Not to like, have a hot take on Wyrmrest Dot Com or anything, but I get the feeling that the vocal disappointment with Cyberpunk’s bugs is caused at least in part by the whole “death march” scandal that broke just before launch.
We have examples of games that were buggy on launch and were later fixed, but we also have plenty of examples of games that were always jank, bug-ridden messes, but that people still loved anyway (ARK, V:TM Bloodlines, every single Elder Scrolls game, basically every game that comes out in Early Access, to name a few). The difference there, I think, is that the developers of those games didn’t suddenly and violently lose the goodwill of their customers immediately before the launch of their product.
Which I guess is another way of saying that, apart from like, reportedly bricking PS4s and corrupting save data, I haven’t really heard of a bug from Cyberpunk that people wouldn’t tolerate from a different game they were incentivized to like.
This is me painting with an absurdly broad brush but I also feel like based on my limited interactions, CDPR as a developer has definitely attracted a vocal, toxic sort of “type” of fan - not all of them, mind you, I own Geralt’s Sexytime Adventures myself - but, well, you wouldn’t go amiss finding someone saying some very hateful things online crossposting about how much they were looking forward to Cyberpunk or have you heard of a little gem called The Witcher 3?
Correlation is not causation and all that, but it is what it is. Keep in mind there was a vocal enough subset about the “pronouns” box and gender sliders at certain points as well. r/cyberpunk and r/gaming also did complete 180’s when “EA and Bethesda and Rockstar and Ubisoft do crunch! Not like our lords and saviors CDPR. EA and Bethesda and Rockstar and Ubisoft are so anticonsumer with their behaviors because of four bugs or something equally pithy!” to “To hell with crunch those developers knew what they were signing up for I just want my damn game” and “Just give it time guys this is CD Projekt Red we’re talking about they’ll pull this back around have faith they have one good game on their track record!”
i’m not out here telling people their anger isn’t valid, because it is. i’m just saying that there’s a lesson to be learned here: buying into the marketing is bad, it doesn’t matter what company it is. people can be angry that their expectations were betrayed, especially regarding content that was promised but not released, but expectations and trust should never be that high for any company in the first place. the second they denied reviews for console versions and refused to let reviewers use their own footage should’ve been a massive red flag for anyone who hadn’t already preordered, and preordering games when you can buy them digitally online is pointless (speaking as someone who preordered the game, lmao).
yes, cyberpunk 2077 is nowhere near where the hype placed it, and people being angry about that is totally fair. but i don’t think i’m wrong for thinking it would be nice if people actually took this as a lesson for once. no company, past a certain size, is on your side. they are not honest because they made one good game and posted funny memes on twitter. they are here to milk you for every dollar they can, even when they pretend not to be it’s so they can make you a loyal customer down the line.
if you watched some of their twitter marketing, at least, cdpr actively courted certain elements of their toxic fanbase, which is part of why my expectations were very tempered going into the game. still waiting to see if they do a better job handling certain things in the game itself.
No; there have been plenty of AAA games that live up to what they promise. You really are trying to put this on the gamers here and not the company that announced this game way too early, promised way too much, and then shipped an absolute flaming garbage pile to a customer base.
It is on them. Period. The only lesson here needs to be learned by gaming studios: don’t promise what you can’t deliver, because you -will- absolutely ruin your reputation, and deservedly so.
i understand you’re passionate about this but i’m not cdpr and please stop ignoring what i type to put words in my… mouth? on my fingers? how does this work exactly?
i’ll grant that i’m not really sympathetic to “gamers” as a subculture because it is incredibly toxic, but i’m not really even trying to address gamers, just speaking generally
no, i think there are enough people involved for multiple lessons to be learned. obviously cdpr messed up. there’s no arguing that point, it’s impossible. that’s why i’m not arguing that point. but consumers can also, hopefully, be reminded or learn that you shouldn’t get hyperinvested in a game that’s not even out, or accept that if you are and you do spend money ahead of time it’s entirely possible you will be disappointed with the end result. that’s why people say “never preorder”. that’s why i’m saying people should at least wait and see the reviews for the game on release before spending money on it. yes, the game was marketed as good and it wasn’t good, and it’s fine to be mad about that, but seriously, i’m not saying anything more contentious than that the next time a company markets their game and people start salivating over the second coming, maybe, with the experience of having been disappointed by cyberpunk, consumers should reconsider buying into it immediately. it’s even fine to be excited for things, just… temper it a little bit.
i mean the witcher released with a ton of bugs, as has been noted in this very thread, and no one learned from that, either, so it is what it is.
I’m pretty far from the type to have any real ground to stand on but it amuses me in a particular way to hear about ruined reputations and game breaking bugs and mass refunds and such.
There’s like, a scant handful of companies producing games in the industry that have clean hands and that hasn’t stopped their products from flying off the shelves.
Dude, I wasn’t even “hyper-invested”. Nor were half the people who have made complaints or asked for refunds, if the game forums and reddit forums are to be believed (and I trust them a lot more than WRA forums, frankly, when it comes to opinions on what a quality game is or is not).
I’m not hyper-invested into any game, and that includes CP2077 or WoW or any other–it’s a hobby for me, and that’s it. But when I purchase a product… and the company promises certain things about that product… and then I get said product and it’s missing half its components and the other half don’t work right… is that REALLY my fault, and should -I- be the one learning a lesson here… or is it on the company?
Yeah, it’s on the company. It’s called “false advertising” and more than a few gaming studios have forever ruined their reputation because of it. That said, I’m done bickering with your “blame the consumer” mentality here. And yeah dude, I -did- read your entire post; it was mostly you talking up ways to place blame on the gaming community for being excited and then getting a half-done product, and being upset about how many promises were broken.
I’ll leave this here. The company purposely duped (right down to only allowing certain footage used during reviews from big companies), lied, and misled millions of customers. That’s not OK and it’s not the fault of anyone BUT the company:
( article here h ttps://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/ )
(QUOTE from article) CD Projekt Red is directly responsible for the size of that gap. Years ahead of launch, CD Projekt Red offered journalists curated previews that inspired breathless [ledes](h ttps://metro.co.uk/2018/06/13/cyberpunk-2077-preview-game-next-generation-7627025/) like Metro ’s “ Cyberpunk 2077 may be the best video game ever made” in 2018. A year later, cinematic teasers and short, monitored gameplay sessions led some to [suggest](h ttps://www.windowscentral.com/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-preview) In June, CD Projekt Red had reviewers stream the game from a PC the company controlled. “It’s a playground rife with opportunity,” wrote Eurogamer at the time. “It’s a game about deciding who you want to be.”
I’ve been dancing around it but all I can say is that this feels like a really funny discussion to take place on an mmo forum. Particularly / especially World of Warcraft.
Honestly I think it’s amusing that 77 is as buggy as it is because wasn’t the new spiderman game also buggy?
Like, turning into a street lamp or a piece of cement buggy? I guess the only difference is that 77 basically praised itself and preened itself for literal years and Miles Morales came out of the gate as a lawn chair and we just kind of accepted it.
CDPR fans spent years dunking on everyone else for not being “polished” enough. At least when, say, TES6 is released (in the actual year 2077 at this rate) everyone will expect the ducks to report you to the guards and for the player to be able to strafe up 90 degree slopes, and we’ll be able to look past that and have some fun with proper expectations
then you should work on your reading comprehension, since i’ve been wildly taken aback by the intense defensiveness of your every response to a simple point i’ve made three times in different ways. i genuinely don’t know how to respond to you when you take what i say and transmute it into some weird anti-consumer rage directed exactly at you, somehow, and keep trying to convince me that CDPR is bad when… i already know and have acknowledged that several times. maybe we live in alternate realities or something because despite insisting you’ve read my posts you aren’t really responding to the content at all
but i’m as happy to leave it here as you, since we’ve made no progress after making the same post 3 times each. your anger is valid brother but i want no further part of it.
it will certainly be a quieter response than cyberpunk’s, so i look forward to it
i have honestly been in an irony-induced haze this entire conversation
I think this is kind of where I’m at. Like I don’t want individuals to be scammed, disappointed, lose a bunch of time they invested in their playthrough, etc. But there’s this sort of collective soup cloud of very loud, very vocal neckbeards who’ve had an absolute war axe to grind against almost everything else I enjoy because it isn’t The Witcher 3, or [Developer] should just give up their IP to CD Projekt Red to manage, or how their games (again, almost literally just The Witcher 3 at this point) were the true standard for true gamers and I only like little dumb-dumb baby games and they’ve been ecstatic about beating this drum for half a decade now, or one-sixth of my life.
It’s a “Leopards Ate My Face” moment that I can’t help but enjoy, even if that makes me a bad person.
Entire threads lying in wait to spring up for every other less than stellar launch or minor company scandal because at least we still have CD Projekt Red, who would never do anything like this. They’re my friend! Somehow.
I played Andromeda. I liked it. A lot. Not as much as Mass Effect 3, which is my favorite (fite me for my terrible taste) singleplayer game. Full stop. But it’s up there with Mass Effect 2 and Inquistion in my “this is an enjoyable use of my time and the story brings me joy” catagory.
It does help that I lived in the Arctic, so I never got to play the broken release version, and we were a patch or 2 in before it finally downloaded on my Internet Of The Frozen North. But when I finally got to play it, it was good. Not a revelation, some narrative hiccups, ect… but all right.
Seriously, there is nothing like expectations not being met to incite nerd hatred. And sometimes we set our expectations a bit too high. Granted, I haven’t paid much mind to it since I heard it was first person (gives me a headache), so that might be on the marketing team.
i will forever stand on the hill of andromeda being an alright game that got massive blowback because it didn’t live up to the mass effect reputation
was it spectacular? nah, not really. but i liked the characters, it was fun, and even though it had steps back gameplay wise they’d have to change a lot more than they did to actually make mass effect gameplay not fun to me
The problem with a lot of games and the people who love them are as more and more becomes possible, the more people daydream and stargaze about the perfect version of the game that will never - ever - come to be real.
State of Decay 2 for example was a completely servicable followup of the systems already established in State of Decay, with some polish, improvements, and additions you’d expect from a sequel, bundled up in a lower-than-mainstream cost.
It got absolutely r o a s t e d for no reason other than a huge amount of the fanbase for it had mentally created this living breathing ARK-with-Zombies-in-America MMORPG that would make every other survival game, zombie game, and MMO look like failures when compared to it.
Despite the fact the team never advertised any of this other than it would have a multiplayer element. It has its flaws, but chief among them were ones not even of their making, just expectations of a fanbase that didn’t hear the “Uhh, we’re not doing that.”
Sure there’s plenty of counterpoints of promises made and not kept but we’re kind of reaching that… Why Doesn’t Hollywood Take Chances Anymore temporary peak in gaming, IMO. Unless you make indie darlings, sequels to beloved franchises will get review bombed - doubly so if they take the lore in an unexplored direction or differently gameplay style - and new concepts won’t be able to take off because they’re not Dark Souls / The Witcher 3.
Why take chances when the next World of Warcraft expansion or Call of Duty game will give you an ROI that would make King Midas jealous.