General Video Game Thread
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I'm still playing CP77 and I'm having a blast. Yes, I'm on a very good PC so my experience is better than most.
Are there bugs? Sure. But overall, they are minor. I think some people and reviewers I've read are overly harsh about the problems in the game, especially on day one releases. (That's the extra polite version of my thoughts on a lot of the negative reviews.) No one releases a bug free product day one. Patches are always a thing. The scale of the game itself is quite an accomplishment. You can travel from one end of the city limits to the other without a loading screen, then there's the vertical integration. Out of all of that, some people expect flawlessness of each and every object and encounter that exists within that for some reason.
Tech is not magic. It can be amazing. But sometimes things go wrong. It is a big theme of the genre and the game itself, ironically.
I highly recommend it as a game in general. If you like the genre, it is a definite get. Yes, sometimes you won't be able to pick up an item or two, yet. You could wait until they release a few more patches to dive in, but I think the extensive world and storylines and gameplay more than make up for a few release glitches especially if you consider the amount of code that goes into a game of this scale versus the amount of code that is glitched.
If you want to ignore the glitches and enjoy the game, you will. If you want to focus on glitches and be annoyed, you will.
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I'm playing it on the PS4 because frankly I don't have a system good enough to run it on PC (fingers crossed for a future investment), but it crashes all the time. Navigation is sometimes almost impossible because you hit these big gray walls and can't see what's on the other side of them until you're through them so you have no idea if you're about to turn or crash into something or mow down a pedestrian and get a warrant. Conversations and quick-hacks have been glitchy af.
I love the game, the writing is awesome and I'm trudging through it, but there's nothing quite like being on one of the longer missions and having your system crash mid-combat only to realize you have to start basically at the beginning because you can't save while enemies are alerted.
It's a mixed bag.
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I haven't started Cyberpunk yet, and I'm certainly happy for the people who have been loving it, but the idea that it should be fine to ship a product with this amount of bugs because "no one releases a bug free product day one" is -- well, basically just consumers being trained that it's somehow unreasonable to expect products that work when they're released. It's a corporate lie. Yes, bugs are probably inevitable, but there are levels here. If people are dealing with crashes daily, that shouldn't be considered a finished product.
But the critical response has clearly been pretty gentle on the bugs, because it's sitting high and pretty on Metacritic. I'm probably just gonna wait for a few more patches before starting, but I'm also not a huge fan of the genre in general that I'm sitting on any particular urge to immediately play. I got it mostly because of how much I loved Witcher 3.
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I think there are two big reasons it had bugs and it all comes down to 'people are shitty'.
CDPR employees were receiving death threats, regularly, after the game was delayed. Lots of them. Some of them with very specific details of home addresses and the like.
I imagine their management was very afraid to delay a second time. I forgive the bugs on that alone.
And I am sorry to anyone who only has an xbox1 or ps4 (because I've been there before) but the game never should have been released on those consoles. If I was playing on a 7-year-old PC, it wouldn't run at all. They shouldn't have given in to the expectation of providing it on as many platforms as possible and just stuck to 'It's a next gen game'. Numerous games have done this in past years.
Those two reasons I believe are why the game is the way it is. But the first reason is why I forgive cdpr.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Here's the thing, though: this isn't uncommon. What matters, though, is that the CEO not only promised it wouldn't happen but later downplayed how bad it was.
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@auspice said in General Video Game Thread:
I think there are two big reasons it had bugs and it all comes down to 'people are shitty'.
CDPR employees were receiving death threats, regularly, after the game was delayed. Lots of them. Some of them with very specific details of home addresses and the like.
I imagine their management was very afraid to delay a second time. I forgive the bugs on that alone.
I get there's been a huge amount of CDPR apologism from gamers because of a belief that they're somehow an ethical step above other video game companies, but "we had to put you through shitty crunch conditions for months for your own safety" is definitely a take.
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@carma said in General Video Game Thread:
I heard it was anti-punk. Contained racist and transphobic subtexts. Things like that.
Not to mention the unfair treatment the workers went through to make the game.
So I don't think I'll support it.
I mean, should include just about every major dev/publisher at that point.
Like Ubisofts rampant sexual harassment via their upper management.
Or EA straight up encouraging uncontrolled online gambling.
Or Activison/Blizzard being against human rights in Taiwan.
Take your pick. No one is exempt.
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@roz They've needed to for years. Literal years. It took far longer for voice actors to get their own union but they were finally able to do so in the last decade.
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@warma-sheen said in General Video Game Thread:
Are there bugs? Sure. But overall, they are minor. I think some people and reviewers I've read are overly harsh about the problems in the game, especially on day one releases.
Sure generous of you to dismiss other people's experiences like that given your complete lack of evidence to the contrary as you aren't even playing on the same platform.
Like @Derp, my game crashed like clockwork even after the day one patch -- almost exactly every two hours. Until I became extremely meticulous about manually saving (when the game arbitrarily allowed me to) that often meant losing 30 mins of progress, more if the autosaves got corrupted. The game even managed to crash during the credit scroll, but at that point I could only laugh.
The walls and floors popped in and out sometimes so dramatically that once I managed to die by hopping off a two foot drop, which the game somehow registered as like a seven story fall. NPCs and vehicles regularly clipped through doors and walls, sometimes in hilarious bursts of particle effects but also sometimes inexplicably triggering a police bounty on me -- one time, my parked bike burst through the ground under where I had previously left it on the sidewalk and slaughtered a bunch of civilians and a cop netrunner, instantly bringing me to 2 stars which...was not survivable at that point in the game. Funny, but also frustrating as hell given that I had to repeat a tedious sequence.
More frustrating was the item pop -- landmines are instakill and they were sometimes invisible because the game hadn't rendered them yet, which...boy, lemme tell you, after some extremely difficult fight sequences? I almost embedded my controller in the wall.
At times random UI elements would just...stop working. I wouldn't be able to summon my vehicle, or open the map, or toss grenades/use quick slot health items, or change the camera POV until I stopped and force quit the game. Some cyberware that you needed to manually trigger just straight-up stopped working at all because of this, even after a reload, which was extremely uncool given how expensive they were.
Quest triggers often failed to fire -- I'd get a message about doing something but wouldn't get the accompanying quest, or even worse they would fail midway through a quest line meaning I had to reload the entire thing from the beginning. The game often got stuck in "glitch mode" (where your character is suffering the side effects of a plot device) looooong past the point it was supposed to wear off and navigation and interaction became impossible until (again) I rebooted the game.
I am usually extremely forgiving and patient with bugs, but altogether it was almost enough to make me stop playing and go really hard after that promised refund. If it had been any other game and I didn't enjoy the genre and story as much as I do, I absolutely would have. This was a very, VERY sorry state to release a game in and had I known in advance I would have held off until I could afford a PS5.
@carma said in General Video Game Thread:
I heard it was anti-punk. Contained racist and transphobic subtexts. Things like that.
The problematic transphobic stuff is pretty well documented. Kinda borderline to some degree IMO because some of it seems to be an intentional thing you're supposed to rail against? But there's for sure like, near zero in-game representation.
As for racism...I mean, they did the best they could with what they had, I think, given the source material. You wanna cringe so hard your head and neck invert into your body? Go read some of the tabletop books like Neo-Tribes, or the original write-up for the Voodoo Boys. Huuuuuuuuge yikes.
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@wizz said in General Video Game Thread:
As for racism...I mean, they did the best they could with what they had, I think, given the source material. You wanna cringe so hard your head and neck invert into your body? Go read some of the tabletop books like Neo-Tribes, or the original write-up for the Voodoo Boys. Huuuuuuuuge yikes.
I just want to point that Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk, is black. And has talked about the gangs like the Animals and Voodoo Boys. I remember this being a large talking issue about the game a couple years ago, to the point where he had to make a statement on it.
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And? He wasn't the sole writer for the game or the supplements, and unfortunately being black doesn't prevent things like internalized racism from manifesting.
The Voodoo Boys writeup I'm referring to in the Night City sourcebook casts them not only in an extremely unflattering light, but also they're...like, literally white college boys posing as vodoun practitioners to sell drugs. That's their whole shtick. CP2077 at least makes them actually people from Haiti or West Africa and/or their descendants.
As for the Neo-Tribes book...I mean, just read it. It blames cultural identity for the collapse of America, spends a lot of time confused about Native Americans and whether they should be sympathized with or appropriated from, and even has that classic bit everyone loves about the Roma and how they suffer because of the unfair stereotypes of them being swindlers and thieves...that are actually completely true because they're literally all swindlers and thieves. Yeah.
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In news that I don't think I've ever seen before:
https://www.playstation.com/en-ie/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/
Sony is offering blanket refunds and de-listing the game from their store. Which is.. holy shit.
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@roz said in General Video Game Thread:
@auspice said in General Video Game Thread:
I think there are two big reasons it had bugs and it all comes down to 'people are shitty'.
CDPR employees were receiving death threats, regularly, after the game was delayed. Lots of them. Some of them with very specific details of home addresses and the like.
I imagine their management was very afraid to delay a second time. I forgive the bugs on that alone.
I get there's been a huge amount of CDPR apologism from gamers because of a belief that they're somehow an ethical step above other video game companies, but "we had to put you through shitty crunch conditions for months for your own safety" is definitely a take.
Yeah, if anything the absurd crunch is what led to a lot of these problems. You work people 100 hour weeks for like 9 months straight (or longer) and fucking mistakes are going to be made. I do hope crunch ends up going away for the industry sooner or later, but it's also been over a decade since the "EA Spouse" blog that brought up shit working conditions and, well, here we are.
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@rucket said in General Video Game Thread:
I do hope crunch ends up going away for the industry sooner or later, but it's also been over a decade since the "EA Spouse" blog that brought up shit working conditions and, well, here we are.
Unfortunately as long as marketing people are making the decisions, crunch will always be there and games will be released in suboptimal state. Not surprised Sony de-listed the game, it's unplayable on PS4.
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POTENTIALLY TANGENTIAL TO EXCESSIVE CODING CRUNCH... Elite Dangerous is adding space legs, and I'm >< close to starting a fresh save when it does, for the lulz, if anyone is interested in brainstorming shenanigans.
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@jennkryst said in General Video Game Thread:
POTENTIALLY TANGENTIAL TO EXCESSIVE CODING CRUNCH... Elite Dangerous is adding space legs, and I'm >< close to starting a fresh save when it does, for the lulz, if anyone is interested in brainstorming shenanigans.
I've been meaning to play it again, but re-mapping ASTRA (my AI) takes a couple hours and I've been sooooooooo lazy.
But! Maybe with new job! I can get a HOTAS and PLAY IT RIGHT.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
