"CD Projekt Red Apologizes for Cyberpunk Issues"

[kane_magus]

Watch on YouTube

"CD Projekt Red has apologized for the Cyberpunk 2077 launch issues on PS4 and Xbox One."

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This doesn't surprise me at all. The modern video game industry gonna modern video game, after all. CD Projekt (Red or otherwise) is not, and has never been, the messiah of the modern video game industry that far too many gullible dupes try to make it out to be. To steal from one of the comments under the above video, maybe they should rename themselves to "Seedy Projekt."

Ian is totally right. It's deception. It's absolute bullshit. And Pat's "crossing the Rubicon" point about no longer being able to rely on consoles to provide a consistent experience is a good one, too (if a bit behind the curve, because that's been the case for a while now, if not necessarily to such a huge degree as this).

Comments

[owsf2000]

Regarding Pat's point you're right he's definitely behind the curve. Heck, even if he was saying that with the launch of No Man's Sky, which many aptly nickname "One Man's Lie", he'd STILL be behind the curve by close to a decade.

As soon as consoles started allowing patching, they opened the floodgates for shoddy game production - losing the only real selling point they had ahead of the PC market. "It just works."

I remember when the first bug patch was done on the original Xbox looong ago where Microsoft promised "this will not be the norm." Even then I was going "lol yeah right."

[kane_magus]

Well, let's just hope that Seedy Projekt Red gets Cyberpunk 2077 into a decent state more quickly than Hello Games did with No Man's Sky. I guess the difference is that nobody was complaining about the graphics that much with NMS, "just" lack of content (which is arguably way worse), whereas with Cyberpunk, the content is all there (as far as I'm aware, at least, and, of course, ignoring anything they most assuredly cut out for later sale as additional DLC), it just looks like dog's ass on consoles. Still, the principle is the same, either way, as neither game was remotely ready for release when they were released. Then again, in the case of Cyberpunk, it possible that they released it on hardware that simply isn't capable of running it, and maybe should have just further delayed it until the next generation of consoles, as Pat was saying. As such, it may not be possible for them to get it into a working state on at least some of the platforms they released it on.

In any case, it doesn't really matter to me how long they take to fix it, as far as Cyberpunk goes, though, as I have no interest in buying it at all, unless I just happen to see it on a 75-80%-plus sale or something. And if I did buy it, it would almost assuredly be on PC rather than consoles, anyway. And even then, I probably wouldn't play it any time soon if I did buy it. I still haven't even finished the first Witcher game yet (and haven't tried to play it in years), let alone installed the second or third one. Also, that's what I did with No Man's Sky, waited around four years after its release to buy it, and by the time I got it earlier this year, it was actually a game with plenty of content at that point, rather than whatever it was at launch. And I haven't touched it since before that other big content update came out recently, Origins or whatever it was called.

And yeah, the addition of harddrives to video game consoles, which allowed for the introduction of console game patches (and, more tellingly, DownLoadable Content) is right around when modern video gaming started spiraling down the toilet.

[owsf2000]

Another case in point is that on PCs you can kind of understand patching being required - the scope of hardware configurations your game is going to be met with is just insane. Every year or two it gets worse and worse too as more video cards are released, more mother boards, more brands of ram, etc.

Some people defend console patching as required because "Game programming is so complicated nowadays" but that just doesn't cut it. In a console, all the consoles of a brand are essentially identical or at least required to be compatible with each other. (Obviously you'd just code for the PS4 and assume PS4 Pro will be compatible - just allow a higher refresh rate and the like.)

The reason console games release so poorly like this is primarily on one thing. The lack of real beta testing/troubleshooting/testing. You're more aware of that than I am, having worked in that shit for years, but seriously how could anyone come to any other conclusion when we see trainwrecks like no mans sky and cyberpunk. There's NO way any kind of testing was done on those, particularly the last gen consoles. Sony (And Microsoft) claim they do quality assurance testing on games they certify... hm. I really can't say I believe they do anything beyond certify a fee was paid at this point.

Sony has outright delisted Cyberpunk in the last day or two over the quality of the game and I believe are now doing refunds. Some would say "Good for Sony! Stand up for the gamer!"

In my case I'm going "Why didn't you properly check to see how the game ran in the first place?"

Supposedly the devs said they'd have all the issues resolved by launch with a day one patch. Well, here's where believing the dev got them. Perhaps they shouldn't allow a release until that patch is in their hands going forward.

Seriously it's hard to even consider buying a current gen console at this point, even if the pricetag alone wasn't effectively keeping me from investing in them.

[kane_magus]

PC game patching is understandable in the sense of unexpected bugs as a result of myriad bizarre PC configurations, as you say, but that certainly doesn't stop far too many PC game makers from also releasing broken shit containing bugs that have nothing to do with hardware and which affect all players, i.e. far too often very basic, game-breaking shit that should have been caught in testing.

And yeah, if I'd been in the group testing Cyberpunk and they sent that shit to us as a release candidate, there's no way in hell we would have passed it. Granted, there would have been nothing stopping them from ignoring us and releasing it anyway (e.g. heaven knows Google Earth released with a shit-ton of bugs that had been in their bug database for literally years, which we always updated with "still an issue" whenever we did a bug sweep), and that would have been their fault, of course, but it would have still reflected badly on us as testers.

In any case, with Cyberpunk, the worst thing is that Seedy Projekt Red, as with so many other game developers/publishers that release shitty broken games, fucking knew the game was going to be broken and shitty, hence the review embargoes "to prevent spoilers." That is to say, the spoiler that the game was going to be shitty and broken, i.e. the deception that Ian mentioned. It's flat out fraud and needs to be punished as such. And yeah, as you say, Sony themselves (and Microsoft and whoever else) should have slammed the brakes on releasing the game until the game was in a playable state, regardless of what Seedy Projekt Red said or did, which puts it on their heads about as much as it does on the heads of Seedy Projekt Red. Whoever was supposed to be in charge of certifying it for each console dropped the fucking ball hard, too.

As for your last bit, speaking more generally, if I ever get a PS5, which is by no means a sure thing at all, it would mostly be for whatever PS4 games that I didn't get in the previous console cycle because I didn't bother with a PS4. That said, I can't think of many games I'd even care about. The Last Guardian is the only one I can think of off the top of my head. There isn't anything new that I care about at this point. That said, I'd likely just wait until near the end of the PS5 lifecycle, too, when it would be cheaper. (And possibly just start the whole thing all over with the PS6, assuming it's backwards compatible with the previous generations. But at that rate, I'd potentially never get another Playstation console. ¬_¬)