The Hype Train Has Stalled
Cyberpunk 2077 was the most hyped game of the decade bar none and as that train accelerated towards its inevitable stop, I always had the feeling that things weren’t going to end well. True to form, the game hit the buffers.
I don’t usually pre-order games, but I got caught up in the mania and handed over $50 to GOG a week before the launch on December 10th, more than anything, curious to see what all the fuss was about. My personal experience has been largely bug-free with only two crashes to the desktop, with the rest of my playtime being smooth sailing. However, many players have reported frequent crashes and game-killing bugs to the extent that thousands of players have asked for refunds, especially on PS4 and Xbox One.
Sony Pulled The Game From The PlayStation Store
The reasons cited are that the game didn’t represent anything near the quality of the game as previously released in game trailers for the PS4 and the above image is a testament to that.
How the game looks on PS4:
How the game should look:
Microsoft has added a warning for the game on its store but hasn’t pulled the plug as Sony has done.
Bloomberg reported CD Projekt’s board of directors apologised to staff during an internal video meeting on Thursday, but offered vague answers when quizzed about Cyberpunk 2077’s unrealistic deadlines, misleading public announcements and long-running crunch.
According to Bloomberg, staff said the game’s deadlines “were always unrealistic”, and the developers knew they needed more time.
We’ve seen this happen time and time again where game developers promise much more than they can deliver, in this case predominantly for consoles. On the other hand, while many gamers on PCs are reporting bugs and crashes, it appears that the majority are enjoying a pain-free experience with Cyberpunk. Remember, it will be ready when it’s ready? Well, it appears that CDProjekt (the developers) needed to keep their shareholders happy, and yet another delay was going to cause the company many problems. But that has backfired because a class action lawsuit has now been filed by the New York-based Rosen Law Firm, citing alleged violations of federal securities laws.
On the other hand, many PC gamers of Cyberpunk, myself included, are having a problem-free experience and enjoying the ride, particularly the attention to detail that the CDProjekt team has put into the game.
Of course, this comes as no consolation to those who are experiencing problems, so the developers wasted no time in pushing out fixes, with two major patches released since the launch date.
For PC gamers it was discovered that AMD processors with less than six cores weren’t being utilised to their full potential and save-game files of more than 8MB could become corrupt. Both of those issues have now been fixed and my system now spreads the load more evenly across the CPU and GPU.
In the above graphic, the only hardware change I made was the GPU, but that’s a subject for another article on my recent GPU upgrade.
I will continue enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 and whilst it will probably take me months to finish — if I ever do — I feel confident that the game will continue to be a work in progress — as is the case for many games nowadays — for many months to come. And good luck with that class action lawsuit which I believe will come to naught.
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Also the latest Microsoft flight sim?
Great on a properly equipped PC but not so hot on Xbox and VR.
Could it be that these “games” were never really meant to be dumbed down for consoles and for the goggle folk? Most folk with consoles and/or VR goggles have their own games which to my mind are still in the last century of both graphics and resolution. Lo poly stuff which does not lend itself to simulators and up-to-date games. Dumbing down games to the level required for consoles and VR is not always a good idea?
Hi Colin
Most games nowadays are made for consoles anyway, with a few exceptions, but then ported to PC.
In the case of Cyberpunk, the game looks like a 90s hash up on console.