CD Projekt Red says it won't give up on Cyberpunk 2077

[midian182]

In brief: Given everything that happened with Cyberpunk 2077, one might think CD Projekt Red would want to let the game slowly fade into the background so it can concentrate on new ventures. Joint CEO Adam Kiciński, however, has other plans.

Speaking to Reuters, Kiciński said, “I don’t see an option to shelve Cyberpunk 2077. We are convinced that we can bring the game to such a state that we can be proud of it and therefore successfully sell it for years to come.”

Cyberpunk 2077, as we know, was one of the most anticipated and hyped games of all time; an RPG from the same studio that brought us The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had a lot to live up to. Despite selling over 13 million copies in ten days and beating Fallout 4’s concurrent player record for a single-player game, Cyberpunk 2077 was rife with technical problems that were even worse on the PS4 and Xbox One.

The disastrous launch saw CD Projekt Red’s shares drop 30 percent during the first week of release and multiple refund demands. Less than a month after it arrived, Cyberpunk 2077 had lost 79% of its Steam players.

The horrendous console issues saw Sony remove the game from the PlayStation Store. Four months later and it’s still absent, though Kiciński said the company has been in contact with Sony, and that the 1.2 patch is a step toward Cyberpunk 2077’s return to the store.

It started to look as if Cyberpunk 2077 was being pushed into the background last month when CD Projekt Red said the game’s grand multiplayer experience that was supposedly comparable to GTA Online was “reconsidered.” The company also announced it is restructuring to develop multiple AAA games simultaneously.

The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of Cyberpunk 2077 are arriving in the second half of this year, and the DLC/expansion packs remain in the works. We’ll have to wait and see if these are enough to reignite interest in a game that most consider disappointing at best.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/89302-cd-projekt-red-wont-give-up-cyberpunk-2077.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I bought Cyberpunk on release night.

Was playing on a Corei9ex, 32GB DDR4 and a 2080Ti - which I later upgraded to a 3090 FTW3 - on SSD.

I swear: the game ran nearly flawlessly for me. I even streamed my first playthrough on Youtube.

I had 0 issues.

I was completely blown away by the graphics and the gameplay was fun. Switching from the 2080Ti to the 3090 - and without using the benchmarks - I was clearly able to see framerate increases and texture improvements.

I encountered very few bugs: mostly people standing in a "T" shape, but normally never a problem and nothing game breaking.

On my second playthrough, they had already begun patching it and I saw more bugs. T stances. Music not syncing with the scene properly. Quests that wouldn't start or end properly...

The game on day one was FLAWLESS to me. Console gamers, however, were never going to be able to run that game on those old HDD systems.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I bought Cyberpunk on release night.

Was playing on a Corei9ex, 32GB DDR4 and a 2080Ti - which I later upgraded to a 3090 FTW3 - on SSD.

I swear: the game ran nearly flawlessly for me. I even streamed my first playthrough on Youtube.

I had 0 issues.

I was completely blown away by the graphics and the gameplay was fun. Switching from the 2080Ti to the 3090 - and without using the benchmarks - I was clearly able to see framerate increases and texture improvements.

I encountered very few bugs: mostly people standing in a "T" shape, but normally never a problem and nothing game breaking.

On my second playthrough, they had already begun patching it and I saw more bugs. T stances. Music not syncing with the scene properly. Quests that wouldn't start or end properly...

The game on day one was FLAWLESS to me. Console gamers, however, were never going to be able to run that game on those old HDD systems.

The game was designed to run on those old "HDD" systems.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but blown away by the graphics? It looks like a late PS3 or early PS4 game. Visually it has ltos of lights but lacks on the fine details. No better then GTA V's visuals, from 2013. And the world is just empty, bereft of the player interaction of games like GTA or even watch dogs.

 

[winjer]

I finished this game, a couple of days ago.
It's not a bad game, but it's also not a great game.
If CDPR wants to make it a game to be proud of, it's not just about fixing bugs.
There are a lot of gameplay problems. The story is just okish. Most side missions and jobs are just filler.
They have a lot of work to do, if they want to improve it to the point of being a great game.

 

[VitalyT]

multiple refund demands

Multiple demands? You are either on CD Projekt RED payroll, or you do not understand what multiple means in English. Which one is it?

Multiple means more than 1. So 2 is already a multiple. Cyberpunk 2077 received over 2,000,000 refund demands. That's not multiple, that's a f. loads, that's copious, that's downright horrendous, and a total f-k up.

 

[Nobina]

CDPR fans will be very angry if they read this.

 

[envirovore]

Or in other words:

'our investors put a lot of money into this sh*tshow and they expect us to bleed it dry'

 

[QuantumPhysics]

The game was designed to run on those old "HDD" systems.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but blown away by the graphics? It looks like a late PS3 or early PS4 game. Visually it has ltos of lights but lacks on the fine details. No better then GTA V's visuals, from 2013. And the world is just empty, bereft of the player interaction of games like GTA or even watch dogs.

Cyberpunk has some of the best atmosphere, best architectural design and best music I've heard in a game. I was completely satisfied.

I give it an A-

 

[QuantumPhysics]

I finished this game, a couple of days ago.
It's not a bad game, but it's also not a great game.
If CDPR wants to make it a game to be proud of, it's not just about fixing bugs.
There are a lot of gameplay problems. The story is just okish. Most side missions and jobs are just filler.
They have a lot of work to do, if they want to improve it to the point of being a great game.

I agree with you. They put a lot of energy and care into the side missions. It's too bad that the main missions and the overarching storyline were so problematic.

 

[R00sT3R]

Probably 98% of the whining surrounding this game is coming from the juvenile part of the console gamer crowd.

As a PC gamer, I had an enjoyable 30hrs or so playing through the campaign without too much hassle, one CTD and one game stopping NPC bug, which was solved with a quick load.

Looked great @1440p with RTX enabled (albeit locked to 30fps) on my RTX 2080.

 

[Adhmuz]

I was able to play and finish the game without any game breaking issues, honestly the game ran pretty good once you set it up correctly for your hardware. I enjoyed the game, being the first game in a long time I actually played through and have interested in revisiting.

I would however appreciate if they could fix a couple things, mainly the NPCs and the police, both of these aspects took away a lot from the games atmosphere. NPCs getting stuck in weird positions, and general weird and sporadic behavior, can't tell you how many times I got run over and they just keep driving, even if you end up on their car from this incidence.

The police on the other hand are nearly none existent until heaven forbid you commit a crime and then they appear behind you in vast number ready to execute you. Fun fact, if you shoot a civilian and you're backed up against a waterway and can see nearly all sides with land they won't spawn in. They just have to materialize behind you so you can't see them pop in magically, this system, terrible choice on the part of the developers...

Other than these two things the game played very well for me, and the second one can be avoided if you don't kill any of the derpy civilians.

 

[Dimitriid]

I feel there is a lot of misconceptions on this discussion. I had almost no bugs or performance issues on relatively modest hardware myself.

So to the people commenting on the bugs and in a larger sense, to CDPR themselves: fixes are nice but your number one fix would be several massive free DLCs that restore most of what the game promised it would deliver and just flatout did not or delivered the bare minimum.

Game's core issue is lack of content: there's a lot of very samey items hidden everywhere and it feels like you keep trying to level up and find new items just because the random number generator is stacked against you, not because it's actually interesting to unlock new items and such.

And even if there's a lot of extra content in future DLCs you will never be able to wash out the bad taste in my mouth the main campaign left me with: It's a great story but be honest: how many of you basically ignored the story's sense of urgency to prolong the game about a third of the way through Chapter 2 when you realized you're getting close to wrapping things up and you still have a ton of the city and side missions to explore?

First act was beautiful and you can tell that was the level of detail the team wanted to aim for when they had some creative control left as it feels like all of Act I was just the intro for Street kid. I was expecting as similarly lengthy intro for Corpo and Nomad and I am sure the dev team wanted to take that much time to crafting a completely different experience but then they were hit with "Yeah, we're releasing 2020 come hell of high water" and just abandoned the other intros and went through the campaign in act II and III as fast as they could and it feels like it was rushed and you just fast forward through a lot.

Compare this to Witcher III and how much slower your progression through the story felt vs 2077 which certainly starts very solid and on this general design philosophy then it feels like it's just trying to get to a bathroom to pee as quickly as possible and everything flies through.

 

[R00sT3R]

Compare this to Witcher III and how much slower your progression through the story felt vs 2077 which certainly starts very solid and on this general design philosophy then it feels like it's just trying to get to a bathroom to pee as quickly as possible and everything flies through.

Witcher 3 had far too much padding for me, the side quests & missions were all just (slight) variations on a theme. I've finshed Witcher 3 (to my satisfaction) but there are still many, many markers on the map that I have no interest in visiting to clear, TBH.

CDPR need to find the middle ground between CP 2077 & W3, for their next game.

 

[Dimitriid]

Witcher 3 had far too much padding for me, the side quests & missions were all just (slight) variations on a theme. I've finshed Witcher 3 (to my satisfaction) but there are still many, many markers on the map that I have no interest in visiting to clear, TBH.

CDPR need to find the middle ground between CP 2077 & W3, for their next game.

Fair enough. My only comment is that CDPR marketed this game as if it was even more widespread and meandering than Witcher 3 and as we can agree, 2077 is far more concise.

So I don't begrudge people that enjoyed 2077 more because it was more concise, but that's really not what was being promised or what was delivered.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

"The disastrous launch saw CD Projekt Red’s shares drop 30 percent during the first week of release and multiple refund demands. Less than a month after it arrived, Cyberpunk 2077 had lost 79% of its Steam players."

Don't put stupid, unsubstantiated claims in your news reports. All that number from Steam shows is that the total number of players using Steam were not playing the game. It does not mean that 79% of players stopped playing the game because they thought the game was bad.

It is a single player game. A lot of people put tens to hundreds of hours into the game after the game released and had been out for a month. They played it, finished it and moved on.

What a stupid f-ucking statistic to put in your news story that has zero substantiated information to properly back up your claim that the game "lost 79%" of it's players within the first month.

 

[Carmaine]

I finished this game, a couple of days ago.
It's not a bad game, but it's also not a great game.
If CDPR wants to make it a game to be proud of, it's not just about fixing bugs.
There are a lot of gameplay problems. The story is just okish. Most side missions and jobs are just filler.
They have a lot of work to do, if they want to improve it to the point of being a great game.

I agree. I think a game has to have at least 1 of the 2. If the story isn't too good, make sure the gameplay is both good and running well. Or vice versa. Obviously, we'd all love to have both.

Bottom line, they shouldn't have caved in to public pressure and released it on their own terms.

 

[Sean T]

I swear I've heard the same things recently.... ohh yeah... Anthem. We see where it ultimately landed. Time will tell if they fall through with this promise.

 

[Chemicalfaerie]

I bought Cyberpunk on release night.

Was playing on a Corei9ex, 32GB DDR4 and a 2080Ti - which I later upgraded to a 3090 FTW3 - on SSD.

I swear: the game ran nearly flawlessly for me. I even streamed my first playthrough on Youtube.

I had 0 issues.

I was completely blown away by the graphics and the gameplay was fun. Switching from the 2080Ti to the 3090 - and without using the benchmarks - I was clearly able to see framerate increases and texture improvements.

I encountered very few bugs: mostly people standing in a "T" shape, but normally never a problem and nothing game breaking.

On my second playthrough, they had already begun patching it and I saw more bugs. T stances. Music not syncing with the scene properly. Quests that wouldn't start or end properly...

The game on day one was FLAWLESS to me. Console gamers, however, were never going to be able to run that game on those old HDD systems.

Same. I play on a 2060 RX Super with M.2 ssd and it looks great. Compared to a lot of images I have seen online. I feel more like it was back in the Crysis days.

 

[Fuzzy Dunalap]

"I ran the game flawlessly with no issues/few issues, I don't understand the problem?" I wonder if they are repeating what everyone is saying and didn't play the game.

There are issues are know others ran into. You know, not having a complete HUD (times, I saw the programming object id instead of whatever it was suppose to be).

Meanwhile, things like having animations (you know, for things like diving out of a moving vehicle) are not in the game. Bugs that you won't let you finish the quest (I've encoutered quite a few of things of those, like cars moving in the ground, desync with voice, missing or misplaced objects during animations or cut scenes), overlooked.

You know, **** you KNOW came up in QA. But we all know management said "**** it", sell it anyway.

What was sold back whenever it came out wasn't even a Beta, that was Alpha. You didn't even have finished systems in place. And they sold it. They sold a Alpha build for a game they can just finish as we go along.

And their answer is to buy game studios to finish the game because we're already moving onto the next one.

I asked for my money back. Got it back it. Satisfied? Yup, I got my money back and I'll move on from Cyperpunk and CD Red. That game needs more than a year to get ready.

Violated my own 6 month rule and got burned. That's what gaming has turned into, pervasive with greed for profit at the expense of quality.

Why not? Even if they come out with something that's hot garbage, very few if any will admit to it, looking at you Kotaku.

I'm sitting it out..Keep my dollars and buy the game when it hits the bargin bin with the "community patch"

 

[yRaz]

"The disastrous launch saw CD Projekt Red’s shares drop 30 percent during the first week of release and multiple refund demands. Less than a month after it arrived, Cyberpunk 2077 had lost 79% of its Steam players."

Don't put stupid, unsubstantiated claims in your news reports. All that number from Steam shows is that the total number of players using Steam were not playing the game. It does not mean that 79% of players stopped playing the game because they thought the game was bad.

It is a single player game. A lot of people put tens to hundreds of hours into the game after the game released and had been out for a month. They played it, finished it and moved on.

What a stupid f-ucking statistic to put in your news story that has zero substantiated information to properly back up your claim that the game "lost 79%" of it's players within the first month.

1) it's a Shawn article and this is to be expected
2) I have almost 200 hours in it and I loved the game.

I was disappointed by it and it was certainly over hyped. Instead of losing a few months of my life to it, like I expected, I lost like 2 weeks. I do feel like I got my money's worth out of it. They need more driven sidequests, like lots of them.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

We need to separate the console issues from the PC version. The PC experience is vastly better as the game was released in a pretty good state. Now they should be embarrassed with what they did to console owners, but as a PC only gamer that's not my problem. They made a rod for their own back with the hype, but it seems to be a pretty good game. I fully intend to get Cyberpunk in the next big STEAM sale or by year's end. By then it should be pretty well patched and polished and maybe some good mods to further improve it. Hell I haven't even played through the Witcher 3 yet, I'm now lost in Valheim and Skyrim SE.

 

[Axle Grease]

The fan-made mods alone will keep the game selling for years to come.

 

[poohbear]

This should never have been released for PS4 or Xbox, it was a waste of resources for this studio. The previous gen consoles simply could not handle this game, period. Even for PC and next gen consoles, they needed another year to bring up to Witcher 3's quality levels. I haven't bought it yet and don't intend to until the "director's cut" version comes out with all the patches.

Anyways, this must have been a very humbling experience for the studio after their high from the Witcher 3. Hopefully they did some introspection and restructured. It's a phenomenal learning experience for them.

 

[scalexander99]

This should never have been released for PS4 or Xbox, it was a waste of resources for this studio. The previous gen consoles simply could not handle this game, period. Even for PC and next gen consoles, they needed another year to bring up to Witcher 3's quality levels. I haven't bought it yet and don't intend to until the "director's cut" version comes out with all the patches.

Anyways, this must have been a very humbling experience for the studio after their high from the Witcher 3. Hopefully they did some introspection and restructured. It's a phenomenal learning experience for them.

This game shouldn't have been released for PS4? No offense but graphically it's really not that great, the graphics are way overhyped compared to other recent games. The PS4 base model is capable of running a lot of games with incredibly good visuals Ghost of Tsushima, even CDPRs own Witcher 3.. and many other games with great graphics so clearly he system is capable of running a game like Cyberpunk.. It's not the systems fault the programmers didn't optimize the game for it.

 

[loki1944]

Honestly, even if it had no bugs, Cyberpunk is a pretty boring game; it has no substance or identity, let alone good combat . The script a meandering, self important bunch of drivel; the graphics on max settings look like the world is slathered in vaseline (not realistic at all). Summed up the game is awful even without bugs; it has no single merit on which to anchor.