Interesting. I've been playing it on PC now for ~15 hours and have only seen a couple of minor bugs. I wonder how the experience is so different for users.
Game software is a highly optimized piece of software. GPU & CPU make, model, or things like RAM amount or I/O bandwidth can affect a lot of things.
Half-Life 2 was randomly crashing on AMD systems on launch. Valve was sometimes churning 4 updates/day. Then they requested some actual gamers with AMD systems to come to HQ for testing. After that point all bugs are ironed out in a week or so.
> But blaming I/O bandwidth for bugs that are clearly related to game logic is naive.
Lazy loading assets with a slow I/O backbone might cause some glitches though. Unless you have a finicky storage controller, you can't create too much problem with a slow storage.
So far had one crash in looots of hours of play, which was a memory hog which ate my entire memory/allocatable region and then crashed the game (saw it slowly rise to 99% commit). Seems to be configuration dependant, who knows what setting causes it.
I have been binging it since launch.
ATM, I have 40 hour playtime in it.
I'm Playing it in a two year gaming laptop, with every graphical setting on Low. (I graphics don't say much to me)
Yes, the game is buggy. But, IMO, there are deeper problems that that:
- The crafting system is absolutely useless.
- The loot and equipment system is basically a "looter-shooter". Which I dislike. And make the crafting useless.
- The game economy is messed up. Cyberware implants and vehicles are way too expensive. And there is no incetive to buy any weapons. The loop is "fight stuff, get stronger stuff, equip the stronger stuff and sell the rest". After four or five loops you have money to buy something useful.
- Big problems the targeting reticle for interacting with stuff.
- The car physics is awful. The minimap is too zoomed in. And driving in first person is a PITA.
- NPC AI is really lacking.
- Quest design feels a bit lackluster. There are less alterative choices and nuance than what's in the Witcher 3 [0].
- The world, while visually and architecturaly well designed, it is empty. There are no side activities. No hotel rooms to sleep in, no option to sit at the bar and have a drink... There is a gun range that is only open for a short quest!
- There seems to be a lack of consequence in the game. I blow up and steal stuff and beal blows to organizations and the game world doesn't change with that.
I'm enjoying the game. And plan to finish it.
But I feel like CD Project Red bit up more that it could chew:
- I believe a push to have the best and latest graphical quality (raytracing and the sort) harmed other parts of the game.
- With a game having so much "bling", they should've added more stuff to do besides fighting people and questing. The places are only meaningful if there are meaningful things to do there. (GTA 5 had the same problem. GTA 4 did not)
- Writing and quest design should've been iterated a bit more. As I usually say, "voice acting did more harm that good to RPGs". This mean that it is harder to iterate on quests and dialog because it's expensive to re-record dialog.
- The Witcher 3 was more streamlined, the world was simpler, and had less mechanics. It was easy to balance the different systems. As well as game physics.