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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.

115 comments

  • Have people forgotten all the straight up lies, broken promises and features?

    The police would spawn inside locked elevators with you!
    NPCs disappeared if you turned around!

    I'm glad some of you had fun with the story but the game was still a damn mess.

    • I'm glad some of you had fun with the story

      Not to mention the story was still very much on rails. Even if there were like what, 3 different outcomes? And on top of that, once you beat the game there is absolutely fuck all to do.

      Honestly. I put about 50-60 hours into cyberpunk. I enjoyed every single hour of it. But once the main campaign was complete, there was just nothing left to do. I tried many times to jump back in and go do side quests or explore but the world is just completely empty.

      • My feelings exactly.

        I played for 60 hours or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. But they put a fatal design flaw into the game by forcing to you be V, and by putting a ticking time bomb in your head. That means that if you play logically, you'll follow the storyline quests in order to fix the big issue rather than spending the time slowly exploring the world they made. It also means that once you beat it, there's no fun in going back and doing it again, because you have to follow the same railroad tracks and go through the same story beats again. It cheapens the experience greatly.

        Like you, the world holds no interest for me now that I have found a satisfying ending for V. The least they could have done was put in a "story mode," and a separate "open mode" where you can build any character (who isn't V) and live any life you choose, free from the main quest railroad.

        I'll never understand why game designers would make an open world, and then slap on a "YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR LIFE HURRY UP!!! railroad quest as the main story. It's a lazy and utterly stupid design choice.

      • A lot of that is because there isn't a post game. So, you finish the quest lines and that's it. Witcher is the same way and it's fine, but Witcher was also a longer game with more interesting side content.

    • I'm torn because Skyrim was also a buggy mess. But it's my most played comfort game. The first few games, I couldn't finish the main quest. And it was soooo much worse than I ever experienced with cyberpunk. Both games I played within the first week of release.

      One game, the dragon refused to be caught in Whiterun.

      Another game, I caught him and he promised to let me ride him, but the guards never released him.

      Another game, half the floor was missing from the floor of the greybeards manor. They were inside but there was a giant gap I couldn't cross over.

      For the dark brotherhood, I couldn't complete that quest the first time when you hunt down Cicero because the room he was in also had no floor except for his area.

      So many quests just wouldn't progress to the point I had the wiki open so I could use console commands to move quests forward.

      I once got locked in during the werewolf quest when my companion was supposed to open the gate for me. He just stood there.

      One quest where I fought three ghosts for the boss had a locked door behind me. I could never get that door to unlock with the fight. Sometimes I beat them all. Sometimes I could kill 2 and the third one just disappeared. The only fix was reverting to a save from before I ever entered the dungeon at all.

      And so many more. Way more issues and game breaking bugs than cyberpunk. And yet I still hold Skyrim close to my heart. Especially as patches started coming and, more importantly, the Skyrim community patch mod. The modders are really what held up Skyrim.

      It feels weird for me to hate what cyberpunk was when I live what Skyrim is. 

  •  undefined
        
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.

    • 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.

  • Lol nah. Game was a mess. Nowhere near feature parity with what they promised, bugs galore, awful police AI, and the last gen versions were literally unplayable to the point that they were removed from stores.

  • Ehh, I'd say they are maybe 20% right about that one, the gaming community just piled on top of it like it was the most irredeemable pile of trash ever.

    The thing is the other 80% of that story is them telling upfront lies about the game, them intentionally hiding that it was literally unplayable on consoles, and even now years after its launch after numerous updates and bugfixes the game is still just a shadow of what it could have been.

    It's a fun good game but the thing I think about most while playing it is usually about missed potential, "damn this could have been so much better". Maybe Phantom Liberty and the free update improves this, I really hope it does, but the game is a mess of gameplay mechanics, terrible progression loops and empty open world.

  • I find most commentary reads as though people were expecting GTA from CDPR, which is completely unfair. I don't see a lot of "this doesn't play like Skyrim" from TW3 commentary, and there's a lot in common with those comparisons: CDPR titles are more story-driven, less freedom in their protagonist's character and role, and far less "life" outside the main path (ie, townsfolk and little finds along the way).

    E: I think it played less buggy on launch than Skyrim, too. PC

  • Nah. It was a mess on launch and it's still kind of a mess. It's full of dead ends and stuff that doesn't quite make sense from cut content, wonky bugs everywhere (play long enough and you'll see a bunch), and whole ass features missing. People need to remember that CDPR's magic is its writers, not its devs. The Witcher games, when compared with other 3rd person action focused games, aren't great. We're talking C+ to B- game design from my perspective. It's just that the dang stories and settings are so compelling.

    There are dozens of games that do what Witcher or CP2077 do (gameplay wise) with vastly more polish and style.

    Also I really hate the whole "yer dyin', V" conceit. It literally does not matter to the gameplay except for one tiny, hidden thing that a lot of players won't even see. Plus it serves no purpose in the broader narrative than serving as a reason to push V into action ... except he/she ALREADY HAS ONE. There's no need for second inciting event writers, you already wrote 3 of them, one for each background. So basically it's redundant and the way it's handled in the story feels like a cop-out. I hate it when the narrative and the game play aren't aligned; it just feels bad.

  • Was it? Is it, even? Still stuck on how you can make a game with the name "punk" and have one of the mechanics in free roam be... hearing police chatter, you jump in and kill a bunch of folk while knowing only the bare minimum of the situation, and getting paid. :thonk:

  • Lmao it was not, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was a train wreck on all platforms.

  • I'm glad that it seems like they've turned around on this game but they cannot be revisionist about the performance of the game at launch. It was quite bad and we have receipts to prove it.

  • Article absolutely doesn't go into why someone might've thought it was bad, nice meme

    my opinion nobody asked for, as someone who played it:
    think the main story is great and that it touches upon a lot of cyberpunk themes in a very faithful way, not personally into GTA type gameplay and openworld, so that was a loss for me, but in general the world felt empty (why i tend not to like openworld) and the combat basic especially in comparison to anything promised a year before launch.
    It also had some cute sidemissions here and there, particularly the Ghost in the Shell easteregg is tragic, and I enjoyed the sentient car (though I wish I could've been hanging out with my AI car alongside my tulpa)

  • Did this dev even play the game on PS4 / Xbox? The current hardware it was developed for at the time? It run constantly sub 30 FPS, even dropping into 20s and below. Like I get the idea that it should of been a "next gen" only title, but copies of the game were sold with the expectation that it's would be payable, 20 FPS with poor frame pacing isn't acceptable

115 comments