The more I play Cyberpunk 2077 the more I realise CDPR have pulled the heist of the generation, and they’ve done so on the back of the idea of “bugs”. 👇
Cyberpunk is buggy as hell, we all know that, but by expecting and acknowledging this reviewers seem to have turned a blind eye to the massive, often absurd, issues with the game’s open world.
Take the games traffic. No one apart from the player can drive a bike. Why? Well after a little testing it becomes obvious that drivers have no AI to speak of. They cannot navigate around an obstacle and often will freeze in the face of an obstacle. They are literally mindless.
Surely this leads to constant gridlock? Well no, because explicitly aware of this CDPR have made every stopped car disappear if you look away. Really. That way the card keep following their paths and any blockages are cleared up. This is NOT a bug.
This is a feature. This is a specifically engineered solution to a massive gap in the game’s feature set. And it turns out pedestrians behave the same way. Fire a gun in a crowded street everyone ducks. Turn 360. The game will unload every cowering pedestrian. This is insane.
These elements were seemingly passed off as “bugs” in reviews, as journalists rushed through to hit deadlines and, understandably, assumed such issues would be fixed. But the fix for these things is implementing an entirely new system.
I don’t know if incompetence or greed is to blame here, but if you spend years telling everyone how revolutionary your open world game will be, amassing 8 million preorders, and then launch that game WITHOUT DRIVING AI something has gone horribly wrong.
And if you actively obsfucate these issues, if you keep up a pretence that they are just “bugs”, naturally occurring errors that will eventually be fixed, you are misleading people so you can make money. Tbh, I’ve never seen anything like it.
I jumped into my game to make some examples for those who haven't played the game and it took me all of 2 minutes to grab these.
Traffic:
Traffic:
https://twitter.com/JumpOvertheAge/status/1338943724114628608?s=20
To be clear (now that this is blowing up) I’m not blaming reviewers here, I’ve reviewed games on a deadline myself. You expect bugs and you trust pr when they tell you those issues will be fixed in a day one patch. CDPR have taken advantage of this.
There’s no way I can reply to all the responses to this, but just want to restate that the point is not “cyberpunk is a terrible game” but that it diverges noticeably from its core selling points, and falls well short of the standards set by its competitors.
The solution to this wouldn’t have been to “crunch more”. It would have been to plan better, to not run an arrogant and misleading 7 year campaign, and to be honest about the studios limits. The kind of solutions we are seeing here come from 11th hour desperation and exhaustion.
If these issues don’t matter to you, if you are enjoying the game, that’s great, I don’t think you should feel bad about that! But I think holding AAA to account is important when its clear that there is an attempt to conceal something. Anyway I’m done. 👋
Final update: it’s been pointed out to me that this thread can be read as placing the blame for this at the feet of the devs. This is not my intention at all. Devs are not trying to trick you or cheat you, typically we (because I’m a dev too!)...
...are coming up with elaborate artifices and tricks to bring worlds to life under pressure, with limited resources and sometimes hostile workplaces. If you use this thread to harass or disparage those people you are as bad as those forcing mandatory crunch...
...and concealing the console versions (where these issues are most widespread) from the press while being acutely aware of the issues that exist in the game. There are no “lazy” devs. Just mismanged people given impossible tasks to fulfill.
Finally if I’d known this thread would have gone viral I probably would have reconsidered my use of “heist” . I’m firmly aiming that at marketing strategy here, but conflating dishonesty and game dev has unfortunate resonances I don’t intend. Anyway that’s it. Go home.
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