But as you said, they made bank, and since they were such a small studio they could have all comfortably retired from the industry, yet they decided to to stick to their guns. I'm not saying they didn't get lucky or that they didn't have help in hyping up their game, just that they could have taken the easy way out, but didn't.
I'm highly suspicious of this "Hello Games redemption" spin that's been making the rounds in the past year. The entire NMS project was one giant Chris Roberts .jpg made flesh, I don't see how you "redeem" that with some bugfixes and a trading interface or whatever, and drawing parallels with Cyberpunk reeks of NMS apologia. I'll restate my position that in CDPR's case, their main design fault was failing to recognise the aspects of their Witcher 3 formula which wouldn't translate well to their Cyberpunk concept, but that failed attempt to reinterpret a successful past design into "Witcher 3 with guns" does not belong in the same category as "you can do anything (
as long as it's landing, mining and taking off)."
Just because CDPR has a higher overhead than the NMS devs is no excuse - unlike them this wasn't their first big game, yet they deliberately kept overpromising and hyping the game up right up until the day of release.
This is the bit I'm not willing to let go, and it's an academic point for me, since I steered right clear of the Purchase button long before its release - No Man's Sky wasn't Hello Games' "first big game" either, because it wasn't a "big" game to begin with it. They just told you it was - they told you in the press features and they told you in their price tag.
And this is what I view as HG's main failure (strictly in the critical sense), that they priced themselves in the AAA segment. In fact, I think I remember Murray replying to a pre-release query on pricing, arguing that they'd "worked on the game for 5 years", meaning as long as AAA studio so of course they should be charging AAA prices. Now, I'd already jettisoned any interest in the game once I'd seen the £40 tag at the bottom of a Eurogamer puff piece, but even a child will see the obvious fallacy in comparing a dozen people working for five years to a small army doing the same in that price bracket. So I can either believe that the people involved were so deluded they didn't understand the
essential marketing value of a price sticker, or that they knew full well that they weren't selling that caliber of experience but decided to pitch it that way regardless.
None of this is applicable to Cyberpunk 2077. You'll see in this thread that I haven't shied away from criticising its numerous flaws in both design and execution, but the game's production scope is appropriate to its market segment. Much of the discussion is that if X had been better or if there had been more of Y, CBP could've been a solid AAA Action-Adventure RPG, and this is my biggest disappointment, that it's wasted potential. Not the case with No Man's Sky because there is no alternate universe, no permutation of features and engineering that would've justified its commercial classification - it was a $25 indie darling hyped up to a $60 milestone ripoff.
That's not "Reddit whining", that's literally stuff that CDPR promised was going to be in the game, but wasn't. Need I remind you of that whole intro video montage showing your PC doing all kinds of cool stuff that they used to purposely mislead people into thinking was actual things you could do in the game?
This isn't an issue of people building up a game in their heads that never existed, this was CDPR deliberately lying about the content available in the game and marketing it is a futuristic GTA V (at least in the sense of available side activities) and repeatedly hyping up Night City as a living and breathing city, and this when the game somehow still lags behind GTA III in the simulation aspect.
Actually, please, I could use a reminder but be mindful of dates. I remember various features being touted that subsequently got cut, but that's business as usual for videogames, the only unusual thing about Cyberpunk was the protracted development
and marketing period, as a result of mismanagement. I know stuff like random ambushes, apartments, racing, were all advertised at some point, but I'm under the impression that the marketing materials
close to release, like in the last year or months up to launch, were pretty accurate to the
quantity of features available. Further, I think there's more than enough content in Cyberpunk, just that the quality of the experience suffers from bad design choices.
This point is vaguely reminding me of Bioshock - disgruntled System Shock fans were calling for Levine's head on a pike, but I'd merely followed the promotional materials up to release and the game turned out to be roughly what I expected.
