CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[highly functioning autist]

What people don't seem to understand is the importance of the spectacular and very public failure of Cyberpunk 2077.

Gaming is a big herd of sacred cows. There exists this unspoken rule that some companies/games are not to be criticized, least you incur the wrath of the gaming press or the rabid fanbase.

As an example, how many years did Bethesda get away with their overabundance of bugs, poor writing, lackluster gameplay and general lack of quality to their games? How many years have people just memed the glaring faults away and laughed at the bugs and called them a quirky part of the design?

And then came Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and suddenly the faults were so obvious and numerous that no amount of intimidation and journalist spin could make it go away. The number of detractors dwarfing the rabid, vocal fanbase to such an extent that it suddenly became socially acceptable to mock Fallout 4 and 76, and by extension Bethesda and all their previous games.

Now, after the success of Witcher 2, and especially Witcher 3, CDPR was the golden Polish darling of gaming - delivering the kind of "deep" and "mature" storytelling that would validate the worthless existence of game journalists and finally put an end to the endless mockery they experience from family, friends, random strangers and pretty much every other human on the planet.

The fact CDPR games were mechanically subpar, buggy and half-finished didn't matter, because they produced a "mature cinematic experience" (read: post-modernist, nihilist filth designed to make you feel like shit) and thus ascended to the endless pastures of gaming's sacred cows and were thus exempt from criticism. They were also the "good guy devs", the people's publisher, the ones that took a stance against greed, lies and deceit - thus becoming haloed sacred cows.

But then Soyberpunk 2077 came along, and it was an undeniably shit game on every level, such that not even journalists could make the bad press go away, and it revealed CDPR to the public as (and this is the most important part) just another shitty publisher, perfectly capable of resorting to the underhanded kind of shit EA, Ubisoft and Activision do on a regular basis.

Now that they have been unceremoniously deposited outside the pearly gates it's hip and cool to shit on them, the spell is broken and they will never again win back that implicit trust. Whenever they try to hype up a new product there will always be a large number of people that will remind the rest of the NPCs about Cyberpunk and the broken promises and scummy behavior. This will forever remain a corrosive poison eating at their success.

And if you don't believe that this will impact their bottom line - just look at what a string of failures have done to Ubisoft. Few companies go bust overnight due to a single failure, it's usually a death by a thousand cuts that sees them slowly crumble from within. CDPR is no Activision or EA, they don't have a reliable money printing IP, they're no Ubisoft with a large number of franchises they can fall back on, they're not even a Rockstar that actually can deliver on their promises.

They're just a collective of underpaid Polish labor monkeys led by inept cretins. 2077 was their one-in-a-million chance to make it into the big leagues, and they thoroughly fucked it up in the most public way imaginable.

High IQ.

 

[Gerrard]

So just like Kojima?

In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.

Couldn't give less of a shit if they are "used to good effect" if the gameplay overall is trash.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.

Overwatch, the iconic sniper rifle from Panam, also penetrates walls. It was the first thing I found before I realized you could do it with charging tech weapons which I basically never bothered with. I tried because it's a fuckhuge sniper rifle, so I figured if anything should be able to shoot a guy through a wall, it was that. It's the only weapon I really used for the purpose.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Panam also penetrates walls

hold up

 

[Turjan]

But as for the number of slots... I don't think I've ever seen a "Legendary" with no mod slots. In fact all seem to boast 3+.

They are supposed to be:
Green 1
Blue 2
Purple 3
Gold 4

In reality it's "between zero and X slots", I've wasted at least an hour reloading quicksaves to fix loot. And even then it's ALWAYS one less mod than they should have for drops.
Dunno if crafted versions require you to savescum as well or work as they should. Could't be arsed to click on craft at least 700 times to level the skill. Seriously CDPR? No "craft X amount" button?

One less slot for drops seems closer to the truth, as I don't think I've ever found a green with a mod slot. In fact "Rares" with any mod slots seem very rare. And all purples seem to have 1.

Legendaries have between zero and 4 slots at the moment. I'd say 3 is about a 40% chance, 4 slots less than 5%, no slots is also rare, but not unseen. This system sucks. At least the slot number should be fixed.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I played this a lot more this weekend and like the game much more. Its stats/skills and combat are mediocre, not bad, and it has quite a few bugs, but I think once the bugs are patched it will be a solid 3.5/5 star game. Once I've gotten into the world, it's seemed much less empty than it did at first glance, and once you get into the game a bit further, the random side quests start being more fleshed out. Even the side-gigs that are told primarily through text often have interesting backstories if you bother to read them, and the fact that if you sneak in you can actually talk to the people you are killing/kidnapping is a nice touch that most people are probably missing.

Ultimately, once it's patched up, I think the game is going to be Witcher 3 level of quality. In other words, it does a few things so exceedingly well (mainly story and immersion) that the game is noteworthy and worth playing, despite its flaws. While W3 outdoes CP in the sheer level of quality of its side quests (W3 has so many intricately written and unique sidequests), CP outdoes W3 in combat and variety of gameplay. Yes, CP's stats/skills and combat are mediocre. However, it's way more engaging than W3 as there are just so many different ways that you can tackle any given situation, especially in the side quests, which you can pretty much complete however you want in most situations.

Plus, I re-speced as a stealthy blade user + cold blood for protection + Breech Protocol primarily for infiltration and debuffs and have found that build to be really fun. The key to enjoying this game is avoiding min-maxing a single skill tree, instead picking pieces of each to conform to your playstyle. Some melee stuff from Body, enough Reflexes to get the "slow time" mods, some stealth and a limited amount of Int has been way more fun than my initial Rifles + Crafting build.

That said, the combat is still pretty mediocre. Melee is fun largely because it forces you to strategize, plan ahead, and strike quickly from stealth, not because the game's melee system is fun (it's not). Think of how awesome this game would have been had CDPR just blatantly ripped off Dishonored's melee system, for example. I want enemies to actually parry me and block my blows, and I want to see them respond to the impact of my blows when I hit them, much like Dishonored. Instead, they respond like Bethesda enemies, where you run up to them and slash away without their reacting (you can stagger with blades, but it's purely an RNG thing that happens randomly based on rolls, so it doesn't seem like anything that's tied to physics).

 

[Gargaune]

Someone said it here or on Reddit: if developers had to crunch for a year it meant the game was a year behind schedule. Like how fucked-up CTO or lead you have to be to be doing overhours for a fucking year? I understand a 1-month crunch when the game is about to go gold, to get Day 1 patch ready or to test servers, whatever, but when you have all the money from investors and you crunch people rather than hire more and better skilled and divide them on teams working on different features and then have someone responsible for integration? Ah, I am no developer but come on, a head-of-department doesn't need knowledge how to code more than he needs to know how underlying teams are doing, if they are reaching milestones. What the fuck they were doing? What did they expect? That people are blind and won't give a bad rep? This isn't just crunching to deliver a masterpiece like RDR2. This was crunching to release a demo with barely any gameplay.

I think I've explained this before, oh, maybe a hundred pages back, but that's not how it works. Staffing logistics aren't just a function of temporary resource requirements, since hiring people is expensive, time-consuming in training and subject to long-term growth plans under the influence of applicable legislation. Independent contractors, on the other hand, are more costly and harder to manage in the context of a large development. Additionally, timeframes do not scale linearly against the number of resources, there's only so many programmers who can work on the same curly bracket.

You'll say that a whole year (if your Reddit post is correct, and that's huge "if") doesn't count as "temporary resource requirements", but look back to what I wrote a few posts up, CDPR completely missed the mark on scoping out the outstanding work over 2020 as evidenced by the haphazard delays, that was their critical failure.

Basically, this story does not hinge on "just hire more people lol." Trust me, I'm a developer, we know everything. Next Friday I'll tell you about the best bridges for sale in Florida.

I 100% stand by my statement that if the gigs had more story the game would be roughly the same in structure and content. I'm sure you'll reply with something like "the police system is so basic" but so was the guard system in Witcher 3. I'm just not seeing this super in-depth gameplay Witcher 3 had that Cyberpunk does not. Witcher 3 was not a New Vegas or Gothic 2, it was an Ubisoft open world type game with a great story and some cool choices. If Cyberpunk had gigs with great stories and some cool choices, it would be the same fucking game, just with Deus Ex-y shooting and stealthing instead of whacky-whacky melee.

I agree with this in principle, though there's more at work than just the narrative design. There are other relevant distinctions between Cyberpunk and The Witcher 3, such as the impact of game space density on quest pacing and exploration or the delivery of characterisation in first-person context, all of which affect the overall flow of the game. But I agree with you that CBP largely follows TW3's formula, with some timid improvements to level design.

The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.

 

[Harthwain]

In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.

Couldn't give less of a shit if they are "used to good effect" if the gameplay overall is trash.

You're free to have your own opinion, but I will say this much - he who is unwilling to learn or dismisses an opportunity, because the source, is a fool.

 

[msxyz]

The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.

Ok, let assume it's *us* consumers that had the wrong expectations. There are however many large and small details that points to CDPR not even being able to deliver a game which is on the same level,technically wise, as the others game on the market. One example is the retarded traffic AI. How about water? It's just a flat polygon covered by a static shader. Throw something and it will clip without even a sprite simulating the ripples. What was the last time we saw such static water? Even in Morrowind with a DX8 card the water was animated. While the poor game mechanics can be a direct consequence of bad design decisions, there's no excuse to how 'primitive' the game feels. Even if they rebooted the story and mechanics twice, what were the programmers doing meanwhile? Why car AI and phisics are shit? It's not as if going from 3rd person to 1st person or rewriting the story to give a bigger role to mr. Reeves required a complete rewrite of the game physics!

 

[Haplo]

Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.

Overwatch, the iconic sniper rifle from Panam, also penetrates walls. It was the first thing I found before I realized you could do it with charging tech weapons which I basically never bothered with. I tried because it's a fuckhuge sniper rifle, so I figured if anything should be able to shoot a guy through a wall, it was that. It's the only weapon I really used for the purpose.

Well, its a SPT32 Grad variant (with a custom silencer... that isn't quite silent). The description in the text for the regular gun even states "No wall will stop it from hitting its target."
Also its motto is "From this weapon there is no cover."

But it can't be intentional that aiming trough its scope instantly reveals all enemies in the whole area...

 

[Terenty]

God bless Crowbcat for his video, finally something retarded shills can't defend their precious "masterpiece" against

 

[Gargaune]

The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.

Ok, let assume it's *us* consumers that had the wrong expectations. There are however many large and small details that points to CDPR not even being able to deliver a game which is on the same level,technically wise, as the others game on the market. One example is the retarded traffic AI. How about water? It's just a flat polygon covered by a static shader. Throw something and it will clip without even a sprite simulating the ripples. What was the last time we saw such static water? Even in Morrowind with a DX8 card the water was animated. While the poor game mechanics can be a direct consequence of bad design decisions, there's no excuse to how 'primitive' the game feels. Even if they rebooted the story and mechanics twice, what were the programmers doing meanwhile? Why car AI and phisics are shit? It's not as if going from 3rd person to 1st person or rewriting the story to give a bigger role to mr. Reeves required a complete rewrite of the game physics!

I didn't italicise "some" as a diss, just to indicate that not all prospective buyers had those expectations in terms of content. What I was covering in that paragraph was exclusively in relation to gameplay complaints, features and mechanics. My suspicion is that CDPR misjudged the scope and cut down on some of the extra features they'd planned.

On the tech side, you're dealing with a similar situation most likely. The developers pursued that original, grand vision for Night City, pushing harder and harder on graphical detail and cell streaming to achieve that seamless city from the design docs, and ended up struggling to keep the game running on older hardware. So they pushed other detail elements to the side, such as traffic physics or water simulations, and went all hands on deck trying to duct tape Cyberpunk to a PS4. Take AI, for instance, it's something that's usually CPU-bound, but CBP's already riding your processor hard even without any sophisticated AI behaviours.

It all comes down to mismanagaing the project plan, CDPR aimed very high but, for whatever reasons, ran out time and processing power to execute so at some point in development they dropped everything else and scrambled to deliver on just the "core experience" of the game, those elements that the bulk of the playerbase will most interact with. I guess it's why there are no water effects, but the dildo weapon vibrates...

And anyway, I'm not excusing it, just trying to break down what went wrong.

 

[Kev Inkline]

TLDR: The bugstravaganza seems to come from fancy high settings if your toaster can't take it. Or the classic internal AA problem, even Bethesda fucked that up.
I hesitate blaming pc players for blowing it up, but.... knowing those entitled shits today they probably tried to run it on super ultra deluxe on their 5 yo notebook and whine on twitter because they saw a bluescreen for the first time in their life.

There's another catch here that has me worried. Iwinski outright said that they developed the game to look great on PC and then retrofitted it to consoles, which proved much more difficult than expected. Now, as much as we might giggle at the consoleplebs finally playing second fiddle and getting a taste of their own medicine, it'll only reinforce the industry-wide practice of developing for console first. Strap in for more decline, boys.

Funny that retrofitting it to consoles includes the most retarded controls and UI I've seen in a modern game. Duh, even dwarf fortress is a paragon of usability and accessibility compared to this mess.

Want to change a grenade type amidst combat and don't want to go to inventory as it is cumbersome? Sure, press alt down to bring up the weapon wheel, use mouse scroll to find the grenade slot and cycle through types of grenades with 'q' and 'e'. Simple as. What were they thinking?

 

[Gargaune]

Funny that retrofitting it to consoles includes the most retarded controls and UI I've seen in a modern game. Duh, even dwarf fortress is a paragon of usability and accessibility compared to this mess.

Want to change a grenade type amidst combat and don't want to go to inventory as it is cumbersome? Sure, press alt down to bring up the weapon wheel, use mouse scroll to find the grenade slot and cycle through types of grenades with 'q' and 'e'. Simple as. What were they thinking?

Don't get me started, I just tried to unfuck the keybinds a bit last night. I wouldn't call it the worst in recent memory, it's no Baldur's Gate "3": Throne of Bathrooms at any rate, but there's definitely plenty that could've been done much, much better.

 

[typical user]

Someone said it here or on Reddit: if developers had to crunch for a year it meant the game was a year behind schedule. Like how fucked-up CTO or lead you have to be to be doing overhours for a fucking year? I understand a 1-month crunch when the game is about to go gold, to get Day 1 patch ready or to test servers, whatever, but when you have all the money from investors and you crunch people rather than hire more and better skilled and divide them on teams working on different features and then have someone responsible for integration? Ah, I am no developer but come on, a head-of-department doesn't need knowledge how to code more than he needs to know how underlying teams are doing, if they are reaching milestones. What the fuck they were doing? What did they expect? That people are blind and won't give a bad rep? This isn't just crunching to deliver a masterpiece like RDR2. This was crunching to release a demo with barely any gameplay.

I think I've explained this before, oh, maybe a hundred pages back, but that's not how it works. Staffing logistics aren't just a function of temporary resource requirements, since hiring people is expensive, time-consuming in training and subject to long-term growth plans under the influence of applicable legislation. Independent contractors, on the other hand, are more costly and harder to manage in the context of a large development. Additionally, timeframes do not scale linearly against the number of resources, there's only so many programmers who can work on the same curly bracket.

You'll say that a whole year (if your Reddit post is correct, and that's huge "if") doesn't count as "temporary resource requirements", but look back to what I wrote a few posts up, CDPR completely missed the mark on scoping out the outstanding work over 2020 as evidenced by the haphazard delays, that was their critical failure.

Basically, this story does not hinge on "just hire more people lol." Trust me, I'm a developer, we know everything. Next Friday I'll tell you about the best bridges for sale in Florida.

That's a good and perfectly valid point. I know there is a limit and eventually you hit the wall as bigger teams can actually slow down progress but you can clearly estimate if a team missed a milestone by 2 months then you can predict to an extent how big a delay is needed if there are 6 more to reach. That is 1-to-1 scenario and just by looking at a spreadsheet. But as a head-of-studio you should have team leaders delivering the feedback of their teams, the atmosphere their projections how much time they will need vs. the schedule etc. If members of your studio are saying the game in it's current scope without changing any features will be ready in 2022 when you have given the release date for 2020 then you done fucked it up. Even more so when you threw 4 years of pre-production into bin. I wonder what was discarded, protype systems like AI or combat mechanics? Or quests drafts, the structure of non-linear story listing all branches? Anyway having people do overtime for entire year is beyond retarded no matter the details.

God bless Crowbcat for his video, finally something retarded shills can't defend their precious "masterpiece" against

One shitbag from lowsodium subreddit said his video is just compilation of bugs. Missing ripple effects from shooting your gun, lack of AI are not bugs. Crowbcat did a great thing when he has shown SkillUp and other journos saying the game is living to the hype while they have Cyberpunk merch on the cameras.

Today I had a car half-sunk into ground (patch 1.06). I punched it with a katana and it started spazzing out like a crackhead without fix.

 

[Xeon]

I don't think I can fault the journos for their impressions that much without knowing their experience, I think they said in the video they played for 4-5 hours? unless they could freeroam as they like and not play an already well properad demo by CDPR, and they probably played it on a monster PC as well.

The ending for Crowbcat's video was brilliant, pretty funny.

 

[Paul_cz]

Crowbcat video is masterfully put together, as is always the case with him/them (No Man's Sky is still the masterpiece though).

But apart from the AI and lacking physics, it was not accurate representation of the game I played, since I haven't encountered vast majority of the issues shown. Of course, I only played on my decently high-end PC.

 

[DalekFlay]

No, I'd reply with the fact the UI is missing any sound effects or feedback from basic actions. This is not a finished game, and I'm stunned by the fact that people are still in denial over that. This is not normal, and it's not like your average Ubisoft or EA release. It's a very visible example of what happens when project management totally fails and there are no safeguards.

I never really noticed any sound issues with the UI honestly, but that aside... I think the debate here is between "unfinished" and "reduced in scope to get it out the door." I don't know where that line is, and I suspect the definitions there are subjective to a large degree, but we generally agree that the game lacks a lot of stuff a finished AAA game should have. It's obvious they went "oh shit we gotta get this out before people lose interest and the PS4 is done for" and acted accordingly.

I'm just saying the basic gameplay, the fundamental design philosophy and structure they went for, is exactly what I expected from the studio that made Witcher 3. That doesn't mean Witcher 3 wasn't better made, it just means this idea that "CDPR lost their mojo and staff and whoops they made this game" bounces off me, because this is exactly the type of game they made last time to universal acclaim. They just forgot the story part for their storyfaggotry.

 

[Zeriel]

For me, the line is at use item -> no sound effect, no pop-up, no animation, and "craft item, tied to entire skill tree, core part of game, zero sound effect or visual feedback". I could understand if this was some rare side activity, but it's basic stuff. You can't even tell you used an item in the inventory except by the split-second pause as the game logic calculates.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I didn't italicise "some" as a diss, just to indicate that not all prospective buyers had those expectations in terms of content.

reminder that if everyone just listened to me then nobody would be disappointed

Yeah, CP2020 has like 10 dedicated social skills(interrogation, persuasion, streetwise, etc.) CP2077 has none as far as i know.

Wait there's no social skill at all? Nothing even like basic ass speech ?

Why would there be? It's not an RPG.
Did GTA5 have social skills?

 

[Semiurge]

What people don't seem to understand is the importance of the spectacular and very public failure of Cyberpunk 2077.

Gaming is a big herd of sacred cows. There exists this unspoken rule that some companies/games are not to be criticized, least you incur the wrath of the gaming press or the rabid fanbase.

As an example, how many years did Bethesda get away with their overabundance of bugs, poor writing, lackluster gameplay and general lack of quality to their games? How many years have people just memed the glaring faults away and laughed at the bugs and called them a quirky part of the design?

And then came Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and suddenly the faults were so obvious and numerous that no amount of intimidation and journalist spin could make it go away. The number of detractors dwarfing the rabid, vocal fanbase to such an extent that it suddenly became socially acceptable to mock Fallout 4 and 76, and by extension Bethesda and all their previous games.

Now, after the success of Witcher 2, and especially Witcher 3, CDPR was the golden Polish darling of gaming - delivering the kind of "deep" and "mature" storytelling that would validate the worthless existence of game journalists and finally put an end to the endless mockery they experience from family, friends, random strangers and pretty much every other human on the planet.

The fact CDPR games were mechanically subpar, buggy and half-finished didn't matter, because they produced a "mature cinematic experience" (read: post-modernist, nihilist filth designed to make you feel like shit) and thus ascended to the endless pastures of gaming's sacred cows and were thus exempt from criticism. They were also the "good guy devs", the people's publisher, the ones that took a stance against greed, lies and deceit - thus becoming haloed sacred cows.

But then Soyberpunk 2077 came along, and it was an undeniably shit game on every level, such that not even journalists could make the bad press go away, and it revealed CDPR to the public as (and this is the most important part) just another shitty publisher, perfectly capable of resorting to the underhanded kind of shit EA, Ubisoft and Activision do on a regular basis.

Now that they have been unceremoniously deposited outside the pearly gates it's hip and cool to shit on them, the spell is broken and they will never again win back that implicit trust. Whenever they try to hype up a new product there will always be a large number of people that will remind the rest of the NPCs about Cyberpunk and the broken promises and scummy behavior. This will forever remain a corrosive poison eating at their success.

And if you don't believe that this will impact their bottom line - just look at what a string of failures have done to Ubisoft. Few companies go bust overnight due to a single failure, it's usually a death by a thousand cuts that sees them slowly crumble from within. CDPR is no Activision or EA, they don't have a reliable money printing IP, they're no Ubisoft with a large number of franchises they can fall back on, they're not even a Rockstar that actually can deliver on their promises.

They're just a collective of underpaid Polish labor monkeys led by inept cretins. 2077 was their one-in-a-million chance to make it into the big leagues, and they thoroughly fucked it up in the most public way imaginable.

Worst case scenario: they go out with a whimper, not a bang.

 

[Yosharian]

For me, the line is at use item -> no sound effect, no pop-up, no animation, and "craft item, tied to entire skill tree, core part of game, zero sound effect or visual feedback". I could understand if this was some rare side activity, but it's basic stuff. You can't even tell you used an item in the inventory except by the split-second pause as the game logic calculates.

I thought was going crazy the first time I experienced that. Like wait is there really no sound effect when you craft an item??? Lmao.

What a fucking shit game.

 

[Xeon]

Didn't a lot of people complain about you having to craft parts or something one by one instead of bulks? its probably a blessing crafting not having sounds. Listening to dings or whatever every time you craft worthless things would probably drive people insane.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Crowbcat video is masterfully put together, as is always the case with him/them (No Man's Sky is still the masterpiece though).

But apart from the AI and lacking physics, it was not accurate representation of the game I played, since I haven't encountered vast majority of the issues shown. Of course, I only played on my decently high-end PC.

All of the issues in that video were known issues with the PS4 version. It's not really reflective of the PC version in anyway. CDPR should not have released the game on PS4 and XBOX. Everyone knows that at this point. CDPR knows that at this point. Honestly, while I was all in on the backlash to this game on its release, now I'm sick of the backlash and am ready for a backlash to the backlash.

To me the game is comparable to CDPR's past work on most levels. It doesn't have near the level of story content of Witcher 3, but it definitely has the same amount, if not more, than Witcher 2. It has better combat than Witcher 2 and 3 and I even think it has greater variety in builds, although that admittedly doesn't say much. To me the game has three major issues that mark a severe decline from CDPR's previous work that they should legit be criticized for, some of which were clearly due to outright fuck-ups, while others were due to poor design decisions.

1. The open world NPC AI is so bad that it has to be an overt fuck up. It wreaks of being a last minute patch job where they gutted whatever system they were working on and replaced it with NPCs who were more or less entirely aesthetic. Yes, Witcher 3's NPCs weren't always brilliant. However, they didn't warp in and out when you looked around, and while most were filler content who were primarily there for aesthetic reasons, it employed enough scripted NPCs with set schedules in various locations that it gave things a bit more life.

2. The Gig system, which comprises the vast majority of the game's side quests, is a questionable design decision, yet seems intentional to me. They have little story content and are fairly formulaic, yet the way that they are designed seems so fundamental to how the game works, that I can't imagine that they were a last minute compromise. It seems like they were consciously planned from the start to work this way, something supported by the fact that while they have little story content, they nonetheless tend to have frequently elaborate, unique, levels with multiple paths for accomplishing objectives (or almost all do, I think I saw them re-use the same layout for a compound once or twice). They also tie into the over all Fixer quests and will occasionally yield one or two missions that are more involved and scripted. That said, the game relies WAY too heavily on the formulaic ones for content, so it's very possible that the GIGs were originally intended to be more elaborate, yet as the developers approached the deadline, they started creating a bunch more using the formula just to add content.

3. The lack of C&C in the main and side quests is the other issue, and I'm not sure if this was conscious or a fuck up. CP's scripted missions are as well-written as anything CDPR has done before, but they lack C&C, so they always feel on-rails. Even the gameplay in them is so limited, compared to the variety of ways you can tackle objectives in the Gigs, that they remind me of Half-Life 2 at times.

Beyond those 3 issues, I think the game largely matches or exceeds CDPR's past work.

 

[Axioms]

Given that the game was intended to have several more characters equivalent to Johnny, characters that exist and are highly fleshed out in the ttrpg lore, as well as more life path and relationship content, it makes sense that the CnC is weak. They cut like 70% of the main content and went all in on Keanu.