Cyberpunk 2077 removed from PS Store and refunded
twitter.comduplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25462717
Good. Software performance should be held in much higher regard.
It is for games, and this is a direct consequence of that.
I do hope that this means we continue to get updates... how does that work if it is no longer on the store?
I don't want to refund the game, I want to keep it, I have so far been enjoying it and I am playing on a base model PS4.
They will. It’s a stopgap for Sony to top the bleeding from their online store.
I wonder how this game got released in the first place. In another life I worked as game tester and I am sure that most issues I read on 2077 must have been caught in those test. If Sony really cares about their brand more than fearing the competitors they could have stopped the release.
I can imagine a year-long crunch where the devs are so tired and the codebase so messed up that the progress is not goes nowhere.
You end up in a situation where you either need to have to start from scratch, or you release a half-backed product and hope it all works out in the end.
I can’t. We are not talking about a start up trying to deliver a product to test the market as soon as possible but a gaming studios delivering a polished experience. I really hope they didn’t have such amateur problems
The rumor has it that CDPR got special treatment from Sony regarding certification - it normally wouldn't pass it, but got accepted anyway due to production's high profile and a promise from the studio to get things fixed with the day one patch. In the end the patch didn't fix things nearly enough so here we are today.
Link to actual page: https://www.playstation.com/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/
I wonder why this happened to Cyberpunk 2077 when it did not happen to No Man's Sky. It could just be inconsistent enforcement or greater negative response, but it was also a timed exclusive with publishing assistance from Sony.
There's a difference between a game underdelivering content and a game continuously crashing.
No Man's Sky was disapointing but playable on PlayStation.
Worth noting, Hello Games have plugged away ever since with massive releases that have brought the game up to (and arguably beyond) what it should have been at launch based on promises.
It's one of the best examples of redemption of image I've seen in a game - also I'm a huge fan of VR No Mans Sky, it's one of the few AAA titles around.
Yeah, I do hope CDPR pulls off something similar. For many reasons I doubt it (even though they managed to turn a buggy Witcher 3 into one of my favorite games ever), but I do hope so.
I'd easily pay 30-40 bucks for this game if they fixed the performance issues and bugs, made the open world even slightly better, fixed the non-existent AI, and tweaked a bunch of the gameplay.
If they also managed to make driving fun and the choices more meaningful, I could imagine paying full price even. From what I've heard the story is okay, but that it has too much 'illusion of choice'.
Good. It's a buggy pile of crap on PC at least. I got a refund on Steam for it.
Interesting. I've been playing it on PC now for ~15 hours and have only seen a couple of minor bugs. I wonder how the experience is so different for users.
Game software is a highly optimized piece of software. GPU & CPU make, model, or things like RAM amount or I/O bandwidth can affect a lot of things.
Half-Life 2 was randomly crashing on AMD systems on launch. Valve was sometimes churning 4 updates/day. Then they requested some actual gamers with AMD systems to come to HQ for testing. After that point all bugs are ironed out in a week or so.
Hardware being to blame is plausible when it relates to visual glitches or outright crashes.
But blaming I/O bandwidth for bugs that are clearly related to game logic is naive.
> But blaming I/O bandwidth for bugs that are clearly related to game logic is naive.
Lazy loading assets with a slow I/O backbone might cause some glitches though. Unless you have a finicky storage controller, you can't create too much problem with a slow storage.
Crashing here constantly. What GPU/CPU combo do you have? Seems to be rather sensitive to that. I've had no issues with any other games on this PC.
3700X / B550M / GTX 1660 here.
5900X / B550m / Vega64
So far had one crash in looots of hours of play, which was a memory hog which ate my entire memory/allocatable region and then crashed the game (saw it slowly rise to 99% commit). Seems to be configuration dependant, who knows what setting causes it.
3900X / 5700XT
I was going to move to the Radeon side of things. Perhaps that'll help... assuming I can get one!
I have been binging it since launch. ATM, I have 40 hour playtime in it. I'm Playing it in a two year gaming laptop, with every graphical setting on Low. (I graphics don't say much to me)
Yes, the game is buggy. But, IMO, there are deeper problems that that:
- The crafting system is absolutely useless.
- The loot and equipment system is basically a "looter-shooter". Which I dislike. And make the crafting useless.
- The game economy is messed up. Cyberware implants and vehicles are way too expensive. And there is no incetive to buy any weapons. The loop is "fight stuff, get stronger stuff, equip the stronger stuff and sell the rest". After four or five loops you have money to buy something useful.
- Big problems the targeting reticle for interacting with stuff.
- The car physics is awful. The minimap is too zoomed in. And driving in first person is a PITA.
- NPC AI is really lacking.
- Quest design feels a bit lackluster. There are less alterative choices and nuance than what's in the Witcher 3 [0].
- The world, while visually and architecturaly well designed, it is empty. There are no side activities. No hotel rooms to sleep in, no option to sit at the bar and have a drink... There is a gun range that is only open for a short quest!
- There seems to be a lack of consequence in the game. I blow up and steal stuff and beal blows to organizations and the game world doesn't change with that.
I'm enjoying the game. And plan to finish it.
But I feel like CD Project Red bit up more that it could chew:
- I believe a push to have the best and latest graphical quality (raytracing and the sort) harmed other parts of the game.
- With a game having so much "bling", they should've added more stuff to do besides fighting people and questing. The places are only meaningful if there are meaningful things to do there. (GTA 5 had the same problem. GTA 4 did not)
- Writing and quest design should've been iterated a bit more. As I usually say, "voice acting did more harm that good to RPGs". This mean that it is harder to iterate on quests and dialog because it's expensive to re-record dialog.
- The Witcher 3 was more streamlined, the world was simpler, and had less mechanics. It was easy to balance the different systems. As well as game physics.
[0] The quest 'Wild at Heart' in one of the first quests in the game and set the tone for the general quest design in the game. https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Wild_at_Heart
Thanks for the honest review. From the little I got to play of it, you hit the nail on the head.
As someone from Poland I have my own suspicions on how all this came to pass - it's a reflection of the local work/management culture, one aspect of which is overpromising and sacrificing work-life balance to deliver - what's unique here that it's present on every level of responsibility.
That idea with working Saturdays for weeks on end is just one example.
I remember my mother, an artisan working in a theatre, having essentially a full month or two of those before each opening night.
My father, an engineer with a decent salary, would still pick up additional work and spend entire evenings on it. Hell, the first PC in our family was bought specifically for this purpose.
All this wasn't perceived as weird or unusual, because during communism working Saturdays were the norm. The parents of my friends would also be mostly absent, making the most of the rapid economic growth of the 90s. Unemployment was also fairly high, so it's not like they had much of a choice in the matter.
This environment created a management culture that either doesn't feel the need to improve and innovate(because you can always leverage the low cost of employment or put pressure on workers) or doesn't even know how to do that, so it experiments a lot - with mixed results.
Their share price is down nearly 15-16% on open. Must be absolutely terrifying for them. I hope their management's ego recovers well.
I'm hoping their ego doesn't recover.
I'm wondering how it would have looked if they had just postponed the launch.
> I'm wondering how it would have looked if they had just postponed the launch.
For the 3rd time? Not well, I've actually got back into console gaming after a near 10 year hiatus specifically for 2077, and to be honest after beating Watchdogs Legion and dealing with all of those bugs (also delayed online play due to bugs across all platforms) I'm actually ok just watching Youtube videos of people playing 2077 in HD rather than buy it myself.
I just wished most would not talk when playing, these youtube personalities are completely intolerable. And while I get that very embellished behavior is critical to their revenue stream, it's appeal is completely lost on and I'm perplexed by who would sit and listen to this for the 8+ hours they play for without wanting to jump out of a window head-first into concrete. Let alone pay them for the experience.
In a way it reminds me of that annoying friend we all had as kids and tolerated because his parents have him all the latest and greatest toys and games and junk food; how these people (Twitch specifically) managed to monetize this awful experience confuses the hell out of me when you realize the roles have been reversed.
I've always frequented arcades since I was a kid and now into adulthood, and nothing clears a room faster than an overly dramatic, and annoying player that wants nothing more than to seek attention.
With that said, this PR disaster is just par for the course for 2020, so maybe with a proper series of patches/updates it'll be all forgotten? I'll likely pick it up when its enabled multiplayer Online play and on discount, assuming they ever fix it on PS4 Pro.
>I just wished most would not talk when playing, these youtube personalities are completely intolerable.
Add "no commentary" to your youtube searches.
The easiest way to find out is to wait. CDPR always sells their games before they’re ready then continues development for a few years. It’s an unacceptable practice but the market allows (and thusfar has rewarded) this practice.
While this is true, the current state of this particular game is not good enough even for a pre-ready launch. The models that are just blobs and take ages to render in, the constant crashes on all platforms in the opening missions and a number of other bugs have made the game close to unplayable. I do hope they manage to bring the game to a workable state though because it's clearly fantastic from a story, environment and gameplay standpoint.
They just pushed it too far this time. They knew the risks but also knew they had extraordinary marketing. Their preorder numbers were insane. Delaying risked a less-than-maximized peak sales. They would have shipped a pile of burning dogshit if it meant they could hit the date. That’s exactly what they did.
If the market allows it, it’s an acceptable practice. Just a distasteful one
According to the conference call, they never really prioritized performance on prev gen consoles. We don't know if this would have changed with more time or if they would have used the time for other fixes / features.
That is what you get with a segmented market. Everyone with their own platform and developers having to invest a lot of resources and effort into adapting the same product for vastly different environments. An effort that is almost always in vain and never contributes to and furthers the actual game.
In a related note - wanna know why linux will never be desktop OS? 2^64 distros a software vendor have to account for. And when one distro dies, several new ones spring into existence - like CentOS for example.
I mean, the Steam Linux Runtime alleviates this quite a bit for games at least; my desktop's somewhat exotic, but I haven't had any issues running Linux-native games through Steam. e.g. Chrome, Mathematica, and Zoom have all been easy to install too, the most I've had to tweak was replacing some of Zoom's bundled libraries in a previous version.
I agree for the general case, though; I'm hoping AppImage makes headway here; I'm not sure how it works with libGL, libEGL, etc., but my understanding is that for most libraries, it moves the "compatibility boundary" to the kernel's ABI. (I guess for libGL and friends, the use of glGetProcAddress etc shrink the compatibility boundary a bit too.)
AppImage? What about snaps, or flatpak, or that new thing that came out just today XD
I don't get the folks who expect, exactly from this studio, to have perfect bug-less game on Day-1. I mean, how far detached from reality and clueless about games in general must you be? There are very few studios who can produce such quality prior to release (ie last Zelda), but I guess they are not under such pressure to release on many platforms in parallel just before christmas.
It will be an amazing game once the patches progresses, and if you are tolerant I am sure it already is. I would expect decent in 2 months, great in 6 months, awesome in 1-2 years (unofficial patches/modding including). Just like many other open world games.
Personally, I'll wait for those 2 months at least, also due to getting better/smoother performance out of my current PC rig. I have no doubt its a game I will enjoy tremendously, again and again, it fits my preferred style very much.
No. Unfinished games being released is a relatively new trend and only happens because companies try to maximize profit. There is no consumer advantage to it. Companies should be held accountable for their bad behavior, no two ways about it. Don’t sell your reputation by giving the middle finger to your customers.
> There is no consumer advantage to it.
Now you are assuming people having [next big game] in month N is as good as having it in month N+10. I think there is a large amount of gamers out there that would rather play a disappointing mess now, than a polished game later.
This doesn’t ring true at all. The games market is saturated. The reason to play the latest and greatest single player AAA game is because it is the latest and greatest. If the game is worse than a 5 year old competitor, then why even play it at all? Plenty of gamers have not played GTA V or The Witcher 3. Those are better experiences and cost much less.
> then why even play it at all?
Because it's been hyped. Because game sales is to a large extent about that pre-hype, not the gaming experience.
Publishers have (correctly) realized that the games themselves are following the same mechanics as in-game loot boxes.
You might also think that these poor/disappointing experiences would turn gamers off from buying the next game because they were burned the last time, but no that's not my experience either. The gamers disappointed about the release of AAA game 2018 from one studio, will happily buy the 2020 game on launch day from the same studio. And the studios know this.
Got any data?
People would shout and cry, and then as the time passes they would forget about the delay and just play it once it's released. People don't lose interest over game that they want to play just because it got delayed.
People don’t expect anything “from this studio”. There are millions who don’t know or care who the studio is.
What they care is that the pricey AAA game they bought will be playable and enjoyable. Looks like it’s not.
Then please explain to me why people who don't care who the studio is are eager to shell out 50 bucks or more on yet non-existing product that won't exist for months or years, instead of waiting for an actual review?
Ie would you pay for a Bosch refrigerator 10 months before its release and delivery just because they wrote about it someplace? A bit ridiculous idea, don't you think?
You know, like we do with everything else we buy these days? (At least I don't just blindly buy stuff on a whim, and I don't think I am the only one)
> I don't get the folks who expect, exactly from this studio, to have perfect bug-less game on Day-1. I mean, how far detached from reality and clueless about games in general must you be?
50 years ago the quality of the code was much better. I expect some things from SW that I buy: 1. To run on normal HW (i.e. home PC or laptop dedicated mainly to web browsing and watching movies) or on the target HW 2. To have a usable interface ( Hello MS, Apple, Google - do you listen ?) 3. To be bug free or at least the main anoying bugs to be fixed. (Hello MS, Google - do you listen ?)(yes i paid for my Android phone)
>There are very few studios who can produce such quality prior to release (ie last Zelda), but I guess they are not under such pressure to release on many platforms in parallel just before christmas.
I'm impressed. So you are saying that a lot of "studios" produce crap and this is ok because other do it.
> It will be an amazing game once the patches progresses, and if you are tolerant I am sure it already is.
That's what they said about MS Windows too and look what it became of it.
> I would expect decent in 2 months, great in 6 months, awesome in 1-2 years (unofficial patches/modding including). Just like many other open world games.
See MS Windows.
> Personally, I'll wait for those 2 months at least, also due to getting better/smoother performance out of my current PC rig. I have no doubt its a game I will enjoy tremendously, again and again, it fits my preferred style very much.
Until one day when you had enough of its bugs, you smash the keyboard and the mouse in despair and you uninstall it.
> 50 years ago the quality of the code was much better.
That's hardly an apt comparison when you see they're focused on rich World creation with many layers of depth as opposed to the rather linear 'white square hits white dot' style games like pong.
They were clearly rushed/pressured by management to release after 8+ years of development and with so many people at home with nothing but free time to fill and 2 delays this year alone, its very obvious to see what happened. I'm guessing this was bound to occur. Especially when modern business models are based on creating a casino addiction model fixated on capturing eyeballs and creating discord online rather than delivering a solid working product from day one.
Personally, my biggest gripe with games/gaming is the lack of fulfillment you get for the time spent after having actually achieved things in real life. I now look it as wasted time not doing things that actually matter or improve my Life and those around me, whereas my teenage-self would have regarded such an addiction to wasting time as 'fun.' Had COVID not happened I definitely would not have picked up gaming again and would have been at an arcade if I had spare time and the inclination to play.
It's really the worst kind of time-sink now because I don't enjoy it and have mainly used it to distract me or to take a break from real-life. And I somehow got paid to play watchdogs legion, too...
It's probably less an expectation of a "perfect bug-less game" and more a game that has so many issues (on this platform) that it's unacceptable even by today's standards of releasing unfinished games. Also (EDIT) I wonder if it's maybe more about the risk of epileptic seizures (which are a legal liability) than the bugs - to quote from https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/12/07/cyberpunk-2077-epile... , "[...] V will be given a headset that is meant to onset the instance. The headset fits over both eyes and features a rapid onslaught of white and red blinking LEDs, much like the actual device neurologists use in real life to trigger a seizure when they need to trigger one for diagnosis purposes". That sounds like a really bad design decision if you ask me...
Then again, CD Projekt is a relatively small developer, and Sony would probably think twice before treating a game by say, EA, the same way, so I wouldn't completely rule out double standards...
Thinking like this is completely ridiculous, software should definitely work upon release, especially on consoles, which have known hardware. They even knew it did not work on PS4 and Xbox One and withheld that information from the public by reviewer manipulation. The nuclear option of being pulled by Sony should be a huge wake up call to CDPR that something has gone really wrong in their management.
Have you not seen how it runs on a base model PS4? You have to be dreaming if you think the bar being set is "perfect" or "bug-less". The frame rates and visual quality are unacceptable when you consider what Rockstar pulled off with RDR2 on that platform.
When you consider no PS4 footage was made available before launch, it seems to me that CDPR were intentionally deceptive.
> I don't get the folks who expect, exactly from this studio, to have perfect bug-less game on Day-1.
Sony doesn't care about that. It's irrelevant, Sony is just protecting themselves from a potential class action lawsuit.
CDPR on the other hand, it's like they are asking for it. All that fiasco was very short term thinking.
Don't CDPR do this kind of thing for every game they release? You think they'd have learnt by now.
I've been getting fed up recently with just how buggy PC games are and regretting not getting a console, but I guess the grass isn't always greener.
The Witcher 1 had some seriously major issues until roughly a year after launch. They are like Bethesda - consistently buggy launches. The difference is that CDPR tends to release gargantuan patches after about a year that fix most of the technical issues (and sometimes altering the actual content a lot as well, like the intro to TW2).
> I mean, how far detached from reality and clueless about games in general must you be?
Condescending attitude aside, I've played multiple games on launch day, and I even worked as a developer in a major gamedev studio. The sheer amount of bugs, glitches, poor implementations, and missing QoL features are inexcusable. Especially from a game that spent 7 years in development and was delayed 8 months.