[chundicus]

I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.

I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.

The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.

[nightski]

The thing is CD Project Red has released it's games in a really rough state before. All of the Witcher games were brutal on release.

But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates.

The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now.

I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

[devonkim]

Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations.

CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.

I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.

[chii]

a lot of CDPR staff left in the wake of TW3 because of crunch and other various factors (presumably, they weren't as well compensated for such a successful title as they presumed they would).

CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.

[devonkim]

This seems to be a longstanding trend in game dev houses across the industry worldwide, so the question is whether it was sufficient enough to cripple Cyberpunk development into its current state and whether the churn was worse than industry averages. It's not clear whether spending more money on developers would have been sufficient to make release better given Cyberpunk is the most expensive game in history and with only 30% of the budget spent on development.

[chii]

It's very clear that spending more money will not retrieve talent lost - just because you're hiring more people doesn't mean the old, internalised expert knowledge from old staff can be replaced.

The graphical details are amazing and the art direction great in cyberpunk (disregarding the bugs and stuff on console). But it's very much a high production value game, but without the singular vision that would've made it an excellent immersive sim game (ala Deux Ex). And this missing singular vision is due to the lost staff that had this element for TW3.

[mywittyname]

> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

Same here. I bought it on PC via GOG, and while it was rough and unstable, I happily put about 100hrs of game play into it.

Honestly, they should have released it as under-development on platforms like Steam that support such designations. It's pretty common for studios to release games in an alpha/beta state. At least that way, gamers would know that they are getting a potentially buggy release.

For consoles, they straight up should not have released it until v1.07 at minimum. That's where they really screwed up. The game is in a much less playable state on the PS4, and console gamers in general are used to a much more polished gaming experience.

[KraftKacke]

I don't get how they would draw _so _damn _much attention to a broken game. The marketing team should have talked with development every once in a while...

Look at me! Look at me, I got these awesome new pants and I also shat in them.

[zamalek]

> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

I bought the game a few days ago and, apart from the NVIDIA RTX timed-exclusive, I haven't run into any issues with it. It's already a touch above the usual Witcher release.

It's also worth noting that, at least from my perspective, there was a vocal crowd begging for the game on account of "something to do during the pandemic, assuming bugs warts and all". I'm not sure if this is why they released an objectively non-functional game to previous-gen consoles, but I would be inclined to believe the excuse.

[andoriyu]

I don't think the size of CDPR is the reason here. They are public company now. Which means they aren't lying to some potential players, but instead they are lying to the investors.

They made promises about work environment that weren't fulfilled.

They blatantly lied about previous gen consoles performance. PC gamers are used to games not running well, but main appeal is that games usually run within the baseline. CP2077 is unplayable on PS4 and XB1.

CP2077 isn't TW3 level of unfinished. I think CDPR has bitten off more than they can chew.

[okprod]

They also dragged out the release for a long time, all while continuing to build hype, like Anthem.

[munk-a]

I think CDPR made a lot of serious marketing mistakes but hype building is largely organic - rando game reviewers end up being a large portion of the momentum behind hype trains.

[FridgeSeal]

The cyberpunk game subreddit was its own worst enemy: people were winding themselves up with hype that was never ever going to be even remotely filled, people speculating and dreaming about features and stuff that was patently never going to happen, etc.

[ShamelessC]

I could honestly never understand this. There's been massive hype over this game for like a full year before release. But we didn't even know what the gameplay was even like until like a month prior to release because they had shown basically nothing of it aside from a few videos of V looking into mirrors and what not.

People should have learned this lesson after No Man's Sky. If people are merely conjecturing about possible gameplay and features that they don't even know will be in the game, they're going to be dissatisfied with the game.

[rootlocus]

I played Witcher3 on release day, and it was nothing compared to Cyberpunk2077.

[b0rsuk]

Your memory might be failing you:

CYBERPUNK 2077: Lies, Excuses, & Sycophantic Fanboys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mKYZVtjgoY

CYBERPUNK 2077 - Early Reviews & CDPR TOTALLY Misrepresented the GAME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko33FH1IItI

CYBERPUNK 2077: INFLUENCERS & JOURNALISTS Are Also to BLAME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJk5TJx6Hq4

[jgust]

It's a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.

If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.

[Sodman]

I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being "broken", most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it's literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won't refund it.

This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:

Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds.

Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?

Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.

Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.

Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.

[incrudible]

I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you'd get patches from print media.

The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".

If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.

[huehehue]

From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.

Does pricing, pre-orders, or online play have anything to do with this? It feels weird that a sports game can change a few names and ship a $60 title, but a company like CDPR goes through absolute hell and still ships a dud -- what's the incentive for that?

[webmaven]

> From a very, very casual gamer's perspective, how did expectations get so high? Consumers are demanding more, companies are promising more, developers are worked to the bone and everyone still ends up unhappy.

The dynamic is the same in films, where all of the studio's profits come from a few blockbusters (sometimes called 'tentpoles'), and in publishing, where all of the profits come from relatively few bestsellers, and got that matter in venture capital, where all of the returns come from a few unicorns.

BTW, you might be interested to note that in film at least, the "work to the bone" component is largely missing (not that film crews don't work hard, they do), and that the film industry is unionized to the hilt (Screen Writers Guild, Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, etc. etc.), nor is pervasive unionization any sort of barrier to incorporating equity compensation (often in the form of residuals) for key talent.

[ROFISH]

Without too much detail due to contracts/NDA/etc, slipping a release date is even worse of a bother for others down-chain also. There are planned times for manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, all that fun stuff for the physical versions of titles. All that would basically need to be re-dated from scratch. You can't slip one week, you have to slip at least a month. More for platforms that don't use standard disc formats which are not made locally. (Which hilariously, CP2077 already did slip a month before release.)

Even for digital games, there's still approval processes where the first parties would have to test the game out. This process involves scheduling people for it; you can't just go to the front of the line as there are other games that have been scheduled for certain slots. (Which hilariously, it was rumored that CP2077 was given the 'don't test, push live ASAP' treatment.)

At lastly, all payments from the platforms and retailers are based on the actual release date. Unless there's a specific contract, games are not paid until months after release. Physical preorders don't pay the developers, they just help with preventing over/under stocking. (And digital preorders are... functionally worthless beyond the psychological value.) The release date starts the payment timer. When hurting for cash, releasing can start that timer.

The processes above can really benefit abusers who decide that "making street-date" is the most important thing above all other concerns.

[surge]

Stop announcing release dates until its 90% finished or all major bugs are fixed and you're just 3 months away from being ready.

Publishers are a problem too, they pressure to release games around the holidays, or the console manufacturers do cause it helps sell hardware around the holidays.

From what I gathered its mostly fine on PC, they're a PC shop after all, the console versions needed probably at least 6 months of work to be polished. People were screaming for it to be released no matter what or to stop making excuses no matter how much crunch the devs were already doing. If they released it as an "early-beta" like a lot of games or just said up front, okay we're releasing it but its not finished, so you can play it but you're getting the beta now and we'll be fixing it with updates. I think hardcore gamers would understand. It would just not look good for release sales and I'm not sure if the game media would care.

[cheschire]

I waited for the reviews. When they were over 90% I pulled the trigger.

Now I realize I purchased a game that was reviewed on what it will eventually become a la No Man's Sky, not what it was on the day of review.

Sure, the crashing didn't affect me, my configuration was more or less normal I guess. Instead what I got was a hollow game that has a lot of hooks ready for eventual expansion sometime in future patches. That didn't deserve the 91% it had when I first bought the game.

I don't blame fellow gamers. I blame the reviewers.

[surge]

Reviewers had the access media problem, it was discussed at length on the 1-up podcast. They can't be trusted, especially on AAA titles or they risk being shut out of preview copies on the next releases, which is bad for business. I just wait for user reviews, after a couple of weeks for the hype to die down and people to actually spend some time in it, then I generally look at the worse reviews first. Unless there's a compelling reason to have a game immediately (like its primarily online and all my friends are playing it), its better to be a patient gamer.

[jgust]

> I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers

That's sort of what I'm alluding to. Personal responsibility doesn't work when you need collective action, so something else needs to step in to fix this. Reminding gamers to not pre-order is pointless.

[ethbr0]

> Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.

What's curious, and I assume therefore legally-reasoned, is the consistent lack of preparation for blow-back by companies. Some part of CD Projekt Red knew the game was broken on older consoles.

It feels like the only real solution to this is to have legal QA documents, signed off on by QA (as factual) and executive leadership (as read and understood).

If there's a magically missing set of older console tests, someone in leadership goes to jail. If leadership publicly misrepresents the stability of the game despite knowing about substantial defects from QA reports, someone goes to jail.

Who cares about video games, but this is indicative of a broader social problem allowing executives to feign ignorance and create systems that deflect blame downward. Either you're running the company or not. And if you are... then the legal ramifications should ultimately land at your feet.

[nmfisher]

Are you honestly suggesting people go to jail for broken videogames?

[ethbr0]

Yes. It's a USD$150b+ industry.

[this_user]

There is also the component of building hype via marketing in order to generate pre-orders. With CP2077, they had made back the entire development costs immediately after launch. This means, refunds notwithstanding, that by the time your customers notice the state the game is in, you are already profitable, and have all the time in the world for PR damage control and patches.

[rootlocus]

> If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games"

This doesn't make sense. The game was announced 8 years ago, and it was delayed 8 months. The company said the product was ready and they published a product that was not ready. I've delayed my gratification 8 years for it.

[jgust]

The quote is referring to the concept of pre-ordering a game.

[falcolas]

This isn't on the players. That's very much in the same line as blaming someone driving their car for the Gulf Oil Spill.

This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype.

They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure.

EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.

[munk-a]

I think there were some really big marketing mistakes but most of the backlash on CP2077 seems to be over the insane levels of hype. I had pre-ordered this game a long time ago and it was genuinely fun on release, there are some bugged quests and I don't have a card capable of rendering ridiculously good graphics but it's playable and fun.

From what I've heard the PS release is absolutely worth getting mad over - it's likely that CDPR should have just given up on even attempting a PS release given how poor the performance is but it probably needs some serious investigation to see what pressure Sony was putting on them to make sure it was available.

[lumost]

I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development).

From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam.

If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?

[pythonaut_16]

> Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process?

> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze...

Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.

[duhi88]

From what I understand, they also promised a bunch of features that were never implemented. Maybe they're still to come, but it sounds like they are months away from fixing all the bugs, let alone implementing better AI and other things players complained about.

I bet it would have been met with less backlash if they delayed only the PS4/Xbox S versions. Players must expect some Day 0 bugs from games this large.

[fpgaminer]

> Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred

I think the absolute worst bug I encountered was because of this, but I don't believe the story pathway that triggers it was uncommon. In fact, that condition apparently has a major effect on the story later.

Basically it was part of a main story quest where you have to wait a day for a character to call you before the quest can continue. But I never got a call. I saw a lot of threads on the issue, and it seems the bug happens if you did some optional dialogue right beforehand. But unlike other optional dialogue in the game, this optional dialogue was really hard to miss. I had to actively run past an NPC to avoid it.

I ended up losing about an hour of gameplay from that bug :/

I agree with you that it was likely because they changed something last minute and never checked it again; a QA failure for sure. And my theory is the COVID situation made QA testing a nightmare. Still ... that bug was brutal. Every "wait for X to call you" quest after made me anxious.

[ethbr0]

It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools.

Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.

Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.

Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.

tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools

[Pfhreak]

The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.

[falcolas]

> releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline.

They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.

[Pfhreak]

I'm not sure that's actually true. Having worked in the industry, games do not always get better with more work and time. Some systems are just too complicated to fix fast than bugs get introduced.

[enahs-sf]

Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience.

I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.

[krzyk]

And to have a counterpoint, I'm playing on PC and have a lot of fun. I've seen so far only one bug (Panams phone somehow freezed in mid air during her talking scene)

I must say that I'm a bit glad that this time consoles were taken less seriously than a PC, in majority of cases is quite opposite (with a few exceptions like GTA V and CP2077).

[jjoonathan]

My PC experience was good too. I saw the "T-pose on a motorcycle" bug a couple times and I sequence-broke a mission once, but that's it. If 2077 had been enterprise software, it would be the smoothest and least-buggy enterprise software I had ever used by a mile.

It sounds like last-gen consoles leaned very heavily on the LOD system, it caused more bugs than expected, and they didn't allocate enough time to fix them.

[2pEXgD0fZ5cF]

I played the game on PC too, and for the first half or so of the game I agree, the first half of the game was more "very very unpolished and rough" as opposed to "broken bugs".

However it got worse and worse the closer I got to the finale, on total I encountered around 10-12 situations that prevented me from continuing and required game restarts and/or loading of older saves, and I had to repeat my final mission 3 times because of a game breaking bug. That is on top of all the minor bugs others have already mentioned.

While I was able to at least get between 50 and 80 fps, the performance was absolutely terrible if I consider my specs (>3500$ PC build).

All in all I was "relatively bug free" compared to the experiences of others. What I don't understand are people saying it would be "a masterpiece" without the bugs, I disagree, the game was very bland in my opinion and I regret my purchase and the time I invested regardless of the bugs and problems. It wasn't TERRIBLE, but I wish I had spent the money on another game.

[nonamenoslogan]

Geeesh I get 40-70 fps on a $250 GPU in a $100ish PC from the recycle pile.

[jasonladuke0311]

You are fortunate. I've encountered at least two dozen different bugs that were only resolved with a reload (or in some cases reverting to a previous save). And the crashes, my god. I would wager at least one crash per hour or two of play.

That being said, I think it's a fantastic game (though somewhat shallow in terms of choice) that I am still having a great time with.

[SketchySeaBeast]

Yeah, I'm finishing up round 2 of the game and loving it with a few annoying bugs, but nothing that killed my joy. I'm finding it an excellent experience that's sucked me in way harder than any game in a long long time. I really left heart with the Aldecados.

[threeseed]

> I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking

I imagine they are thinking the same thing since GTA5 Online was released.

Why even bother making new games when you can just drip feed some DLC every now and again and continue to print billions.

[ethbr0]

I'm not going to say that's a worse model.

We saw outsourcing of engines to companies who focused on that as their core competency. Then middleware. As AAA budgets go up to maintain pace with SotA, it makes less sense to trash-and-start-from-scratch (traditional practice).

DLC on online games is the ultimate realization of this. Why sink the cost of rebuilding a game, when you have a battle-tested core, with bugs already fixed, and content tooling already created, that you can start from? Essentially: EA {Sport} {Year} model, for everything else.

[munk-a]

> It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience.

Can you clarify a bit whether you were hitting game play bugs or visual issues?

On the PC side there are occasional visual glitches but the game play is relatively stable - I've had trouble with one quest line (the delamain one) and the enemy AI can get stuck sometimes - but it hasn't interrupted game play too badly.

[puranjay]

Rockstar is smart in that it they don't hype up their games at all. You won't even know GTA6 is going to be released until the product is 6 months from finishing.

[munk-a]

I think this is the crux of the issue - Rockstar seems to be pretty heavy handed in keeping their marketing department in check, it's a thing more developers and publishers need to learn. Early and inaccurate marketing is a liability - quantity does not equal quality and marketing departments generally feel like they're judged based on quantity (and often escape issues with over-hyping in favor of shifting blame onto developers).

[MaxBarraclough]

> The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique.

It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.

[Pfhreak]

I'm not suggesting it's unique, but I am suggesting that expecting them all to be delivered fast, high quality, and reasonably priced is a very tall order.

[outworlder]

> I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games

The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC.

It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.

[rasz]

Even stock poor spec PS4 wasnt as bad as media would led you to believe. It runs at 30 fps with occasional drops to 20 fps and seldom/very rare 15fps, MUCH better than past critically acclaimed games like Control which shipped garbage running at literal _10 fps_. Ps4 will also crash on you once every ~5 hours, probably not fixed memory leaks. Still game saves often so its not a problem, more of an annoyance. Other than that its smooth sailing.

You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Arguably, they just needed (much) more time to optimize the game for underpowered, older consoles.

Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.

[macspoofing]

Absolutely the big studios should stop releasing broken games.

From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.

[warpech]

I wonder if CDPR released the game at that stage because they thought that the window of opportunity on last-gen consoles was closing

[tstrimple]

Somehow I doubt Polish law is going to have much impact on the larger game industry.

[chundicus]

Agreed. By "this" I actually (confusingly) was more so referring to the general negative feedback Cyberpunk has been receiving.

[tstrimple]

"Don't preorder games" is the new "year of the Linux desktop". I've heard it over and over but have seen no evidence that it's any closer to being a reality.

[ekianjo]

There is no need for action. The only thing people need to do is to stop preordering games.