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Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received,” CDPR dev says

Cyberpunk 2077 faced a tough reception at launch, but with the Phantom Liberty DLC nearing launch, one CDPR dev feels the RPG was better than history records.

…uh, no. It was a hot mess at launch.

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Nevertheless, Platkow-Gilewski also says that he feels the original version of Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received.”

“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive. Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. We knew that the game was great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.

“That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like ‘let’s do this.’”

    Yeah, I actually can get behind this. They got a lot of crap for the technical performance of the last-gen console version, partly because there was no current-gen native version. Having played it on PC day one my impression was that it was rough-to-normal (still better than day one Skyrim). Design-wise, the combat parts and open world design are the least interesting parts of it to this day, but even at the time I thought the narrative elements and obviously the visuals were great.

    Just to sanity check this, even with the torubled launch the PC version reviewed with an average of 86 on Metacritic and sold very well. It was a technically rough launch and they should have delayed the console ports at the very least, but it's not a bad game.

    • "(still better than day one Skyrim.)"

      I'm glad you mentioned this because I almost never see anyone make the comparison, and skyrim didn't get nearly as much hate despite that fact. I remember if you were playing on PS3, walking into water would crash your game, and it was like this for the entire first year of the game on PS3. It also had a problem where save files that were too big would guarantee save file corruption. It was the definition of unplayable for lots of people.

      Not saying cyberpunk is better than skyrim, just explaining how dire the launch for skyrim was, many people have forgotten just how rough around the edges skyrim was.

      • People tend to forget how broken games were at launch once they're no longer broken, which is why these days you only get broken games.

        I think studios need to reassess what is a showstopping bug these days, because restricting it to hard blockers is no longer enough, but that may require people having a different perspective on these things.

        But yeah "the game will eventually get into an endless crash loop if you play too much of it" is a pretty high bar to meet in terms of launching a broken game, and since I did play Skyrim on PS3 first, I may have a bettter memory of it than others.

        • I think there's definitely some room for interpretation here, some games suffer from basically being brigaded, and this OP actually points that out. Some games are cool to hate. CP2077 was one of those. Skyrim wasn't. People forgave it for a lot because it wasn't cool to hate.

          Look at Horizon Zero Dawn. Same story. That game has incredible game play, some of the most creative and new ways to do it. But certain people - ahem - brigaded reviews and made it cool to hate. Which sucks because that game has an amazingly unique combat system. Really nailed an action based trapping and hunting instead of just overwhelming force or stealth.

          Conversely people adored MGS5 and to be completely honest it was generic at best. Go figure it featured a hot naked woman with jiggle physics who couldn't speak and would die if she put clothes on.

          • Wait, did they brigade Zero Dawn? I mean, my impression of it is that they're cursed as a franchise with the worst possible timing, having released against genre-defining competitors two out of two times. If anything the impression I get from people is that it's the "deserved better" franchise.

      • New Vegas and Fallout 3 were borderline unplayable on PS3 when they launched too.

        Old timers keep warning people not to buy on launch. But every time a 'big' game comes along, there are a lot of people who ignore the warnings and do it anyway.

        Witcher 3 was the same. Roach(horse) on a roof was a meme at one point. But CDPR wasn't as famous then, so far less people played that on launch.

        Oh, and while we're at it, Witcher 3 isn't a true RPG either. Cyberpunk is quite a lot like Witcher 3 IMHO.

        • How quickly we forget that the Witcher superfans were absolutely livid about CDPR having dumbed down the potion system. I mean, I disagreed then and I disagree now, but "they dumbed it down for consoles" was a bit of a talking point at the time.

          Now, the atrocious input lag and having to shimmy for five minutes to pick up a thing werre always bad, and they aren't even great after their passive-aggressive option to make it slightly better under objection.

          Still, I do think Witcher 3 is the better game, I was just suprised to find out how many of its strong points do carry over to CP after hearing all the online rage at launch.

      • You did get screwed if you tried to play Skyrim on the PS3. The hardware limitations on the console caused obvious instability in the game that I don't think they ever fully resolved.

        But I don't think most people played Skyrim on PS3 so they aren't going to have that same experience. I know I didn't.

      • Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had "open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years" maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.

        Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.

        Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?

    • Next-gen was broken from day one (xbox series s, in my case). It took months to get it to a reliable state. T-posing, broken missions, broken driving, terrible draw distance, progress resets, crowd/npc behavior. (Remember when it took them over a year to figure out how to make crowds behave realistically when a gun fight breaks out. Even then, most of them just dropped into a grab position with their hands above their hands, hiding behind nothing.) Even if we forget all of that, there's still the frequent crashing, with no rhyme or reason. You never knew what was going to cause it, and it was months before it was mostly reliable.

      It deserved the hate.

      https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/03daxuxcE5t7NHYGJwO1AyQ-2.fitlim.size768x.jpg

    • I missed your comment before mine, but this tracks with my experience. Thinking about it I did a stealth fists playthrough, with stealth being all about avoiding combat where possible... I thought I was just bad at the game, but maybe it was my inner reviewer telling me combat is not a fun way to play the game 😂

      • I'm old enough now that I accept it's fine to switch difficulty to be trivial in games where combat is not the point.

        To be clear, combat in CP is still better than Witcher 3 combat, especially at launch of that game, but it's also not why I'm there. I'm there for the exquisitely rendered Keanu and the extremely granular, detailed story beats with unexpectedly affecting writing.

    • I think it's a good perspective but it rather downplays the biggest problem: Hype. He talkes about being "hyped up" and all this "hype surrounding us was big pressure" but it is one of the biggest reasons the game was recieved so harshly. It had been built up into being one of the greatest games ever made. In the end it was a good game but couldn't live up to the expectations.

      Also while the game was better on PC, it really was a disaster on PS4 and Xbox One which is what drove it's bad reputation.

      I like the game but to be honest I'm yet to finish it. The plot and narrative is good, but the open world is disappointing with far too much reliance on purely combat side missions, often with minimal associated narrative. The world would have felt much richer if they'd put in more narrative around the side missions and found other non-combat things to do in the city. I loved the Witcher 3 which has a lot of story around the side missions. I think CDPR could have take a leaf out of Bethesda's book for CP had multiple narratives running alongside the main plot.

      But ultimately the game finishes unfinished - they promised too much to deliver at that launch, so kudos to them to being able to focus and deliver a good core game. It just could have been a great game if they'd managed to develop other elements of the game world.

    • Exactly this, thank you! I had an amazing time with the game on release, and yes I DO remember launch day Skyrim and how broken it was. And how game-breakingly buggy it CONTINUED TO BE for over a year. There was a main story quest that I was unable to complete because of broken voicelines not being loaded! In comparison, CP2077 was a smooth as butter experience, and I had very few serious bugs. The one time I had them, a simple reload of my save fixed it.

    • I think on PC it was tolerable at launch. Definitely not perfect, but not a hot mess either. On consoles, I think I would agree with you though.
      I got my fill before the first major patch hit....100%ing it and playing all paths of the main story I could find.

    • The release of the game really hinged around the system you had at the time of launch. I really wanted to buy the game prior to launch, but I'm glad I didn't. All the promises CDPR made sounded awfully familiar to all those promises Hello Games made about NMS.

      I didn't purchase the game until I had a PS5, and the Playstation Store put it back in their queue (PS4 version). I bought it on sale, yet a week later it was going for like $25 IIRC. I should have waited, but whatever. And there were minor issues, but the game was not broken like the clips I saw at launch. And I'll say it again, despite all the promises the studio made, a lot of the problems revolved around the specific equipment you were running.

      The dev kind of does have a point, there was some overreaction, and seriously how many times are gamers going to continue to trust studios to deliver on their promises to these kind of games? However I believe he's painting a different picture at a critical point in the game's history where its first expansion is on the horizon.

      And you see these same promises coming from the studio. The tone sounds so similar. Don't buy the DLC until after launch...I'm not. Wait to see the game reviews before buying. The only way publishers will stop making these overblown promises is when gamers stop pre-ordering games and expansions, regardless what carrots they dangle.

115 comments