How did we get here?
Me as a patient gamer: “I dont understand the problem.”
Same. I’m still a little leery. Think I’ll give it another few months to settle down.
I bought it at launch, and on PS4 it was actually an unplayable mess.
I’ve since gotten a PS4 pro, and still haven’t loaded it up again.
Pretty sure I’ll get a PS5 this year, so I’m thinking of waiting till the to play it.
With large games like this, I know I’m going to sink a lot of time into my first lay through, figure why not wait until I can do it right.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
you have a better experience for half the price or less.
And there are no downsides!
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
- It was straight up broken for many console players.
- Some PC players had performance issues.
- For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
- Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn’t - it’s GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
I mean it WAS actually a broken mess from what I saw.
Im saying I always buy games on a deep sale well after it has been released so Im not particularly impacted.
Yeah, my point was it wasn’t a broken mess (except on last Gen consoles), but the gaming community blew its flaws out of proportion.
The game you’re playing as a patient gamer is close to the original with some polish.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
I did play it at release. CP77 isn’t very openworld, yet I had very few bugs in Skyrim on 360.
It was such a mess that Sony removed it from the PlayStation store and gave out refunds.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Yes, I explicitly acknowledged that the last Gen console criticism was warranted.
Lot of missing features and loads of bugs. It just wasn’t what they hyped it up to be
I can hold out until it’s $19.99 – this is normal for me.
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.I bought a used PS4 copy of No Man’s Sky for 5$ before the Next update came out.
Wisdom of the ancients!
One - two years is a mere blink in the life of a patient gamer. I’m patient. I can wait.
Massive L for even considerimg giving them any money at all.
One of the few games I don’t regret buying before release was Baldur’s Gate 3 but that’s an anomaly. Most games I’m happy to wait a year or more when it’s in better shape.
It’s funny that you mention Baldur’s Gate 3 because the game is blatantly unfinished. Act 1&2 are pretty much 9-10/10 but Act 3 is like a 6/10 at best. I’m surprised it gets a pass where Cyberpunk didn’t because in my experience they are equally as buggy. Because of my beefy PC and the scope of the games I think Cyberpunk may have even had less bugs than I’ve had in BG3. And I played it on release.
In BG3 I have quests breaking, characters not showing up where they should, continuity issues, obvious cut content, etc. I just gave up halfway through Act 3 and started a new playthrough instead because I adore the first half of the game and it makes the latter half that much more disappointing by contrast.
I agree completely. I’m even very forgiving when it comes to bugs and performance - especially when it’s a studio I trust will address them - but the huge swaths of obviously cut content combined with the way the story wraps up really gets to me and left me massively disappointed. I too still love the game for the gameplay and Act 1 and 2, but it really didn’t stick the landing in my opinion.
Even just things like the reactivity of your companions stands out; in Act 1 you could barely sneeze without everyone at camp chiming in with a comment about what just happened while in Act 3 you’ll do massively impactful things in both main story and companion quests and be greeted by the standard “Well met” or “hello soldier” at camp.
And that’s not getting into whatever scraps of the stated 17k different endings actually ended up not getting cut or the sorry state or the epilogues. Not even all companions get one!
You get “Larianed” a lot in BG3 just like you did in DOS2, plenty of inconsistencies, annoying pathing and quirks that make you wonder if they even played their own game before releasing it. But to put it in the same vein as cyberpunk 2077 is kind of disgusting. CDPR completely lied about the product, it barely ran on most PCs and didn’t even function on consoles.
BG3 while far from perfect, is much more of a game than cp2077 will probably ever be and Larian are firing out patches left and right at the moment while CDPR are still forbidding reviewers to even use their own game footage.
Baldurs Gate 3 will go down as one of the greats. Cyberpunk 2077 will be forgotton about.
I am talking strictly on the basis of bugs/incompleteness not the overall quality/scope of the games. But also “it barely ran on PCs” neither did Act 3. I have a 7950X and I still drop down to 40fps in some places even after the patches. People with say a 3600X were barely scraping 30. If we’re talking about the trend of games being unfinished or buggy on launch then BG3 deserves to be called out for the same.
On just bugs I still disagree that it’s anywhere near cp2077, but yeah there is a trend of games being buggy on launch and that defo has to be called out, especially when it’s bugs that most people come across that are not even niche or very specific. Performance in act 3 still has a long way to go yeah, luckily it’s not a fast paced game or a… shooter, so it’s not the end of the world, but not very pleasant either.
I’m surprised I don’t hear more people talk about this, maybe because they seemed to strategically handle bugs and content more thoroughly in the early game so that a lot of players would gush about that and be more forgiving by the time they got to act 3, along with everyone who didn’t even make it that far and only praised it online instead.
Starfield gets dragged through the mud for both deserved and undeserved reasons, almost universally without nuance, and BG3 gets blanket praise and acclaim, almost universally without nuance, and then I see this comment thread where there are apparently some serious issues grouped within a specific portion of the game and I’m not sure if that’s better or not.
Part of it is the game just being so huge. Most people aren’t even going to hit Act 3 until 50-60 hours in which is already much longer than most other games. So you’ve already formed your opinion of the game by the time you hit the less polished part.
And to be fair, those first 50-60 hours are pretty great. (Minus some gripes with things like pathing and inventory management) If the game just straight up ended with Act 2 I would be completely satisfied. I didn’t even mention this because I wanted to focus on the bugs but even narrative, pacing, and quest design in Act 3 is just so rough compared to the other two. It almost feels like a different game or a different developer. The quality drop is that drastic IMO.
I am worried that other studios might look at this and realize they can just front-load the best content and all the polish in the first section and neglect the rest to fix later. It sets a bad precedent.
Indeed, that’s the worry. It sometimes seems like AAA game development is learning just how far you can push the average gamer and still get good word of mouth online by way of leaving choice aspects incomplete and compromised
Worry now about front loading?
MMOs have been front loading the best content since at least Conan. Remember that one, the first zone had amazing quests and voice acting that the rest of the game didn’t.
I agree. I have had major show-stopping bugs with main story quests in Act 3 and more crashes on the PS5 than I have experienced in any game by a huge margin. I love the game but it has been buggier than CP2077 for me as well.
Cyberpunk for me was not as buggy as for my friends. I find that a lot of the games I play on release aren’t as buggy for whatever reason. It could be my AMD setup. It could be that I’m on Linux and use Proton or sheer goddamn luck. Callisto Protocol was fine for me but I’ve seen so many videos of the game running terribly and some crazy bugs.
The biggest problem with Cyberpunk was the performance. It ran horribly. The bugs were just the icing. My issues with Cyberpunk was that it felt hollow and lifeless. I loved everything about it but it just didn’t feel like it had a soul.
My PC wasn’t as beefy as it is now when Cyberpunk released so I felt that pain. I’m still on Act 1 on BG3 (because I insist on exploring everywhere) but I see that it has a huge amount of polish put into it. It makes sense that the earlier parts got more attention because that’s what the majority of the players will experience. At the rate I’m going, Act 3 will be in great shape.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is great at story and choices, which I think is where a lot of praise comes from. But it has a lot of really questionable issues with smaller mechanics.
The one I’m hating the most is how NPCs react to many summons and wild shape. Having a wild shaped party member makes most NPCs run away screaming, which is very painful in the NPC heavy areas of act 3 and basically discouraged you from even using wild shape or summon elemental, even though those are both incredibly powerful. You can dismiss the summon/wild shape, but it uses resources, so it sucks to do so. People have reported the bug for months but it doesn’t seem on the devs radar (they purposefully made NPCs run away – it’s a “feature”).
And just the other day, I discovered weirdness with warlock spell slots. Something about having used an elixer that gives me an extra spell slot (and then having consumed the spell slot) was preventing me from casting certain warlock spells (I think those of the spell slot’s level) because it claimed it needed that spell slot, even though I had higher level warlock spell slots. So a bunch of my spells couldn’t be used! When I searched, I found many reports about similar issues when people multi classed.
I maybe be wrong but I think they just fixed the NPCs running away in the latest patch. One of the patch notes is, “NPCs will no longer run away from anything but the Dark Urge Slayer form to improve interactivity and flow.” I’m not sure if that is referring to Dark Urge only or if that means they exclusively run away from that one form and now all other summons are fair game. But I haven’t had time to jump back into the game to try it yet.
There is actually a quest where you need to escort an NPC and when we got to the boss the NPC cowers in fear and tries to run away. But because I had an elemental summoned he would run towards the boss and instantly die. At first I just thought that was how it was supposed to be but after defeating the boss 3 times I thought it was way too hard to keep the NPC alive and it didn’t really make any sense for him to run straight in after dialogue saying he doesn’t want to go in there. The quest/dialogue also acted like he was still alive so it’s as if the developers never even planned for the possibility of him dying in that area. On my 4th attempt I moved the elemental in front of the door and sure enough he ran the opposite direction and stood in the corner he was supposed to, safe from the fight.
Yes! Can confirm it’s fixed. It’s great and revitalized my interest in using certain characters. I had almost sworn off some characters because of the bug and now they’re back on the menu.
Druids are insane. Owlbear does utter bonkers damage. Far beyond what I could do with any other character (I can’t tell if that means I built my other classes wrong). Only downside is that druids feel super limited. Usually to just melee attacks with no items and most equipment doesn’t even do anything (there’s little reason to ever purposefully revert to your original form, since you’d just eat a wild shape charge).
I love BG3, but agree that it deserves some criticism for act 3 bugginess. Just remember Bethesda basically forced them to release a month early when they announced starfield was coming out on the same weekend.
Even with BG3, act 3 of the game is in much better shape than it launched with.
And their history of making “definitive” editions is looming a year or two down the road.
Oddly, as is their gameplay style of act 3 being the buggiest and least directed along with artificial difficulty of grouping the party in a tight clump via cutscene before the hard fights.
Still an utterly fantastic game despite those minor gripes.
Any game that has to release endings in patches means it wasn’t released as a complete product. BG3 is great, but it is so hypocritical that other games get dragged through mud for bad launches, but BG3 is getting nothing but praise despite releasing incomplete and full of bugs. I can forgive some stuff, but this hypocrisy and inconsistentcy in the gaming community bothers me to no end.
This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
Features that had to be cut because they lack the time to implement it, so basically “large scope games take too long to make”.
One feature was also removed because of player feedback, so the issue there is talking about features before they were tested. This issue stems from their lack of PR expertise, but it means they weren’t lying when they said it.
Except weren’t they still promoting those features at launch? And they had taken preorders before review embargoes were lifted.
Both No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk both had dishonest marketing and significant bugs. Call me crazy, but if a game isn’t ready to launch, it shouldn’t launch. The developer sets the launch date, and if they didn’t give themselves enough time, it’s not reasonable to ask the people who have paid for he thing as advertised to wait because they couldn’t deliver the features as promised.
It had seven years of development before it’s initial broken release.
That’s not as long as you’d think anymore, it’s why the bigger studios have massive teams working on multiple games at the same time
It might not be the best move to hype and sell it to such degree that seven years of development time is not enough. Got too ambitious I guess.
its long enough to not have police or cars in races magically teleport behind you every time you look away.
Literally. Gamers be like
“No more crunch culture! Take your time and release when it’s ready!”
also
“Why do games take so long??”
I mean ubisoft had the problem with all their games. Wait a year before buying a ubi game. It will be fixed and half price
yes yes, its the awful customers fault for wanting a product they’ve been lied to about.
God damn big bad evil customers!
Jesus fucking christ, the amount of corpo white knighting these big games get…
This revisionism is quite tiring but I guess that the development companies are counting on it.
The problem with Cyberpunk was not “just bugs” but a 40 minutes video that tells lots of lies and was clearly stated as “fake” to drive up the hype for it.
What you see today was shown as if “ready” 4 years ago. And today we still can’t see the hacking as shown in that video.
On top of that there are all the design decision that are simply terrible but no amount of patches will fix, like the looter shooter approach to loot, levels on enemies, etc etc.
Overall, it’s not a matter of “realistic expectations”. We were lied to and that’s just it.
Agreed on all points.
And sadly its becoming a practice now.
Starfield is the latest example, While not as crashy/ buggy as Cyberpunk was… You can see the lack of finish, the amputated systems, etc etc, that scream that it is a half finished mess, just like Cyberpunk, and was shoved out the door way too early, just like Cyberpunk.
It would not be if most would stop buying pre-orders. However I am so far behind on my gaming library that I just use it to my advantage and wait.
You’re not buying a triple A game anymore. You’re buying the idea of the game they want to sell you, and hoping they deliver.
It’s just an expensive early access.
They just added driving combat, which was in the launch trailer.
Cyberpunk is the
soulsole reason I don’t preorder games anymore. Hype be damned.soul reason
*sole
Ha, yes. Thanks for the correction.
The Australia tax is why I don’t buy games at all, much less pre-pay for the ones I might want.
Hype is literally the only thing you miss out on by not playing games on release. If you get used to existing 3 years behind the release schedule, your gaming experience is vastly improved.
With realistic expectations, the game has always been a good experience, imo of course. I did not follow any coverage of the game until after release, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect. I’m not excusing their shortcomings, but I feel like the community leaned hard into the “bad game circlejerk” as soon as it came out. I played once at release and got the worst ending. After edgerunners, I played it through three times, the last of which on very hard and with all the endings earned.
I enjoyed it! The 2.0 update is an interesting shakeup. I’m playing through a 4th time and having a good time
I’m assuming you didn’t have a Playstation.
I do and aside from one serious bug that made me start over I had a good time with it, I think summer 2020. I didn’t finish my first playthrough and am waiting for it to install so I can start #2.
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I did get all the hype but after a lifetime of experience working in live performance marketing and software marketing, my position is that all marketing is a lie, and with limited experience in journalistic criticism, that too is as subjective as whether you prefer chocolate or strawberry ice cream.
in the end you experience something — regardless of the overall quality, some parts are better than others. And that’s it. That’s experience. Sometimes you love it, sometimes you don’t. Your fave is someone else’s least and vice versa.
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Couldn’t agree more!
If I’m excited for a game, I try to make a point of not looking at the hype. Seems like the mainstream coverage has three phases:
- Hype
- Bad game circlejerk
- Retrospective (it was actually good)
Nice to know that other people have had similar experiences!
That’s wanted by the marketing team tho. Hype creates profit, regardless how shit your product is. There is a reason why the Diablo 4 Facebook ad says “the fastest selling ARPG ever” instead of something tangently related to gameplay. It’s banking on hype sales, product comes second. They need to rake in quick profits to appease their shareholders.
Social media has conditioned people into swarm thinking and instant gratification instead of introspection and reflected decisions. Nobody gives a fuck about long-term consequences anymore. It’s sickening.
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I never played it but wasn’t the game still a buggy mess weeks, if not months after release?
Going by the journalistic coverage of the game, yes. If you played on an XB1 or PS4, yes. I’m fortunate to have played it on a competent (not insane) PC and had little to no issues. It wasn’t bug-free, but the issues I encountered were minor and didn’t really bog down the experience tbh
For the I don’t know how many times… I was enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. It wasn’t BG3 quality but it was OK.
They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.
That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.
So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.
Okay, but you being able to eek out fun from it doesnt fundamentally change the fact that it was a buggy, broken, amputated mess that was released 2 years too early.
Increasing complexity, tighter deadlines, demand for highwr profit margins, decrease in education quality. Theres a lot of reasons and not all of them are necessarily bad. Its good that we can simulate what we can. I think the profit motive is just starting to show its ruinous powers as shareholders demand more and more.
Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.
This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.
I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕
Yup, I re-downloaded and started a new campaign this week, and I’m a little disappointed. All the prompts are controller prompts, I can’t rebind several of the actions, I can’t crouch or dodge, the game crashed 5 times in 2 hours last night, the FPS takes a dip sometimes between ‘scenes’ in the story, DLSS kept resetting when I was benchmarking, etc.
On the plus, the game still looks amazing, the story is still S-tier in my opinion, Judy is still Judy (I simp for Judy like it’s going out of style and you can’t stop me), the driving combat is a good addition, and the cop fights are good. I don’t regret downloading it right now, but I will be putting it down for a couple of weeks, and hopefully they’ll fix some of the nagging bugs
The only way the industry will learn is to simply not buy any if the shitty games. Plenty of other games out there that are worth it.
Like games that came out three years before!
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that’s not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn’t be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur’s Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It’s straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it’s less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don’t think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
A year for the mod kit? Wow
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
