specific deadlines unless you've basically completed the product and just doing minor touchups and even then you _still_ pad it by 2x.

The problem however is that execs want exact dates and meanwhile marketing is just hyping up the product which yields to crazy expectations from consumers and this forces the engineers to even more crunch and degrade the quality of the whole thing. Vicious cycle indeed.

burntoutfire2• 6 years ago

Let's not forget that games are actually just way more than software products. Sure, you need to write a lot of software, but you also need to figure out good gameplay, setting, mood of the game, design levels, create a shitton of art, have actors act in mocap etc. etc.

Games are most likely biggest and most complex "artistic" projects on earth (certainly they dwarf movie production). And doing artistic things is harder than typical software development for e.g. banks, where you have clearly stated requirements, whereas in games the requirement don't go beyond "it has to be cool and play great". Both of these can often only be verified in advanced stages of development, which leads to big delays where company heads realize that the game they've been developing for the past 4 years is indeed sucky and needs a huge revamp...

pie_flavor• 6 years ago

I have experienced exactly one bug, namely every tree within view-distance being visible through walls at all times. It is possibly the single most immersion breaking bug I have experienced in a video game and every time I see it I cringe.

And, yet, twelve hours and counting.

n3dm• 6 years ago

Update your video drivers. Known issue.

chrysoprace• 6 years ago

In the last couple of months friends have asked me "are you gonna get Cyberpunk?", and some seem taken aback by my answer when I say I'm gonna get it next year. Usually when I explain my reasoning (which I apply to almost all new game releases), people seem to understand:

a) There is no way of knowing if the game is gonna be good until real copies land in the hands of people who play games to have fun, instead of reviewers who are too worried about giving an honest review with the fear that they won't get future review copies or get sued.

b) Games generally get steep discounts a year or so after release. This is not universal, but if you avoid buying into the hype then you'll save yourself a considerable amount of money.

The only way to hold these companies accountable is to vote with your wallet, and so I always encourage people to reconsider pre-orders.

I'll be eagerly waiting to see if the game gets the love it deserves over the next year and if it turns out to be a flop, it'll just join long line of over-hyped AAA release flops.

partingshots• 6 years ago

Does anyone know what the timelines are for new DLC? Also, are Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series the only games that CD Projekt has?

floatingatoll• 6 years ago

For those wondering what all the fuss is about, CD Projekt Red is the company that released a popular game called "Cyberpunk 2077" with critical deficits on PS4 and Xbox One platforms.

lyx0• 6 years ago

I played it Day 1 and it runs reasonably well on my RTX 2080, nothing spectacular tho. I've had like 3 crashes in the 20 hours I've put in yet. I enjoy the game a lot, even with the bugs but what really let me down were the life paths.

I started a corpo character, got some fancy tech and a lot of cash 5 minutes in, then I ride a cool flying car around, I felt good and liked my choice. 10 minutes later I'm in a bar and 2 people come up to me that I have a meaningless dialogue with, they steal the tech and cash and from that point on I'm just a regular street kid?

It made no sense to me, I played on for an hour and then restarted as a street kid.

arminiusreturns• 6 years ago

I'm going to skip telling about all the bugs I have run into, so I'll just get down to what I think happened here.

Two primary things:

One) They targeted consoles when they shouldn't have. Cyberpunk is a game that should have been pc only first, and then later ported to consoles. They had a hammer (the engine) and saw nails (consoles), but in the game dev world the largest sets of complications come from trying to support different environments. The same can be said often in the normal software world, trying to be cross compatible when sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. When you do the math, targeting consoles, and especially if you go for last gen, the beancounter numbers show the ROI increase over just pc or just pc and latest gen are very high... and then instead of the development resources that should have gone into the AI, customization, bug-squashing, etc, go into console work.

Two) They focused too much on building the individual quests instead of the emergent opportunities which abound. It seems like they spent too much time on hand crafting quest levels, especially the ones that involved Silverhand. Many quests have their own complete loaded levels you can't get to from the main game world. By doing so, they probably wasted tons of tester and dev hours on those individual levels instead of the open game world bugs and features.

I suspect also that quite a few features just got ripped out and replaced with placeholders while the bugs get worked out more. There is no way the AI they touted so long ago is really in this state, for example, so I suspect if you give it half a year, lots of expected features will suddenly start showing up in updates and the game will end up in a much better state.

All in all, I enjoy the game world, and it has moments where it really shines. It also has madness inducing and show stopping bugs that most normal players just won't put up with... (~100+ proc kills/game freezes to finish main story line on linux/proton).

Why do beancounters always ruin everything they touch? What should have been one of the best games ever released was one of the best releases to ever money.

Two years from now it will be primo, I'm sure. The question is will there be enough backlash to change anything? Given the amount of money they made and are still making, I doubt it. Different industry, same bullshit as everywhere else.

londons_explore• 6 years ago

Are there any videos of this "unplayable performance"?

All the PS4 videos I could find barely stuttered and seemed well above the threshold of playable

dusted2• 6 years ago

I am running a last gen system (PC) and the game runs fine even with everything on max (except for ray-tracing which I don't think look that good but hits performance a lot).

I don't think CDPR should have released for old consoles, it's going to misrepresent the game no matter what, and just take extra effort.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

Wish at least one game studio/publisher would come out and say "We are just like any other software company. We work 40 hour weeks and have a healthy work/life balance. We don't have crunch time".

As the industry grows ever larger, that has to be a good way of attracting talent.

moritonal• 6 years ago

It exists. The result is a slower-paced release process and "smaller" (as in, not absurd attempts at simulations of megacities) games, but instead forcing them to rely on story-telling and strong art. See SuperGiant games and their recent enormous success with Hades.

https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre...

omega3• 6 years ago

It looks like there are major issues besides the bugs on the last gen consoles and a lot of promised features/content were not delivered:

no practical difference between life paths chosen
AI system broken/unfinished
length of the game + no replayabity factor
linear playthrough

It has been suggested that the game was rewritten to accommodate the Keanu character.

From what I've gathered this game is a solid 7/10. It's interesting to see so many nine and ten out of ten reviews from the "professional" reveiewers and the reviews from the players. This is a trend that has been going on for some time now.

CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

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