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

[Bliblablubb]

This game is already going the way of the Skyrim: Shit on all levels but with people desperately trying to "fix" it via mods.

Except Bethesda has better PR, they would never publicly appologize or admit anything.
They knew the most important rule: "Ignore every bug except those preventing consoles from running it!"
They knew what happens when it doesn't, CDPR experienced what happens when it doesn't.
While Beth managed sell themselves to MS to gain yuge amounts of moneyz and rereleases Skyrim every few years for more milkmoney, CDPR is scarred forever and lost yuge amounts of moneyz.

Sad.
But their own fault.

 

[Tyrr]

This game is already going the way of the Skyrim: Shit on all levels but with people desperately trying to "fix" it via mods.

Except Bethesda has better PR, they would never publicly appologize or admit anything.
They knew the most important rule: "Ignore every bug except those preventing consoles from running it!"
They knew what happens when it doesn't, CDPR experienced what happens when it doesn't.
While Beth managed sell themselves to MS to gain yuge amounts of moneyz and rereleases Skyrim every few years for more milkmoney, CDPR is scarred forever and lost yuge amounts of moneyz.

Sad.
But their own fault.

When Bethesda made Fallout 3, they went the 'Oblivion with guns' route. They knew what they could handle and made the (for them) smart move.
CDPR could also have gone the 'Witcher with guns' route, but decides to go WAY out of their league. I guess they developed some delusion of grandeur after being praised too much over the years.

 

[pickmeister]

When Bethesda made Fallout 3, they went the 'Oblivion with guns' route. They knew what they could handle and made the (for them) smart move.
CDPR could also have gone the 'Witcher with guns' route, but decides to go WAY out of their league. I guess they developed some delusion of grandeur after being praised too much over the years.

I still don't understand how did Bitcher 3, therefore CDPR, get so big. I mean, I liked it a lot because I read the books and played the previous ones and loved all of Gerwantino world. But why did it blow up so much on reddit? The most frequent critique was "The combat suck because it's not Dark Souls." and "I hate the game 'cause Gerald is a premade character and I can't LARP." so most people had no background like I did.

And that somehow led to this unsalvagable mess.

 

[Bliblablubb]

When Bethesda made Fallout 3, they went the 'Oblivion with guns' route. They knew what they could handle and made the (for them) smart move

The irony being: everyone just expected a cheapo "Oblivion with guns" total conversion mod. But they went the extra mile to implement an optional quasi turn based combat system and a classic xp/skill/perk system. They just built it around the tech they knew (and it's limitations) well. It was just their usual writing that sucked hard.
That aside, I gave them kudos for trying, and exploring the world was decent enough.

CDPR wanted faaar too much for this game. Now we have cinematic missions with an open empty open world part that feels pointless and tacked on. To quote Johnny Silverdick: "You had a plan, it fell flat. Now you're flat."
Sad.

 

[Bliblablubb]

I still don't understand how did Bitcher 3, therefore CDPR, get so big

Because it was dark 'n edgy without trying too hard. A welcome detour from all the happy elves wonderland games.
And most importantly, CDPR, like Beth, knew their limits.
No fancy AI needed. No pathfinding nightmare. No fast traveling speeds requiring fast streaming. Inside cities even slower to ensure everything is quickly loadable.

And when they suddently needed all that for CP77, they realized neither the consoles nor they could handle it. Making it look like it was done by people without prior experience at times. Pedestrians jumping towards my car when I get near cracks me up every time...
I bet the peasant AI is still the same as in TW3, but nobody there complained that the 2 NPCs in a village only just walk up and down the road all day.

 

[Tyrr]

I could be wrong, but I remember the NPC "AI" being better in W2 than W3.
(If you can call a detailed daily circle AI)

 

[Bliblablubb]

If this game the biggest flop in the gaming history?

Even surpassing Daikatana?

That's a good question actually.
Daikatana and Duck Nukem Forever were vaporware with massive dev times resulting in a mediocre product and the "death" of the studio. Making you wonder if it wasn't just a long con to begin with.
No Man's Sky failed to deliver it's promises, but I think it cleaned up decently in the end?
Mass Effect Andromederp and FO76 got a lot of flak, but the companies behind it were too big too fail to make an impact.

CP77 however managed to do what the others didn't: it got pulled from the PS store and Sony gave refunds. That alone is worth an entry in history books. Add their whiny appology video that will stay forever on the internets and investors might think twice before forking over Zloties.
Real question tho is how they pay dividends in the future. There is no new title on the horizon, just bugfixing and maybe DLCs. DLCs people will be reluctant to buy for a still semi-broken game...

 

[Bliblablubb]

I could be wrong, but I remember the NPC "AI" being better in W2 than W3.
(If you can call a detailed daily circle AI)

TBH I barely remember them at all. They were meant to blend in with the background foilage and they worked well in that role.
But in CP77, the real main character is supposed to be Nigh City with everyone and everything in it. Works well enough if the player is just zipping along, barely getting a glimpse, but if he stops to, you know, admire your beautiful city, just walking the same 10 m up and down won't cut it anymore. They need to at least walk a circle around the block, out of the players field of vison.
And that is some really basic design knowledge. Sad.

 

[Tyrr]

I could be wrong, but I remember the NPC "AI" being better in W2 than W3.
(If you can call a detailed daily circle AI)

TBH I barely remember them at all. They were meant to blend in with the background foilage and they worked well in that role.
But in CP77, the real main character is supposed to be Nigh City with everyone and everything in it. Works well enough if the player is just zipping along, barely getting a glimpse, but if he stops to, you know, admire your beautiful city, just walking the same 10 m up and down won't cut it anymore. They need to at least walk a circle around the block, out of the players field of vison.
And that is some really basic design knowledge. Sad.

NPCs in CP2077 despawn the moment they leave the players vision. Of course they don't even have the most basic routine. Everything in this game screams shortcut. Lazy development, thrown together in the hopes nobody will notice or care.
Same with the mirrors. The first time I saw a mirror in game, I thought it was a bad joke.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Oh another thing regarding the pedestrian AI: it seems to depend on the area and amount of NPCs present. When I was in the very sparsely populated Northside, I saw a whooping 2 of them. Crossing the street, running after a car honked. One went around the corner, the other went to a grill a had a smoke. That is as it should be.
Alas, that is Watson, which obviously got far more love, being the walled in "press demo area". Other ares did not get that treatment, just a "fill it up with loads of circlewalkers, players just drive by to visit PanAm's ass anyway."

Makes sense tho, most players probably stop touching gigs forever after clearing Watson anyways. I know I did.

 

[Gargaune]

No Man's Sky failed to deliver it's promises, but I think it cleaned up decently in the end?

No, it didn't, it's just dubious press and desperate fanboys screaming that "it's good now!" Don't believe their lies, No Man's Sky can never be "good" until it settles into its honest indie price bracket regardless of any other considerations. Right now, it's still more expensive than even the complete edition of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and therefore remains verified, 24-Karat Shit™.

CP77 however managed to do what the others didn't: it got pulled from the PS store and Sony gave refunds. That alone is worth an entry in history books.

All of which, coupled with the fact that Cyberpunk was performing just as poorly on Xbox without Microsoft giving a crap, might hint at a hidden beef there. Plenty have suggested that the reason Sony went apeshit on CD Projekt was precisely because the latter went ahead and offered refunds over Sony's head. Someone in this thread even speculated it might've been an attempt at a hostile takeover, but I dunno how much I'd entertain that notion. Either way, I don't put much stock in the idea that Sony pulled Cyberpunk because they were concerned about their customers' experience.

 

[Fedora Master]

This game is already going the way of the Skyrim: Shit on all levels but with people desperately trying to "fix" it via mods.

Except Bethesda has better PR, they would never publicly appologize or admit anything.
They knew the most important rule: "Ignore every bug except those preventing consoles from running it!"
They knew what happens when it doesn't, CDPR experienced what happens when it doesn't.
While Beth managed sell themselves to MS to gain yuge amounts of moneyz and rereleases Skyrim every few years for more milkmoney, CDPR is scarred forever and lost yuge amounts of moneyz.

Sad.
But their own fault.

When Bethesda made Fallout 3, they went the 'Oblivion with guns' route. They knew what they could handle and made the (for them) smart move.
CDPR could also have gone the 'Witcher with guns' route, but decides to go WAY out of their league. I guess they developed some delusion of grandeur after being praised too much over the years.

You could make the same argument regarding Bloodlines 2 but even Paradox, a company that has its head firmly up its own ass, were smart enough to see a disaster coming and just cancel the whole thing.

 

[Gargaune]

When Bethesda made Fallout 3, they went the 'Oblivion with guns' route. They knew what they could handle and made the (for them) smart move.
CDPR could also have gone the 'Witcher with guns' route, but decides to go WAY out of their league. I guess they developed some delusion of grandeur after being praised too much over the years.

I repeat myself but Cyberpunk is Witcher-with-Guns, that's the source of multiple issues. Narrative screwups aside, the problem isn't that CDPR strayed too far from TW3's design, it's that they didn't go far enough. CBP's concept needed a different approach to to a number of core design elements (levels, progression, itemisation etc.) and related technical requirements.

You could make the same argument regarding Bloodlines 2 but even Paradox, a company that has its head firmly up its own ass, were smart enough to see a disaster coming and just cancel the whole thing.

Wait, are you suggesting CDPR should've cancelled Cyberpunk?

 

[Fedora Master]

They spent seven years, at least 6 of which nothing got fucking done at all. The only options they had was cancel it and start over or try to sell the shit they managed to cobble together. The state of the final product wasn't some sort of "surprise" to them.

 

[Gargaune]

They spent seven years, at least 6 of which nothing got fucking done at all. The only options they had was cancel it and start over or try to sell the shit they managed to cobble together. The state of the final product wasn't some sort of "surprise" to them.

You don't "cancel" a project you've sunk seven years of funding into. Unless you're the government, and even then you make sure to blame the previous government. And after a year and a half of delays, further postponing was no longer an option (not that it'd have made a huge difference) so the only thing that was left was to put a bow on it and ship it to our dumb asses.

And let's get something else straight - Cyberpunk 2077 made a lot of money. It cashed in nearly 14 million copies in December 2020 and analysts speculate it'll have sold another 4 million by the end of this year. If we assume, I dunno, an average price of fifty bucks to account for regional pricing and seasonal discounts, that's close to a billion in gross revenues. It's all a damn sight shorter than the 30 million copies over 12 months analysts were predicting pre-release and even their revised 25 million post-launch figure, but I'd suspect it's not too far below CDPR's more conservative projections. On top of that, the game will likely sell another few million copies in 2022, as next-gen console adoption keeps getting higher and Cyberpunk's "next-gen" re-release lands.

Shareholders are fuming, to be sure, but market capitalisation isn't linearly correlated to sales performance. CD Projekt posts a consolidated net profit of some $280 million for 2020 and its stock price is down to around $40 from $80 a year ago today, whereas Twitter is up from $40 to $50 despite having never defecated a cent in profit. To put it simply, CD Projekt's shares didn't tank because Cyberpunk was a commercial disaster, they tanked just because it no longer looked like it was gonna be the financial jackpot investors thought it would be.

 

[Fedora Master]

Sales are completely irrelevant for this argument. The game sold on the false promise that it would be a finished product. It caused them no end of grief.

In an ideal world, CDPRs reputation would be ruined for years to come but we live in a world of Bethesdas and EAs and Biowares where quality isn't a factor and customers forget everything just in time for the next hyped up pile of shit.

 

[Gargaune]

Sales are completely irrelevant for this argument. The game sold on the false promise that it would be a finished product. It caused them no end of grief.

Is your fedora too tight? If you think releasing a buggy, mediocre game caused them "no end of grief", how do you think they'd be doing if they scrapped seven years of work and told their financiers to put in another hundred million or however much to start over? By December 2020, CDPR had no choice but to release it and weather the storm.

And no, Cyberpunk's problem isn't that it isn't "finished" either, another six months or even a year wouldn't have fundamentally improved it. The game's main problems fall back to bad assumptions in core design, not bugs or various halfarsed implementations. "Finishing" CBP the way it's currently designed would've just given us a more robust and polished, but ultimately still mediocre game. That's my recurring gripe in this discussion, that base design flaws get overshadowed by peripheral failures.

 

[Fedora Master]

Nobody said they should have scrapped the game right before its release. It should have been scrapped the moment it became obvious the whole thing would turn into a huge time and money sink... So about 2 years into "development". Just like PDX did with Bloodlines 2.

 

[Diggfinger]

Nothing mo' G'd Up than taking the bus

 

[Gargaune]

Nobody said they should have scrapped the game right before its release. It should have been scrapped the moment it became obvious the whole thing would turn into a huge time and money sink... So about 2 years into "development". Just like PDX did with Bloodlines 2.

Sorta, though even two years in is painfully late, you really wanna be in a position to assess the viability of your core design in preproduction or course-correct within the first year. Thing is, rumor has it Cyberpunk 2077 did suffer a massive refactor midway through development. It really does look like they just couldn't muster a proper vision for it and relied too much on the idea that if The Witcher 3 was great, The Witcher 3-with-Guns would suffice for Cyberpunk. It doesn't.

As for Bloodlines 2, how much of an utter shitshow must it have been to actually get cancelled after two years of work and a published release date? Man, to have been a fly on that wall...

 

[Wesp5]

Shareholders are fuming, to be sure, but market capitalisation isn't linearly correlated to sales performance.

I'm pretty sure the shareholders were the reason CPR released the game for the Christmas sale in the first place, so they have themselves to blame!

 

[Hobknobling]

Nobody said they should have scrapped the game right before its release. It should have been scrapped the moment it became obvious the whole thing would turn into a huge time and money sink... So about 2 years into "development". Just like PDX did with Bloodlines 2.

Sorta, though even two years in is painfully late, you really wanna be in a position to assess the viability of your core design in preproduction or course-correct within the first year. Thing is, rumor has it Cyberpunk 2077 did suffer a massive refactor midway through development. It really does look like they just couldn't muster a proper vision for it and relied too much on the idea that if The Witcher 3 was great, The Witcher 3-with-Guns would suffice for Cyberpunk. It doesn't.

As for Bloodlines 2, how much of an utter shitshow must it have been to actually get cancelled after two years of work and a published release date? Man, to have been a fly on that wall...

If I remember correctly, CP2077 was in development parallel with Witcher 3 for multiple years, so keeping the project alive might have been a financial backup plan if Witcher 3 went to shit. I haven't played the game but it looks much more like it mutated out of Witcher 2 tech when you see problems with basic features like spawning NPCs in an open world.

CDPRs perceived ability to polish their games got pretty over-hyped because so many people played their games years after their releases. Eurojank is eurojank. It is interesting to see what they can do with the dolled up version.

 

[lukaszek]

Nobody said they should have scrapped the game right before its release. It should have been scrapped the moment it became obvious the whole thing would turn into a huge time and money sink... So about 2 years into "development". Just like PDX did with Bloodlines 2.

Sorta, though even two years in is painfully late, you really wanna be in a position to assess the viability of your core design in preproduction or course-correct within the first year. Thing is, rumor has it Cyberpunk 2077 did suffer a massive refactor midway through development. It really does look like they just couldn't muster a proper vision for it and relied too much on the idea that if The Witcher 3 was great, The Witcher 3-with-Guns would suffice for Cyberpunk. It doesn't.

As for Bloodlines 2, how much of an utter shitshow must it have been to actually get cancelled after two years of work and a published release date? Man, to have been a fly on that wall...

If I remember correctly, CP2077 was in development parallel with Witcher 3 for multiple years, so keeping the project alive might have been a financial backup plan if Witcher 3 went to shit. I haven't played the game but it looks much more like it mutated out of Witcher 2 tech when you see problems with basic features like spawning NPCs in an open world.

CDPRs perceived ability to polish their games got pretty over-hyped because so many people played their games years after their releases. Eurojank is eurojank. It is interesting to see what they can do with the dolled up version.

it was running on w3, character was 3rd person but then one of the important guys with visions forced 1st person view claiming that cdpr will create new game and new engine fine

 

[Justicar]

Nobody said they should have scrapped the game right before its release. It should have been scrapped the moment it became obvious the whole thing would turn into a huge time and money sink... So about 2 years into "development". Just like PDX did with Bloodlines 2.

Sorta, though even two years in is painfully late, you really wanna be in a position to assess the viability of your core design in preproduction or course-correct within the first year. Thing is, rumor has it Cyberpunk 2077 did suffer a massive refactor midway through development. It really does look like they just couldn't muster a proper vision for it and relied too much on the idea that if The Witcher 3 was great, The Witcher 3-with-Guns would suffice for Cyberpunk. It doesn't.

As for Bloodlines 2, how much of an utter shitshow must it have been to actually get cancelled after two years of work and a published release date? Man, to have been a fly on that wall...

If I remember correctly, CP2077 was in development parallel with Witcher 3 for multiple years, so keeping the project alive might have been a financial backup plan if Witcher 3 went to shit. I haven't played the game but it looks much more like it mutated out of Witcher 2 tech when you see problems with basic features like spawning NPCs in an open world.

CDPRs perceived ability to polish their games got pretty over-hyped because so many people played their games years after their releases. Eurojank is eurojank. It is interesting to see what they can do with the dolled up version.

it was running on w3, character was 3rd person but then one of the important guys with visions forced 1st person view claiming that cdpr will create new game and new engine fine

Shooting in 3rd person would be trash at least with first person they made pretty fun gunplay, they should have just made dialouge scenes in 3rd person cutscenes so everyone would be satisfied.

 

[ADL]

Can you imagine how shitty the game would have been in third person even if it was the RPG everyone hoped it would be? Using the mantis blades to cling on walls, stealth, hacking, the gunplay with the inevitable cover system... Fuck that.

Witcher 4 should be a Kingdom Come Deliverance-style immersive sim RPG too. Third person perspective in RPGs is decline. First person or isometric or go home. Piranha Bytes should make the jump too.