Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty fun. Other than the time it corrupted eight hours worth of both manual and autosaves, I’m enjoying it. It’s a solid game (as long as you aren’t playing it on a base console, apparently).
However I would not say that the game lives up to the hype.
To be fair though, how could it? Based solely on the press and fandom hype over the past half a decade, you’d be forgiven for thinking Cyberpunk was going to be a transcendant RPG, an experience the likes of which we’ve never seen before. It wasn’t just going to raise the bar, it was going to take the bar and fuck your girlfriend with it, and you’d be grateful for your proximity to said fucking.
Could it have been that? I don’t know, but I doubt it. That’s the detrimental effect that runaway hype has on video games. It can set expectations, or at least hope, so high that the only place to land is below it, in disappontmentville. Not only that, but the emotional investment that the “fans” make in the game’s potential turns accepting the possibility of anything less into a personal affront.
The Cyberpunk we got is a realistic mess. Some pretty decent, if not inconsistent graphics (again, provided you’re on the right hardware). Night City is fun to travel around, but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily doing the “open, living world” thing any better than games like GTA. The gunplay is, at best, adequate, and the leveling/loot system is pretty standard fare. The story and dialogue has been great thus far, though there are a lot of weird bugs that do detract from it at times (example: I interrogated some sleazeball regarding the whereabouts of a girl he’d sold, and I acquired the information I needed. Having no further use for him, I decided to kill him just ’cause, and after doing so the game/quest progress re-aligned itself and acted like I’d never talked to him first, simply killed him. It then made me search through his computer to find the exact information I’d already gotten).
I did lose a bunch of progress to something that keeps corrupting save files, but otherwise none of the bugs I’ve encountered have ruined my ability to play the game; just made my time with it occasionally more quirky.
As I said at the outset, overall I’m enjoying my time with Cyberpunk. I have it up there in company with Anthem, Andromeda, and others, and sure, you could argue that some of them are good games, some are bad games, some are bad games that became good, etc. Some of them launched with very real issues, and some were worse than others. But the comic isn’t about whether the game is fun or not, good or not. It’s about whether it could measure up to the hype, and in all of those cases I believe the answer is no. There are very few games that can actually live up to their pre-release hype, for a variety of reasons, yet the publishers all insist on sending them up that mountain only for the nigh inevitable tumble back down to earth. Back to reality.
The game, from what I have seen, reminds me of Skyrim on launch. It had some pretty big issues. Several patches and it became great. Couple of actual versions later and it is awesome. I wonder if the Cyberpunk devs are going the Bethesda route?
Highlights my sorrow in modern gaming. I want to go for release day of a game for no spoilers and can just play. But they seem to have so many bugs it is best to wait a few months till they are ironed out.
Fully agree nealithi, but the sad fact of the matter is that devs are beholden to publishers these days. It’s all about the money, not about the game. They need to pump something out by the launch date, and it’s going then whether it’s ready or not. Cyberpunk is obviously an exception to that rule. I think CDPR fell victim to the hype themselves and so had to keep pushing it back and back and back to iron out all the bugs they could prior to launch. Unfortunately, most of the hyped up fandom would have seen this as “OMG… Read more »
In this case, it wasn’t a publisher but the higher ups of CDPR. Either way, it’s number crunchers that decide when the game is going to be released regardless of if the game is ready or not.
and let us not forget that some of CDPR devs received actual death threats over delays…
Completely agree. I was actually glad to see them postpone it and not be pushed into releasing it when there were things they knew were not ready. I haven’t had any horrible issues (AC:V had a mission blocker 20 hours in that’s not fixed yet) on PS4 Pro. But I expect any game to have some minor glitches in the first few months. I’d have to put more blame on the publishers than the studios because I feel they don’t understand that a lot of bugs aren’t going to actually show up until near the end of making a game,… Read more »
Many publishers have to. Games have gotten so insanely complex programming wise they often can’t find a lot of the bugs in alpha or beta, just the really bad/ apparent ones. But when your test poll jumps from a few dozen or hundred to a million all of a sudden something that was a might happen just did 10k times
Paid beats are easily accepted now though and would give them the sample size they need.
Do you think a paid beta would have helped Cyberpunk? Or just hurt it as everyone complains about how bad the beta was, as they treat it like a preview and not a beta test?
FWIW, the Bethesda route is to release an unfinished game and then to wait six months for the community to patch it into some semblance of completion.
I thought it was to ride their prior successes and hope people still like them enough to say “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” and then ignore the need to fix things because they’ve already got our money.
People seem to forget the mess that The WItcher 3 was when it was first released. It didn’t score low, but the number of people who wet nuclear on the internet for something as simple as a horse turning seems about on par with what we’re getting here.
Now it is considered one of the best Western RPGs ever written to code.
That’s why I don’t get involved in all the hype. I’ll watch a trailer, catches my interest I’ll keep my eye on the game. I learned the hard way about being to hyped up for games and movies. The more hyped up you are the more disappointed you are. Comic fits perfectly. My personal thoughts and opinion.
Likewise. Also, a decent game with bugs at launch -> a good game a few months in -> a great game a year in because you get extra content, more bugs killed, community stuff, and often a sale price. The reality is that the price point, for some of us, contributes to the expectation. If you sell me something with some problems at $20, I can still feel I didn’t get rooked. If you sell it to me for $80, I do definitely feel like I’ve been shafted. The other reason I won’t pay $80 for a hype fest that… Read more »
did this for Shield, Breath of the Wild, Origami King, and any other game ive been interested in. less i know beforehand the better i feel the game is. its rather funny watching people whine about games i love but then i realize most of them were hyped into expecting a divine creation.
You can not invest in the hype, but unless you disconnect, it’s pretty hard to not become aware of the hype. And being aware of the hype surrounding a game is likely still altering your perception of it, regardless of whether you fully buy into it or not.
I legit didn’t know Cyberpunk had been hyped for half a decade. I just thought there was mundane levels of “wow this genre isn’t done much” excitement.
Tim has a love for buggy or bad games doesn’t he?
Avengers, cyberpunk…
considering ive yet to get my copy of oblivion to even run past the first load screen id say the same applies to the “oblivion is best people”.
then again im willing to hold off my opinion till i actually get the game to play.
I have a love for video games. Period. And none of them, not a single one, is perfect. Some get closer than others.
Some have have bugs or design issues that make enjoying them unteneble. Some I am able to find enjoyment in DESPITE their issues.
If a game has a few bugs, I’ll tolerate it.
If a game is defined by bugs, I hate it,
If a game sells while hiding how bad it is, purposely, while taking consumers money, I’ll never forgive it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game defined by its bugs and it actively tried to hide how buggy it is.
And hey, if you love it, power to you. I just can’t help but notice how you seem to love the ugly christmas sweaters of video games.
Cyberpunk is a fantastic game that has some issues. Avengers is a shallow game that had significantly more issues and still hasn’t worked a lot of them out months later. I just don’t see how you can compare the two. Cyberpunk does a lot well. Sure it’s not breaking any new ground in the genre, it does what it does well and in an entertaining way. The story has been great so far. (If you have story quibbles, please don’t post those. I’m only maybe half way through) The only people that have an actual legitimate gripe are those that… Read more »
I’m playing since 25h and I’m still very hyped. We’re far from me:a.
You are confusing “feeling hyped” with The Hype™
It is not the same thing.
well my english is not THAT good it seems, but hey, I’m learning it on the internet. Anyway, in a year with patches and mods that game will be the goty.
I’ve found that only 4 games have really lived up to their marketing this year: Doom Eternal, Animal Crossing, Ghost of Tsushima, and FF7 Remake
Ghost was lighting in a bottle and I truly hope that company can do it again.
Man, I feel like Ghost was robbed at the Game Awards. And I loved Last of Us 2 as well. Ghost was just better. The fact that it didn’t win in audio design was a damn crime.
Sony would have been emabarrsed if their big super hype AAA game lost to their lesser known game, so they paid off Doritos Pope to make sure that didn’t happen.
Seriously, don’t take The Game Advertisements seriously, they hold no authority over which games are better than others, or have better audio design than others, and so on. And this is the show that had a giant razor running around one year. It doesn’t take itself seriously, neither should any of us.
Just had to ask, why’s he wearing a harness if he doesn’t have a rope?
Its a paid cosmetic. It doesn’t affect gameplay.
Thank you for this comment
Yeah! Someone else who enjoyed ME:A!
it was not THAT bad. It was just not as good as me2/3.
Count me in too. Did you talk to Conrad’s sister? She’s just as ‘dumb as a rock’ as he is.
at least we’ve gotten a meme goldmine so there’s that
I got the game on release day, installed it on my base model xbox one, the patch was installed at the same time and to be honest, I dint realize there was a problem until I read about it on the internet a day later. A lot of the issues had been ironed out and the ones I recognised from my own play – eg. people popping from low res long distance models to high res close up models late were something I was used to having had a low spec PC for most of my life lol.
I feel like they should have just waited to bring it out on the PS4/Xbone. It very VERY obviously wasn’t optimized for it and despite the patches some people still find the game basically unplayable. It’s happened before with other releases, mainly on the Switch, but it could have probably helped with so many problems; crunch and delays due to optimizing, negative reviews and demands for refunds, plus they would have had all the goodwill from the positive reviews and the older systems would likely have been more widespread due to the new systems causing trade-in re-distributing.
PS4/Xbone were actually the only reason why the game was released now. New game releases on PS4/Xbone only make sense until end of this year. I think that’s the biggest reason why CDPR didn’t delay the game any more.
When Christmas comes, much of the demand for PS5 and Xbox series will be fulfilled and you finally should be able to buy them off the shelf. That in turn will cause old consoles to be retired.
But old consoles don’t get “retired” for a SIGNIFICANT amount of time. They were squeezing games out of the PS2 for a long time and the 360 and PS3 are still widely used systems. This early in the next consoles release games are expected for the previous system for at least another few years.
This. For gamers with the money to burn who spend significant time gaming, then regular hardware updates are probably the norm. A lot of the rest of us, who have other things to spend money on (kids, cars, bills) and who play, but don’t play every last game nor play necessarily every week even, hardware updates will tend to run years and years between (including skip a generation entirely). And there’s a lot of these folks and they do represent a big part of the overall revenue picture for any firm (not saying the well off game focused crew aren’t… Read more »
Have you found Smoking Crotch Guy yet? I got a good laugh from that sidequest.
Thats a youtuber cameo, Jesse Cox on youtube btw
I feel SW:G and WOW should be tagged on the rock.
I feel a bit fortunate that I’ve had zero crashes or significant issues playing on my Series X. I did take some internet advice and turn the additional graphics settings down, though. The level of in-world detail is really astonishing when you think about it. Just looking around the city while travelling, you realise that while similar, a lot of the buildings and advertising boards you see are very unique. Perhaps we’re spoiled by the likes of GTA or Skyrim, but aside from the weirdly clunky NPC animations, the world itself does feel realistic. And the worldbuilding in general I… Read more »
Honestly, it feels like the 3d shooter action rpg sandbox games are the worse at this sort of thing. And it is probably because they are trying to do everything all at once. Which also gets them more hype because they are promising everything all at once.
Borderlands was great.
-meanwhile playing on base console and having encountered no issues- Honestly, at first I thought people were just making things up. So far even before the patches I wasn’t having any issues and haven’t noticed any weird graphics as far as I can find. o.o; So a bit surprised by all the news on how bad things are.
Sometimes it’s just luck of the draw. I’ve had a mostly smooth experience aside from the fact that the game up and crashes on me whenever it feels like, with no rhyme or reason.
ive done this for so many games. ill read reports of buggy messes and unplayability only to never be able to replicate the bugs and have absolutely no issue. really makes me wonder if people even consider their inputs can potentially be the cause. a bug report should never be “found a bug, FIX”
Weeeell…I think i will wait to January or February
why the explicit and subliminally violent image to describe the hype?
I never heard the hype.
I just bought the game for pc after seeing it pop up on steam and epic. I thought to myself, hmm, this might be a big title worth getting.
Going into it with no expectations, I’ve been having an absolute blast.
Same here, although I heard about it a few years ago, but didn’t get into the hype train. It IS a great game, and so far I have not encountered any serious bugs on PC.
Half-Life 3 is still climbing, which is likely why it will never be made.
This is why I *avoid* hype in the first place.
And give games a few months to fix the problems they will inevitably ship with with the current “Fix it in Post” Paradigm
do gotta give them the credit they tried to hold it off to fix it pre but the public was starting to go on about it becoming the next duke nukem
I never saw anybody suggesting it was going to be the next DNF, but CDPR *were* starting to receive death threats for the delays… Because, you know, GAMERS. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
the save file thing calls back memories of soul calibur 3 on my ps2. delete any OTHER game save and the game will corrupt your save and force you to restart all over. sucked only having one card and not a big one.
i like the NMS WAS HERE
I’ve personally run into no major issues. Just some random graphical twitches that are to be expected. I’m loving this game and am majorly impressed with the detail in this weird and totally corrupt city. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every minute so far in my 50 hours in game.
Honestly, I’ve grown sick of all the shinanigans with big tech: Microsoft, Facebook, Bethesda, Nvidia, EA, Sony… scalper’s and their bots…
CDPR is supposed to be one of the good ones. DRM-free, high quality content. But between a 3 year crunch time, and the release state of a game THEY overhyped, I’m losing faith.
The only game I ever had which truly lived up to its pre-release hype, and actually exceeded it, was Breath of the Wild. But that’s only one type; there’s also post-release hype, where a fandom talks of the virtues of a game so much that I get super hyped to eventually try it, and that hurts as bad.
But yeah – I almost -never- pre-order games, I always wait to hear reviews, even if an awesome company is making it. Everyone has duds, even in the most successful franchises. I’m fine with waiting another few days.
I actually specifically came in here to see if someone would mention BotW, and also the two new Doom games, and to see if Tim thought they were some of the few that made it to the top of the mountain. To date, aside from very minor quibbles that are a matter of subjectivity rather than outright flaws, I’ve never heard a single bad word about those three games. Doom Eternal, in particular, appears to be that rare game sequel that seems to have managed to live up to and maybe even surpass its direct predecessor. Curious what anyone else… Read more »
Probably easier when the developer and publisher are on the same page, as is the case for Nintendo in house projects. BotW also benefited some from the “changing the formula” speculation, which helped tone down the hype a little.
No Mans Sky is a perfect example of this as well. Years later it is an amazing game that realizes the dream. and it is still buggy as all get out, and that is fine.
NMS was a HUGE victim of its own hype and overpromising. It fell off that mountain hard.
But yes, it got up, brushed itself off, and started working to improve, to get closer to the game it was hyped up to be. It may still have issues, and the sour taste from its launch may never fully dissipate, but I give it a lot of credit for the improvements they’ve made over the years.
NMS “was” here, as opposed to actually being there, is a nice touch.
And Diablo 3, which never really recovered and had its second expansion cancelled.
Wasn’t most of the hype problem the fault of the buyers and their wildly unrealistic expectations, not Hello Games themselves?
High quality, polished games are actually cheaper and run even better on the hardware that didn’t exist when they were initially released 5 years ago. Once you get accustomed to the extra release lag time, it’s all win and arriving at your doorstep at roughly the same rate. Sure, you won’t get to play Cyberpunk 2077 for 5 more years, but in your world The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt /just came out/, and you’re still really enjoying that top-notch version of Skyrim from only 3 years ago that (looking up steam price history…) holy crap only cost you $6. Damn,… Read more »
I have it on Series X… There are some bugs. Mostly graphical hiccups. I find I have to save and shut down every now and then because the NPC’s voices stop playing or shards don’t display information. Nothing game breaking so far. Very pretty game, though I play it in performance over display because the 30FPS just… hurts my eyes after awhile, especially when racing around the city. Actually that is something I have noted, it has “crashed to desktop” twice on me. Both times in performance high FPS mode. That actually seems glitchier than the FPS Fancy graphics heavy… Read more »
I don’t know if it’s terrible of me, but I really enjoy watching Gamers get excited for things that I know will disappoint them and reveling in all of the rage from the immensely deflated hype
Really can’t wait for Elder Scrolls 6 to be an utter flop because Gamers absolutely will build it up to be the next game in this cycle when its marketing starts trickling in
Gamers really just need to devote themselves to better developers, like From Software. Hyping up Elden Ring will not lead to any disappointment
Not many things live up to the hype.Games,Movies, sporting events, the production companies all go way overboard on the hype.I avoid it as much as possible,don’t read reviews, watch trailers,fast forward thru commercials ect.if I’m interested ill buy it or watch whatever it is, and like it or not like it based on the reality I’m presented with.
It was a HUGE mistake to release on PS4 and XBox. They are so different from a modern PC or next-gen consoles that the development required to Port would be devastating. And the fact that there are so many bugs across all product lines just comes to show that had they simply focused on PC, next-gen XBox and MAYBE PS5 (different architecture, which is why I said “maybe”), they likely would have released on time and with far fewer bugs. Releasing on Stadia, Xbox One, and PS4 could be their undoing, particularly after the revelations and admitting that they demonstrated… Read more »
What people wanted and expected were nothing revolutionary or ground-breaking. Just an amalgam of features we’ve already seen in multiple other games, some over two decades old.
I think most of the fanbase was expecting Deus Ex + GTA + Witcher 3.
Instead we got Borderlands + Farcry, done poorly.
It was well within the scope of their capabilities and budget. I think given another year or two at most they could’ve pulled it off.
Am I the only one who is having the slightest bit of evil joy that for once it seems its the console gamers that are having the issues while the PC gamers seems to be having significantly less?
I avoided the hype, watched the videos when they came out. Saw Keanu was in it at E3. Ignored all interviews and gameplay footage. I knew I was going to buy it from the start. I’m a huge fan of Shadowrun and anything close to it is just fun to play. I like the aesthetic of Cyberpunk. That’s what I bought the game for and the game delivered that to me. Loved the story so far and I’ve been getting a kick out of traveling around Night City. Now if only my game stopped crashing every 2 hours…
I usually avoid the hype, and wait a bit before buying games. I broke my rule for Destiny, and relearned my lesson.
Has any open-world FPSRPG ever, in the history of video games, launched smoothly without major bugs and other issues? As video games go, it seems to be one of the hardest things to get right, and I’ve never bought a title at launch that didn’t have major issues. Dishonored is the closest thing I can think of to an exception, but honestly it still had its problems and it was also relatively linear (compared to others in its genre). I have sorta trained myself to both get hyped but also moderate my expectations, and it has served me well at… Read more »
The most astounding thing though is the hate train, the gaming press rides on a mob of – once again- infantile gamer hordes against cdpr. Some seem to really enjoy seeing “the popular dev fall”. And if one dares to say, to at least give them time to patch things up, you get called names and the mob turns its forks and torches at you.
Great new/old Mob World…
Don’t forget they are defending the death threats gamers sent to the developers over delays, and many were ready to carry them out.
But we’re not allowed to talk about that.
This is the first I’ve heard of the corrupt save bug on any platform….could that have been a erhm singular issue? though I did have that with Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and fixed it by uploading my save, reinstalling the game and then downloading my save. I usually get *all* the bugs lol. I’m on PS4 Pro and the only real bugs I’ve encountered with this game are frequent crashes, especially on longer plays….but my spouse also plays on PS4 Pro – we have a dual setup and they’re right next to me. When one of us crashes, the other will… Read more »
I believe that Cyberpunk 2077 will be an absolutely phenomenal game eventually. From the sound of things the reason it’s so rough right now is because it simply wasn’t done when they released it(despite having gone to Gold status) but they didn’t want to announce another delay that would infuriate gamers similar to what happened with TLOU2(or they wanted some of that sweet sweet Christmas money depending on who you ask). Over the next few months they’re going to be releasing a number of large patches that will finally get the game up to snuff and that’s when I’ll get… Read more »
Cyberpunk 2077 finally let me walk around a fully-realized Night City, a place that’s only existed in RPG sourcebooks and my imagination since the 1990s. I couldn’t be happier… And, sorry, I’m one of those insufferable jagoffs who has a machine that runs it very very very well.
After that little hypetrain how could it actually meet any expectations? 😉 That’s what you get for building too much anticipation… This is the same reason why we’ll probably never see Halflife 3, that’s why Diablo 4 will be a letdown – the expectations are already too much for any game to handle. And the funniest thing is: we’re doing that to ourselves… 😀
This is my experience as well. (Apart from the corrupted saves. I will now make sure to back-up periodically.)
It’s a perfectly fine game. Adequate. Above average even. It’s doing exactly what I wanted: letting me drive around a future world and shoot people in the face while periodically hacking.
It’s biggest problem really was the hype. And the reaction just feels baffling. Have people *never* been disappointed by a game before? Do they not know how this works: game companies tell you their game will be amazing and you doubt it because it’s fucking marketing
btw, so far I’ve only heard of saves being corrupted on the Steam version, and best guess is it has something to do with Steam’s Cloud Sync. (Which you can disable on a game-by-game basis!) [Oh, I see Tim already tweeted that.]
Over 21 hours in, and my GOG version hasn’t corrupted the saves, even using their implementation of cloud-based saves.
“yet the publishers all insist on sending them up that mountain only for the nigh inevitable tumble back down to earth.”
Well, why wouldn’t they? Gamers worldwide repeatedly told them with their wallets that this is what they want; that they don’t care how disappointed they end up, they’ll still pay top dollar for something overhyped. If they didn’t like it, they’d stop preordering stuff, right?
They even sent death threats to them over delaying the game, so honestly gamers got what they deserve.
To all readers:Which games do you think lived up to their pre-release hype? Pretty good track record for the Ys series myself and #9 is looking Sweeet.
I love the No Mans Sky reference on the rock.
In other news I’m one of the happy Cyberpunk players as my bugs, to date, have been minor glitches sometimes needing a reload (thank you the frequent auto save). It’s sort of delivering what I expected except the city is maybe a bit less open and more redundant than I had hoped.
shocked no mans sky not sitting there with a crown on.
That’s because Star citizen is the one with the crown on.
cyberpunk will over hyped is not as bad as WoW burning crusade was. chars clipping off map, epic lag crashes, spawning to wrong zones. it was and still is a hot mess. I have a char I not logged into since TBC which was bonded with the dark portal spiralling forever. even admins could not work out how or why that occurred.
It’s funny. All the hyped kids are wailing and gnashing. I was barely paying attention, and I’m having a good enough time, on an XB1 even. It’s Deus Ex gameplay in a GTA style world. Nothing revolutionary, but a damn great idea.
I was struggling with the skill trees, but nukesdragon has a character builder up. That helps.
So if you were to draw a different angle of this comic, who/what would be standing proud at the top?
Witcher 3, Half Life 2, Metal Gear Solid 3 and 5, most Super Mario’s, Breath of the Wild, Metroid Prime Trilogy, Doom 4, Final Fantasy 7 Remake (provided they do better with the rest of it) and every main Pokemon except Sword/Shield. Also MCU Phase-1, Peter Jackson’s LotR trilogy, and Alita: Battle Angel, even though they’re movies; I wish I could add James Cameron’s Avatar, but everybody’s so (rightly) hung up about the story. And World of Warcraft built himself a throne at the peak, but sits a dying husk in it. Maybe not all as far up, but they… Read more »
I’m enjoying Cyberpunk quite a bit. The gameplay reminds me alot of Saints Row 4, and gives me a similar feeling. Feminine V’s voice is fairly similar to female Boss’s voice as well.
I was disappointed with Mass Effect Andromeda…
If you can’t look at a game in a series and say it’s at least as good as the first one, then it’s a flop in my eyes.
honestly minus the bugs the game was exactly what I expected it to be, a mix between Deus Ex and GTA. and im fine with what I got. really enjoy it even.