Bruh the first 6 months of cyberpunk were an unofficial early access
Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of “The Pickup” which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.
Now the game is still a good game. But it’s a great “emergent gameplay” game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it’s not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of “The Pickup”, which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.
Wasn’t the Witcher 3 also a mess at release? I’ve never played them, but I distinctly remember my friends complaining about it, and now it’s pretty beloved.
Maybe CDPR is hoping the same thing happens with Cyberpunk?
I played both later (TW3 in 2018 and I just played through CP) and they were very stable for me. CP a little glitchy at times but hardly game breaking. I recommend doing this in general, with big games such as these.
True, but your point is more consumer side. The headline is talking about CDPR wanting to have a “banging game” on release, which is historically uh…sketchy at best. They should be called out on the statement separate from consumer habits.
Why wouldn’t it work? I mean, if CP2077 came out in EA a lot of the shit CDPR scrambled to get fixed, all the plans they changed based on the response, etc might have been lessened or not even a problem since it would be expected to be unfinished. And I say this as someone who didn’t have a problem with what I got with the game at launch, personally.
Of course, teasing it all the way back in 2012 and showing off concepts that never materialized didn’t help either.
I’m a day one CP77 player and spent a lot of time in Night City. I’ve made four level 50 characters, read every patch note as it updated, and even fell into the FF06B5 rabbit hole.
The launch wasn’t great, but the negativity was miscalibrated.
The worst part of launch was the previous gen versions, which were functionally unplayable.
Yet most people were hanging shit on visual bugs and physics irregularities. This is an issue since CP77 is supposed to specialise in spectacle and immersion, but was a long way from being “unplayable”.
Outside of one instance, during an emotional scene, when a character died while a gun was clipped through his head, these bugs were funny. It didn’t affect how much fun I had.
The game is in a very good state now. The progression system had a major overhaul since the start of 2.0 and it is a fucking blast!
The game is far more streamlined, they’ve reduced the time spent in the menu, and made cyberware more important.
Perk points are now a lot more balanced.
Previously, if you wanted to play “properly”, you would dump 20 attribute points in Cool for Cold Blood, 18 in Tech to craft legendary items, and 20 into Intelligence/Body/Reflex, depending on your main damage type. It was quite restrictive.
Now the game is pushing you to use each attribute type to level up all five of your skills.
Besides labeling Tech up to 20 (you’re a dipshit if you don’t), and Reflexes to 15 (for air-dash) you can basically do whatever the fuck you want with your stats, and the gameplay is far better for it.
Once you get things set up, you’re zipping around the city like spiderman, sliding up to peoples butts at 70km/h and shoving the funnel of a shotgun into their ass. It’s a good feeling.
I seem to remember Cyberpunk 2077 having a release that was quite far from perfection…
The whole release was early access in my opinion, they just weren’t honest about it. Eventually it was a really good game, but even then it didn’t have everything they’d advertised.
I mean, he’s talking about what he’d prefer. I’m sure that if you ask him, he wouldn’t prefer problems at launch either.
Witcher 3 was pretty damn buggy on release too. Not Cyberpunk level buggy, but still
And a complete lackluster main quest.
So, did that whole “late discovery” thing just not happen with Cyberpunk? Because I just have a hard time imagining CDPR looking at the state that game launched in and thinking that they’d made a game that was basically perfect. I mean, at least they learned in time for Phantom Liberty’s release, I guess.
