CD Project Red expects Cyberpunk2077 will eventually be a "very good game"

[GhostRoadieBL]

Summary

 In a recent interview with a Polish economic newspaper Rzeczpospolita Adam Kicinski (President of CDPR) is hopeful for the game and is optimistic for their updated roadmap to continue "fine-tuning" the visuals and performance. He was quoted saying Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually be seen as “very good” due to brand awareness, and expects it to “sell for years”

 

This is following a delay to the upcoming Next-Gen upgrade to Q1 2022 instead of late 2021.

 

More free DLCs, updates and improvements should raise the game to the promised standards. There was also rumours that the game would be coming to the Xbox Game Pass, but CD Projekt was quick to shut them down.

 

Quotes

Quote

"We're proud of many aspects of the game, but as we know, not everything went our way," stated Kiciński. "Nevertheless, the brand awareness of Cyberpunk that we've managed to build is huge, and the game universe, its characters and details have fans all over the world."

 

My thoughts

Before stating my opinions it should be noted; I played the game from launch and been one of the very very few players to not run into many bugs, I have over 500hr on the game on PC and am hopeful for the project to continue.

 

The apologist in me's thoughts: It was a huge game that got caught up in marketing and promises before being pushed out (IMO) WAYYYY too early to make an unrealistic deadline. We have seen this industry wide and unfortunately the relevance clock ticks down faster than the games can be fixed.

 

The 'What If' scenario:

Consider a world where the game came out in 2023, following Facebook Metaverse normalizing VR and the optimization time to make the game run well on average hardware at launch. This game gave you a VR first person world to explore with a huge game and world to play with.

This is my hope for the future of the game as the potential for fixing huge swaths of issues is there. If you don't believe that, look at the modding community overhauling everything from character model alteration after creation to full game re-balances which change how your all the weapons in the game work. It's quickly becoming the next Skyrim but with a stronger base of graphics and world.

 

It's a flawed game, I have complained about that undisputed fact from the first time I wanted to use the brain dance item or change features of my character's appearance at a ripper doc. They flaunted an open world and gangs to fight with but no way to carve out a legacy (looking at Saints Row), no way to swap your looks, not even keeping to the overtones of the aesthetic of the world (in game ads, billboards, 'junk' items, purchasable items) It was too ambitious and still seems to be too fractured to recover the magic formula for the game to meet the expectation they put forward.

 

Still hopeful for a proper VR cyberpunk world game.

 

Sources

https://www.techspot.com/news/92393-cdpr-claims-cyberpunk-2077-eventually-become-good-game.html

https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/cd-projekt-says-cyberpunk-2077-will-be-perceived-as-a-very-good-game-3105652

[GuiltySpark_]

Well that’s neat. I enjoyed it as it was when I played through it on release. 

[StDragon]

CP2077 should be re-launched once the next generation of (affordable) RTX GPUs are released. Just sayin.

[SorryBella]

50 minutes ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

 In a recent interview with a Polish economic newspaper Rzeczpospolita Adam Kicinski (President of CDPR) is hopeful for the game and is optimistic for their updated roadmap to continue "fine-tuning" the visuals and performance. He was quoted saying Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually be seen as “very good” due to brand awareness, and expects it to “sell for years”

They really need to break this fucking loop, this kind of shit is unsustainable for brand recognition.

[Arika]

interested to see what the DLC is. from everything i've heard the post-game (or lack thereof) is one of the largest complaints outside of the bugs

[Brooksie359]

Honestly I think the problem is that a bad launch can crush a game and I don't think cyberpunk 2077 will change that. Honestly idk if it's just the fault of covid or what but most of the games that have come out since the start of the pandemic have been sorta a mess. I mean look at how much of a disaster battlefield 2042 is. It also clearly was rushed and released too early even after its release was delayed. 

[tikker]

6 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

It's a flawed game, I have complained about that undisputed fact from the first time I wanted to use the brain dance item or change features of my character's appearance at a ripper doc. They flaunted an open world and gangs to fight with but no way to carve out a legacy (looking at Saints Row), no way to swap your looks, not even keeping to the overtones of the aesthetic of the world (in game ads, billboards, 'junk' items, purchasable items) It was too ambitious and still seems to be too fractured to recover the magic formula for the game to meet the expectation they put forward.

Witcher 3 took some time to fix as well. I think calling it a flawed game is a bit too much and that they are selling themselves a little short by saying it will be a good game eventually. In my opinion it already is an good enjoyable game. Many mistakes were made, both sides hyped it way too much. At least they're owning up to them.

 

Regarding those complete overhaul mods: I love seeing what the community can do, but we have to keep in mind those things would never have been if we did not have the game in the first place. It's easy to say mods make the game 100x better, and maybe they do, but they have an incredible foundation to build on. They definitely suffered scope creep (like a certain other game), but every mod that implements "missing feature X" has had the luxury of having only that single thing to worry about, building on a delivered game. Imagine the amount of work that would have needed to go into developing that "1000-mods modded Skyrim Ultimate Version", or the CP2077 equivalent, if you were to actually develop that from scratch.

 

 

[Avocado Diaboli]

Cool, once it's a good game, maybe I'll buy it when it's 70% or more off. I decided not to buy the game anywhere near full price because of their insistence to let their developers crunch to hammer a barely sellable product out in time for the Christmas release window and I don't reward tactics like that. I always think back to that proud picture they posted on Twitter of the game going gold. Hindsight is hilarious when you think back at how they wanted to convince players that "no really, after the first couple of delays, it's done and we're totally happy with the final product". They gave in to the pressure of entitled gamers who couldn't handle another delay and went so far as to issue death threats to both members of the press who accurately reported on it (as if those members of the press were responsible for the delay just by mentioning it) as well as the developers. They had the option to delay and chose not to. Ironically, in a setting that's all about human exploitation at the hands of corporations, they did the very thing the setting always criticizes.

[ToboRobot]

When is it going to be a game rather than an aesthetic simulator?

[cj09beira]

5 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly I think the problem is that a bad launch can crush a game and I don't think cyberpunk 2077 will change that. Honestly idk if it's just the fault of covid or what but most of the games that have come out since the start of the pandemic have been sorta a mess. I mean look at how much of a disaster battlefield 2042 is. It also clearly was rushed and released too early even after its release was delayed. 

Battlefield was likely made to be a battle royal, thus the extremely big maps, no fixed classes, much smaller squads etc, so they most likely had to change quite a bit to get it to how it launched, leaving less time for bug hunting, but outside of this battlefield has been have pretty bad launches since bf4 came out, they seem to never learn, and people dont seem much bothered by it and keep buying on pre order/release day

[jagdtigger]

24 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

and people dont seem much bothered by it and keep buying on pre order/release day

I havent bought any of them since they started using browser and external site based "launcher". Guess what happens when they pull the plug on the website.....

[TetraSky]

So they are hoping it will be like No Man Sky, where it was trash on release and slowly got better over the years?

[Montana One-Six]

10 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

"fine-tuning" the visuals and performance

10 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

free DLCs, updates and improvements should raise the game to the promised standards

Isn't remotely enough to make it a good game imo unless "updates and improvements" mean overhauling the whole game (which I highly doubt).

 

Right now it is a mediocre game (without taking bugs into account) in my eyes and to me the biggest problems are the story (and the lack of pretty much any meaningful choices) and the lifelessness of the city. So the game will never get any better than an OK game unless that gets changed.

 

Their false marketing and bullshit they were spewing before launch made everything worse so maybe he is hoping that in a few years when all that is forgotten people won't judge the game as harsh as they do now.

 

 

[Doobeedoo]

Nice it's going to get long support and DLCs. It was nowhere near as buggy as many other top popular yearly rehashed franchise games that got released, yet people continue paying high price over and over.

[GhostRoadieBL]

4 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

They gave in to the pressure of entitled gamers who couldn't handle another delay 

That's not actually true, they bent to the partner companies who are the only ones who can push a game out early. Fans have zero control over the game release.

[RejZoR]

The issue here is, no one will remember it as such even if it some day reaches that point. Just look at "No Man's Sky" game. There are still people who will say it's a shit game because thats what they know from back then. But devs were busy improving it, making it what it should have been in the beginning. Cyberpunk 2077 has the exact same issue. It may be amazing game in next 2-3 years, but everyone will remember it as that horribly buggy game with gameplay features missing.

 

There is also issue of experience. Whoever played and finished the game, even if they totally update it and improve in all things, they experienced it already and they know the progression and ending. It'll just never be the same if they play it again. For example, I'm a massive System Shock 2 fan. The game was amazing on release and I loved every bit of it. But playing it again just isn't the same because you've experienced it already, even if you pick different class, different paths, different weapons and use different approaches. You've experienced the game already. They'll never rework the game so much to feel all new like for example Black Mesa does to Half-Life 1. It's essentially exactly the same game, but they rebuilt it from ground up to have new everything, even level architecture to a point it was in fact exact same game, but it felt entirely different and it was a whole new experience like you were playing a different game. Cyberpunk 2077 will never have that and thus won't change experience.

 

And there is 3rd issue people like me have who are hesitating to buy the game until it'll actually be good and we'll play it to have experience we were promised in the beginning. Game is a lot cheaper now, but I just don't want to buy it and ruin first play experience. I also resisted watching any gameplay except those bugs compilations so I don't know any of the story or events. I guess I'll buy it in few years time when it'll cost 10€ and it'll be amazing experience. Until then, I'm just gonna wait.

 

And because of all this, it's super important you release a game in correct state the first time. Otherwise you'll face all the above issues. Multiplayer games are not bound to this rule because they are expected to be the same thing over and over, but better over time with more stuff. Single player games don't have that luxury.

[JZStudios]

8 hours ago, tikker said:

Witcher 3 took some time to fix as well. I think calling it a flawed game is a bit too much and that they are selling themselves a little short by saying it will be a good game eventually. In my opinion it already is an good enjoyable game. Many mistakes were made, both sides hyped it way too much. At least they're owning up to them.

Witcher 3 improved rather than fixed. The initial release of Witcher 3 was fine, and far more stable than anything Bethesda has done. The post release stuff of Witcher 3 was some UI and QOL changes with minor bugfixes.

 

2077 is straight broken, it's been a year since launch (HOLY SHIT!) and it's still not much better. Keeping in mind that they started developing 2077, paused, made the entirety of the Witcher 3, then went back to work on 2077 after W3 was supposed to have solved some issues like open world. How they went from their prior game releases to 2077 is astounding.

[Blademaster91]

10 hours ago, cj09beira said:

Battlefield was likely made to be a battle royal, thus the extremely big maps, no fixed classes, much smaller squads etc, so they most likely had to change quite a bit to get it to how it launched, leaving less time for bug hunting, but outside of this battlefield has been have pretty bad launches since bf4 came out, they seem to never learn, and people dont seem much bothered by it and keep buying on pre order/release day

I agree it makes sense that Battlefield 2042 was probably made to be a battle royal game, until EA realized no one wanted to play a battle royal mode in a battlefield game, I think it seems like EA wanted it to be a battle royal because of specialists you can use a medic, support or engineer items on instead of a fixed class so there is less teamwork, no server browser, and you don't stay in the same lobby every round.

But I got so tired of buying games that were pretty much a beta test at launch then hoping the game gets patched enough to be playable and just stopped buying them unless they're on sale for a significant discount.

10 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I havent bought any of them since they started using browser and external site based "launcher". Guess what happens when they pull the plug on the website.....

I think having a site based server browser is a nice feature, and EA can pull the plug on servers whenever they want as they haven't allowed you to host your own Battlefield server since BF4.

[JZStudios]

7 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I havent bought any of them since they started using browser and external site based "launcher". Guess what happens when they pull the plug on the website.....

I know that all the BF games up to V have been using the same launcher thing. No idea about 2042, but if it does, it's likely to just be the BF launcher for the foreseeable future. Unless BF itself is cancelled by EA.

 

4 hours ago, GhostRoadieBL said:

That's not actually true, they bent to the partner companies who are the only ones who can push a game out early. Fans have zero control over the game release.

Considering CDPR are self published, who would that be?

 

3 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The issue here is, no one will remember it as such even if it some day reaches that point. Just look at "No Man's Sky" game. There are still people who will say it's a shit game because thats what they know from back then. But devs were busy improving it, making it what it should have been in the beginning.

I remember on launch people compiled lists of promised features that weren't in game. I'm curious how many of those are in game now. It's definitely not the product it was marketed as, it's just turned into another kind of shitty pointless survival game. Even if I had bought it in the hopes it would be updated, they've gone in a direction different than they marketed so I'd still be unhappy with it.

[Roswell]

8 hours ago, cj09beira said:

Battlefield was likely made to be a battle royal, thus the extremely big maps, no fixed classes, much smaller squads etc, so they most likely had to change quite a bit to get it to how it launched, leaving less time for bug hunting, but outside of this battlefield has been have pretty bad launches since bf4 came out, they seem to never learn, and people dont seem much bothered by it and keep buying on pre order/release day

Battlefield games have always had enormous maps, that’s one of the staples of the series. The game’s map sizes aren’t abnormal compared to previous entries.

[Brooksie359]

9 hours ago, cj09beira said:

Battlefield was likely made to be a battle royal, thus the extremely big maps, no fixed classes, much smaller squads etc, so they most likely had to change quite a bit to get it to how it launched, leaving less time for bug hunting, but outside of this battlefield has been have pretty bad launches since bf4 came out, they seem to never learn, and people dont seem much bothered by it and keep buying on pre order/release day

Tbh I would have to partially disagree. We're there some bugs on launch with bf1 and bfv? Yeah but nothing too bad and they still had a ton to play with and honestly I had alot of fun playing the games despite some of the bugs not being totally figured out yet. Battlefield 2042 is different as there are some bugs that a lre legit game breaking and quite obvious too as I have heard multiple people have the same bugs yet somehow they still launched the game with those bugs. I can handle small bugs but game breaking ones are simply not OK for me. 

[Elisis]

I hate this growing mentality where companies believe it's fine to mislead consumers by thinking everything would be fine, so long as the game is eventually made acceptable more than months from release. Especially when people fanboy studios such as CDPR so much.

[CTR640]

[Quackers101]

hope they do recover and the past "lets just add more hours onto a dying project". crunching the hell of the developers. Like they did before release and after.

while cyberpunk could improve in certain ways, doubt it's new enough to fix certain problems from whenever they started the project.

 

at least more and more game engines, has more and more tools to improve debugging, but the best ones are built in debugging to that specific game.

also the recent AI solutions, some for code (simple) and some for AI pathfinding/testing of a scene or level.

[IAmAndre]

The Scrooge McDuck in me is happy that next year I buy a AAA game free of bugs for a fraction of the price. I saw it on sale at around $15 this year so it's a pretty good deal.