This is what I don’t get. You can always wait until the game is up to your standards. The game will probably be on sale too.
People just want to be outraged and Schreier is happy to fuel the fire. Does he write anything positive?
Personally, I love the game and have ran into minimal bugs on Series S. One crash on my One X on launch day. I’ve had to reload an auto save twice. For context, Fallout 4 crashed on me countless times almost two years after release.
Meh. As usual, he doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Schreier is honestly the worst kind of reactionary, clickbait, fan the flames “journalist”. It’s a sad state of affairs when he’s regarded as the best in the industry.
Having said that, I still cannot believe that CDPR thought it was the right call to release the game in the condition it’s in. There’s great stuff in there, no doubt about it, but it’s clearly, painfully unfinished. They shouldn’t have released it. They should’ve probably dropped the Xbox One/PS4 versions & announced, long ago, that it was coming next gen only. Hopefully the people responsible learn a hard lesson & do better in the future.
That’s very definitive with no knowledge. We’ve seen for example Halo Infinite delayed by a year. And clearly would have launched in a similar mess to CP. MS have deep pockets as a publisher to eat a years delay but do CDPR - especially for a game already delayed a lot?
It sounds to me more like you aren’t interested in a discussion but just a witch hunt. Cyberpunk is still the best game I’ve played in a decade. That doesn’t take away from its issues at all - but I prefer to see balance rather than just screaming about greed and whatever with no evidence. Hatchet jobs are never good.
What exactly are you upset about here? o.0
Saying ‘we will figure it out as we work through the challenges’ or whatever is not admitting some evil plan to do anything nefarious. It’s literally how all ambitious games are developed.
As someone who actually follows game dev, I’m genuinely shocked at the notion that ppl cling to a 2018 demo and rail against the game for missing small elements of it years later. That is the industry norm! Complex games always go through transformations over several yrs of dev! CDPR showed off the final game complete with its game loop and finalized tech/graphics/UI/etc last summer in a LOT more detail than nearly any other game gets pre-release.
What did they lie about specifically? I keep seeing ppl claim they lied about all manner of stuff, but when pressed they list a bunch of stuff that is actually design choices that have merit (changing from TP cutscenes to FP) or stuff that they never actually claimed was in the game (folks thinking it was always gonna have GTA-levels of systems integration among NPC’s). Cutting elements is bog standard game dev. Literally every single game you’ve ever played most likely endured cutting content. LOTS of games have vertical slice demos that end up having stuff changed or cut for retail for a variety of reasons, usually good reasons.
@Zappy5 is spot on here. It’s spinning the context around these decisions to be menacing when the vast majority of things noted are not abnormal at all. That doesn’t excuse the crunch culture btw, but it does highlight how much Schreier is willing to twist the context to one side to get attention for himself with sensationalist pieces. He makes a living doing exactly that and sells books based on it too.
You can see some of this spin right outta the gate when he talked about how the game was supposedly ‘so broken’ that Sony pulled it. That was NOT why Sony pulled the game though. They pulled it because they don’t have a modern refund mechanism and CDPR told ppl they can get refunds through Sony. Schreier also claims that MS merely slapped a warning label, as if they didn’t do anything else (which is false). He is framing things from a very hyperbolic perspective, as he typically does for these kinda stories. He’s made a career around it.
You say the game ‘failed to run’ on current gen…that just ain’t true! The game ran no worse than GTA5 did on PS3 and while that is terrible it is very far from ‘literally unplayable’ rhetoric ppl toss around w/o any first hand experience themselves. You can find TONS of ppl playing current gen and loving it. We all likely have ppl on our own friends list doing that RIGHT NOW. Those current gen versions post-patches now run 25-30 fps typically, which is the norm for ambitious games on that hardware. But yet, we still have ppl pushing the narrative that it is ‘unplayable’. Granted, on PS4/PS5 it crashed constantly but specifically wrt the Xbox version it is not so far below industry norms that it deserves the rhetoric we’ve seen since release.
There are entire cottage industries popping up online built around trashing this game and that is something that gamers should find reprehensible and pathetic. Honestly there isn’t anything even new or surprising at all in this piece. It’s bascially saying the game was too ambitious, they had to pare a few things back as per usual game dev, as the team grew it was challenging and management has unrealistic timelines (hence stuff got cut…again, this is USUAL! it is WHY stuff gets cut all the time!), and they hoped the day 1 patch could fix it but it was too complex to get all the bugs in that patch so further patches were necessary. Hell Schreier barely even mentions the elephant in the room (COVID)!
Like, if they had shown a buncha stuff in the summer showcases that was not in the final game, I’d agree wholeheartedly with the ‘they lied!’ position, but that just ain’t the case. Everyone was thrilled when they showed that footage and eager to play what was being shown off at the time! It’s only ad hoc that ppl decided since trashing it was so popular online that suddenly we are gonna pretend cut content was unique to CDPR or something.
They literally lied about the state of the game on base consoles saying it ran fine and held back footage as much as they could to not affect preorders and MC scores. That is worse than cutting features.
The promised next gen update might as well be another year out too cause they gotta fix the game now and makeup for this fiasco.
The game is great and is already my most played game from 2020 and possibly last gen too 
but it is a little disappointing to think that it could’ve been so much better with a year delay to late 2021 or mid 2022 and had they canceled the last gen versions, still I love CDPR and I’m sure they’ll come back from this, no doubt their next game will be amazing.
They never said it ran fine. They said it “ran surprisingly well” on last gen consoles.
They did hide the console footage though, during the review window, only allowing reviewers to show officially released PC footage. That was suspicious as all hell at the time &, with hindsight, a very disappointing move.
They said it was bad on current gen when announcing the delay to Dec, then said it was surprisingly good given the scope of the game. That’s fair to criticize, but the game even at launch was nowhere near ‘unplayable’ the way ppl pretend it was. I think one cold plausibly describe a game running 20fps in its rougher spots but spending the vast majority of its time 25-30fps (at launch, patches improved this a ton since then) as running surprisingly well given the scope (which is immense). They never said it ran at 30fps locked or anything like that. I’d also agree that it was misleading at best, but let’s not pretend it was way worse than it was in the real world just to get outraged.
Also, they didn’t artificially hold back footage. They weren’t ready with the day 1 patch on current gen until the 8th and they sent out codes for review that day. They SHOWED us how the game looked/ran on X1X/Pro weeks before too.
They explained this already too. And they did show current gen versions before that (just not base versions). The reason was due to the day 1 patch not being ready for base current gen consoles until the 8th. It would be stupid for them to release review codes or footage of something they know for sure doesn’t reflect the state of the game ppl will play.
Yeah I know what the official explanation is, I watched the apology video. I’m sceptical, at best.
Bottom line is, reviewers were not allowed to use their own footage in their review. Once we played the game, we found out why.
Surprisingly well is a stretch. It was unacceptable and there is no defending it or we wouldn’t be having this discussion a month later. They lied about the state of the game on the consoles they promised on and tried to hide it until they couldn’t no more and they got caught. It is what it is.
Lmfaoooooooo the 2018 demo was fucking fake, jfc what’s wrong with these guys
And before I’m bombarded with more twisted apologia from some folks here, I enjoyed the game personally (most played game this past year easily) but the truth is, the facade of consumer friendliness of this company, of this industry darling that cannot do wrong is slowly starting to wear off and I’m all for it.
You’ll still have people saying Jason has an agenda or is bias for reporting what we all can see. There’s no excuse for the higher ups at CD projekt.
Like if people enjoyed the game in its current state thats fine but lets not act like the game was all kumbaya.
I dont get how 1 game propelled these people in rep over studios like Bethesda, Naughty Dog, Santa Monica and even Rockstar.
I dont know what to say. I enjoyed the hell out of the game.
I still do, about half way through atm I’d guesstimate.
Why would you be skeptical? If you spent yrs on a game and it was coming in super hot wrt patches and whatnot you wouldn’t want reviewers to score something that wasn’t reflective of what customers are actually gonna play either. That’s also why reviewers could not use their own footage.
Frankly, that’s the fault of the reviewers imho. Game reviewers should not expect to have free reign of showing off unfinished games when that state of the game isn’t reflecting the actual customer experiences. Every one of those publications had the ethical options to just wait for the day 1 patch and then capture their own footage and include it in their reviews after launch. Their job is not to rush out reviews, their job is is to offer insight that reflects the product that their audiences will actually be playing. The rush to have reviews out pre-release or right at midnight of release is for clicks and nothing more.
Your theory here only works if the reviews for all versions were horrible…but the PC version reviewed VERY very well, debunking your theory.
Fake how? When the game won’t ship for yrs down the road, you should know that it can and will likely go thru big changes. They make disclaimers saying so for every single one of these stage demos. How new to game development are you guys?! Like…this is the norm! It’s why most don’t do vertical slices anymore and why those disclaimers appear on ALL games. TLoU2 had notable changes to it too. As did Halo 2, as did tons of games. This game isn’t an anomaly.
Surprisingly well for the type of game it is…that was the context of the statement. And it’s not a stretch at all. There are other games running with similar performance that never got this backlash. There are other explanations that don’t require huge leaps in logic you are making here. You guys aren’t even engaging with any pts that don’t reinforce what you want to believe. There are other explanations beyond some evil foul play narrative and Occam’s Razor suggests those are much more probable than how you frame things.
It is not hard to see what happened. Game was too ambitious, they had to cut some stuff like every other game in existence does during dev, not enough was cut and it was too complex for the day 1 patch to fix performance issues, hence they wanted to hold off showing the game prematurely on current gen. No leaps in logic needed here. They showed us the game running on PC and current gen Pro models well before release. They showed off the final game’s game loop and what it had to offer and did so transparently and in detail months ahead of launch and nobody complained. They didn’t want to showcase a version without the day 1 patch as that doesn’t at all reflect the product gamers are actually playing on day 1.
Does that mean things are rosy? No, of course not. It launched with half a dozen problem spots that ran super bad and patches weeks out from launch fixed them. They made mistakes wrt how to manage all the complexity. It happens. And when it does, in time it improves and gets fixed. You seem stuck in the narrative about how it launched while ignoring what it actually played like back then and today.
Also, please appreciate that there were no good options for them here. Delaying it would invite the outrage of all console gamers on both current and next gen machines. It would also invite mountains of unfair criticism wrt their crunch culture (which IS problematic, but ya shouldn’t harangue them twice for the same issue). They likely thought the current gen versions could perform ‘ok’ with the day 1 patch and by the time they realized it was worse than they thought it woulda been literally 2 days before launch, so another delay was not an option.
It genuinely seems as if ppl stop using basic logic when complaining about this game. Like, you can have a dev team make super ambitious gambles with game design and tech integration that just don’t pan out as well as intended without it suggesting some nefarious plot to outright mislead customers with some evil multi-year marketing campaign. And when devs make those gambles and things don’t go as hoped, they are often left with nothing but ‘bad’ options to choose from for how to proceed. It’s stupid to take the view that because things turned out ‘bad’ it must be due to some betrayal to their fanbase or something.
I mean they can show whatever they want before the game releases showing best case scenarios and all that but when the game released it was in an unplayable state for a majority of the 175 million console owners (Pro and Xbox One X owners niche) and no day 1 patch saved. If that was not true then why a month later we have been getting hotfixes and promises to fix the game, free dlc to make up for it and news articles saying the game wasnt ready from people that were in the project? They deliberately released a product that was broken on the target plaforms, hid it in the review process and they got caught and are catching well deserved flack. I cant believe there are people defending this. If 343 dropped a game that runs at 15fps, with terrible textures and just cant run at all on base consoles then you are damn sure people would complain even if it was a 92 MC also.
You can enjoy your time with the game but that doesnt change the reality about it.