What a shit show. In their rush to get it out for Xmas 2020 to make money, it comes back to bite them in their ass.
Why is this happening more and more? I feel like we get one of these stories every other month now. Where some game comes out either under delivering or in this case a buggy mess and everyone just loses their shit. Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing CD Project Red but I do look at this industry and think "is it time to scale down and stop trying to outdo themselves?"
I've been thinking about it. 8 years to develop this game and I can't see one new interesting thing about it outside of its cool setting. In contrast, Shenmue III, a game that we all expected to at least be a buggy mess given the budget and what not, took 4 years to develop and despite its flaws (it has them) is largely solid. It wasn't the buggy mess I feared it may have been and actually worked mostly okay. I'm not talking about its flaws, I'm talking about general build and performance.
Yet here we have a game that took 8 years to develop and promised all these amazing things and yet the end product is a buggy mess that feels like it needed more time in the cooker.
I get game development is rough and I understand CD Project Red had a much bigger task on their hands than YS Net did (they were working with at least 6 different versions of the game across all current platforms its released on...not to mention next gen) but I don't know. I feel like the grand scope of this simply got away from them and it just makes me wonder...is it time for games to narrow their scope a little and stop trying to reach as big as they are?
I feel like open world games in general have gotten too samey, too concerned with filling the map with size over quality and filling out their maps with meaningless check lists instead of finding interesting things to do with said worlds. But I feel something is completely lost in 90% of open world games and that is the sense of discovery. I was playing Spiderman Miles Morales earlier and I got to thinking that I haven't once stopped to look at the city. All I've done is pretty much gone objective to objective collecting another random checklist collectable. Sure, it's not the largest open world but it still feels sterile to me and just feels like another excuse of a setting to be littered with random shit to collect or do and then forgotten about just as quickly as it came.
I can't stress just how much Cyberpunk strikes me as just another open world game in the mold of the other open world games out there this gen. Yes, the setting and aesthetics are nice and all but the gameplay is so samey to everything else out there. It's not a bad game by any means (performance aside) but given the wild promises it made, it's so wildly mediocre. And as such the backlash was only inevitable. It's why I never bought into the hype for it. Because I was afraid it was setting itself up for disappointment. When people started bigging this up in the same way they were bigging up No Man's Sky at launch, that's kinda of when I knew the game could never deliver and was set for disappointment.
I kinda wish game devs would narrow down and stop over promising. I really feel like game devs need to take another look and refocus a little. Maybe focus less on size and scope and actually start refocusing on core gameplay ideas that you want to explore instead of creating a large world and then having to fill it out?
But hey, this is what the general market wants so they're gonna cater to the general market and give them more of the same. But I personally believe something is lost in modern game development and projects like this are a perfect example of how an idea got lost over the course of 8 years. It just feels entirely like a game that had wild ideas but got completely lost in the execution and ultimately just became another open world game. At least to me.
People can laugh at The Last Guardian and its long development time, but poor frame rate on the PS4 base aside, at least that game did deliver what it promised to deliver upon release and did it mostly well. I look at Cyberpunk and think somewhere in here is a wildly ambitious game that was too big for its own scope and got completely lost in the 8 years of development. Or they were willingly lying and over selling. It's why I never bought into the hype because I was always afraid this would happen. The game would come out and not deliver on that hype. Or worse, be a buggy mess reminiscent of The Witcher 3 at release and get wildly criticized for it.
I dont have any special inside knowledge but it wouldnt surprise me at all
if this game version was not in development for 8 years.
Sure, they worked on something for 8 years but i doubt that they worked
for 8 years on this final product.
Its the same thing when people say that Nioh was in development for 13 years or whatever,
so it took them 13 years to make the final product. Thats not true.
They stopped the development completely three times and then made the final version
from scratch in about 4 years.
The thing with Nioh is, it makes sense because they also changed the development team three times
(all owned by Koei Tecmo)
so every team made its completely own thing that had nothing to do with the old version.
Cyberpunk 2077 was always a CD Projekt Red game
so this project was probably just way too ambitious right from the start
and they had to remove / change things one by one again and again
until it came down to the typical open world design because thats a formula that works
and then they put their main story and their old but too ambitious ideas in that open world in a scaled down version.
You know like kind of four different small construction sites but all of them together stacked atop each other
are a really big construction site but they only had 3 years or so to make it work.
Sure, someone like Rockstar Games can work on something for 6, 7, 8 years
and the outcome will probably convince most people
but Rockstar Games has the money safe from Dagobert Duck.
These guys are okay with spending like 500+ mil USD on one game.
Cyberpunks budget was probably around 70-120 mil USD,
so if we take the lowest amount, thats only about 30 mil USD more than the game Kingdom Come Deliverance.
This will create a lot of problems when your main idea is already too big
and you dont have a top tier development team.
Then take some stubborn heads of the market share or the publisher or whatever into that pool
who insist on the old idea in some form at all costs and now you are in a fine mess.
If we look at the original stuff that they talked about at some point like your own way is so important,
every life path is so important and unique, hand crafted NPC routines, VR features, side activities,
adult themes, unique story decisions, optional stories, gangs, customize everything, explore every street corner ...
it all comes down to too much content for this team and this budget in this time frame.
And of course the typical over hype but thats not just a problem created by the studios.
Gamers, the press and influencers are a part of this problem too.
Hype creates likes, clicks, news, stuff that the press and influencers need for their jobs
and gamers love to hear about the next big hype project and they will never learn.
They always think that the loudest and biggest PR campaign means that this will be the best product ever.
www.tomshardware.com
www.pushsquare.com
if they released this trailer they would've been ok in regards to committing fraud. There's no denying that CyberPunk will lose its appeal after they patch all the bugs. The bugs are the only entertaining part of an otherwise subpar gaming experience.