I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal

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.

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.
- 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 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.
- 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.
- Lot of missing features and loads of bugs. It just wasn't what they hyped it up to be

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.
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
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..
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

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 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 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 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.

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.
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

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 ~~soul~~ sole 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.

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

Don't forget to pre-order their latest DLC!

After they lied that their first major DLC will be free. I'm happy to wait till Phantom Liberty is 50% off or more. Not going to forget it's launch. Review embargoes. Last gen performance. B roll footage forced into reviews to hide all the bugs.
- The tweet you linked to is just a gif of the kool aid man they tweeted. Did they alter the tweet?? Wtf

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.
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.
A year for the mod kit? Wow

It was a very different experience for me. I had a blast playing this game when first released and didn't find any game breaking moment. This could be due to me playing on PC? So with the latest patch I loaded up my V and found noting of merit had changed. Seriously I found it to be the same game with small UI and Skill changes. I was shocked to say the least, due to the enormous patch size. I still haven't left training NC so I might find more changes but so far it's still an enjoyable game.

You had to be one of the rare lucky ones then.

I played on PC and it was an absolute buggy, sometimes crashy, mess.

You didn't need to wait 3 years to enjoy it. That's on you.

Well i bought the 12 month humble choice last year and haven't played a single on of them...

New? Where have you been for 13 years

This is the new narrative for Cyberpunk 2077. I'm guessing cdprojekt greased some palms ahead of the new DLC release.

But make no mistake, and don't fall for it; cyberpunk is still a wholly buggy and unfinished game with extremely janky mechanics that will never be patched out.

If and only if you can overlook such issues, and I know from personal experience some can, should you consider paying for the new DLC.

It was a great game at launch, and it's an even better game now. It runs like butter. Choose to not play for whatever reasons you have, but it is still a great game.
- I'd like to disagree. Even if you disregard all the bugs I had and content/features that was promised and never included, CP 2077 was maybe a good game in 2020. I didn't think it was great by any means.
People love to hate on this game but I bought it months ago and played it several hours. I didn't see any bug I found noteworthy
One review for the new DLC explicitly stated that he was requested by CDPR to use only their provided footage.

"To avoid spoilers."

It’s weird - when I played at launch, I had precisely one bug that impacted my gameplay. Other than that, the game ran pretty smooth and was a joy to play.

Now mind you, I was playing on a PC with a Xeon, 64GB of RAM, and an RTX 2080ti. Nothing ram badly on that system three years ago. Nowadays the older CPU, slower RAM and admittedly older GPU without all the newest bells and whistles (DLSS Framegen I’m looking at you) can’t quite measure up to the latest titles.

Cyberpunk, at launch, was great. For me. Specifically for me. I loved it and still do. But this article hits a point for me that I’ve been struggling to find reason to write about without feeling like I’m ignoring people who primarily play on consoles or can’t afford a nice PC. Regardless…

Man it fuckin’ sucks how you can spend a huge amount of money on a new GPU and then four months later a new one comes out that blows it out of the water. New hardware is so much better and - because all the game devs are using that hardware to design their games both on and for - systems like mine that are still fairly new can’t run the latest games at high settings anymore.

It used to be that if you ponied up the money for a high-end rig, you could expect decent performance for years to come. But I guess blowing a grand on a GPU these days just means you’ll be doing it again in a year or something, instead of the decade or so before.

I’m not saying my PC is bad. Most of what I play runs excellently. But when I spend a grand on just a GPU I expect that GPU to run the newest games at high settings for a long time. Jedi Survivor, Starfield, both run like crap on my system. Never mind the 2TB NVMe drive everything’s installed on.

But I’m just removed to removed. Ignore me.

I had a similar "it's great I don't get what people are talking about" experience, only I was running it on lesser hardware than yours: 4GB GTX 970, 12-core i7-5820k, 32GB ram. I ran into a handful of bugs that were funny but not really disruptive (e.g. some dude's corpse floating behind a car as I was on the highway) and otherwise had a blast.

Nonetheless, it didn't really feel finished, y'know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.
- Ran it on a 980ti, i7 4770k, 32GB ram at release. It certainly struggled at parts, but overall decent experience. And that was a pretty outdated rig at that point.
  
  People just threw a tantrum. There were fewer serious bugs than Skyrim, which got all around glowing reviews. People have claimed the hype was why their expectations were so high, but as someone who wasn't even planning on playing it for a couple years until it was gifted to me, it was a decent game that had some areas of obvious improvement. Definitely a worthy first attempt at a GTA kind of game, and its a damn shame the gaming community chose it to be the meme pinata for the year.
- Nonetheless, it didn't really feel finished, y'know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.
  
  The performance issues seem to be what every article and blog post focuses on because it's the easy thing to talk about, but I think this right here is what the actual biggest issue was and the real reason people shat on the game.
  
  I didn't hate it by any means. And I, like you, ran it without issue. I just sort of lost interest because it was janky and super unpolished. Like I was playing an early access game. It wasn't big bugs as in the game breaking and not running. It was just lots of little annoyance that felt unfinished or half conceived, or like they didn't undergo full play testing.
  
  The massive performance issues experienced by some just compounded those issues that existed even when it did run perfectly well.
- This was totally out for me. It ran ok on my setup, but it was a shit game. It randomly generated traffic when you turned your back. AI for NPCs was often barely functional. Numerous build options seemed either broken or just untested. Itemization was boring and poorly balanced. Vehicles handled like crap in a game with a car collecting activity. The crime system was so undeveloped it felt like it was a joke from the Devs with police spawning in a bowl of rice to bust a cap.
  
  Anyways, I played about 20 hours and realized the game wasn't finished or feature complete, and absolutely wasn't what had been advertised. I refunded, but I'm watching feedback now and may buy again if the game is closer to it's original sales pitch.
I was having fun also in 2020 even with my 1080... frame rate wasn't great but it was OK.

That's not a new thing though.

I first learned the wisdom of waiting until after the bulk of the bug-squashing was done before expecting to play a reasonably stable game with Oblivion, 17 years ago.

Granted that Cyberpunk 2077 was a particularly egregious example of the problem, but still...

Hard to disagree with the article, it seems it's safer to wait at least a few weeks or months to play a new game because there are often things to be fixed after launch. Many games have multiple ambitious and complex systems that need to be tuned post launch. Combine this with high expectations/hype that marketing teams foster and you have a recipe for regret and disappointment on day 1 experiences

CP77 was already a great game at launch. I am sad that so many games are barely in beta state at launch, but CP77 wasn't an offender.

I consider this new launch a 2.0 or remastered edition. It didn't need it, but it's good it got it.

You don't need me to post the parade of gifs showing how broken and beyond the veil broken it was at launch. Recall it was so broken that Sony had to remove it from purchase. I hate this revisionist crap.
- Sony only removed it because there was a mass-refunding problem since CDPR told people they had to contact Sony to get refunded, while that wasn't Sony's policy. Had nothing to do with how broken the game was (which it was).

The game was great for from day one.I can't recall any significant issues. The Xbox one and PS4 stuff was dumb as all hell and shouldn't have happened but everyone overreacted on the rest.