[shadowgovt]

... as long as you ignore the places where CDPR didn't actually finish debugging the game and errors abound, from innocent things like a pathing error in a pre-rendered character animation causing them to steamroll through movable objects in a scene to arguable game-breakers like a mission neither being succeed-able or failable because some key internal flag is in the wrong state, with the only solution being to roll back to a save before the error occurred.

[pdntspa]

I've beaten the game and NEVER had any issues like that, other than right after launch. You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time. The game is really quite good now and has been for some time.

> actually finish debugging the game and errors abound

Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this. I cannot count how many games have come out in this state and there wasn't an ridiculous backlash, just CP2077.

NOTHING comes out bug free nowadays, because we as an industry have this idiotic policy of shipping things ASAP

[shadowgovt]

> You should consider leaving the faction of people who are irrationally bitter at that game because it is a position that is becoming more comical over time

I'd be happy to as soon as it's possible for me to complete or discard the "Get a gun" tutorial quest that is stuck in my quest roster. Stuck quests are a category of bug that stick badly in my craw; personal preference.

> Literally EVERY software developer is guilty of this

Absolutely true, but there's degrees, and CP2077 was the buggiest game I played in 2021. When it works? It's... Okay, it's fine; I didn't find it as captivating as I hoped.

When it doesn't work, the results range from annoying to comical. I did have a good laugh the time that NPC got her handbag fused to her hand at a right angle, just gesticulating wildly in a conversation waving the thing around like an oven mitt. I did not have a good laugh when I got stuck in the floor crawling through an air vent to get into a locked room with a 'runner jacked into his chair, levitated off horizontally into the void so I couldn't move, and found that restoring from save took me all the way back to before I'd accepted the quest.

I'm old now; that shit eats into my finite time to enjoy games at all, and I have minimal patience for that category of error.

[pdntspa]

You can't be very far in the game if you are stuck on that quest. Why not just start over?

[shadowgovt]

There are two answers to that question.

The first is "You misunderstood me. I'm hours into the game; that quest got stuck in the first hour or so, I didn't realize it was stuck, and rolling back to before I acquired it would basically reset all my progress. So it's just stuck there, like a splinter, reminding me how broken the game's mechanics are. Getting to live out twelve-year-old-me's fantasy of fighting Adam Smasher hasn't offset the irritation because that's my flavor of OCD."

But had the situation been as you expected, my response would have been "Because I respect my time more than these developers do and there's a literal sea of other games I could be playing that don't make me replay around script bugs."

[pdntspa]

I'm pretty sure everyone has had to start over because of a game-breaking save bug. I know I have (but not with CP2077)

As for the respecting time thing... does TurboTax respect my time while showing me a false progress bar when it actually completes its analysis near instantly? Does Microsoft respect my time when Edge constantly pesters me with popups asking to be the default? Does Instagram or Facebook respect my time when they pollute my feed with their business objective bullshit? Does a cop respect my time when he pulls me over and spends 15 minutes running my information? (Like WTF is he even doing... he punches my info into cop google and it spits out an answer! Where is all that time going!) What about if they arrest me? Does the radio respect my time when it airs commercials?

Another answer is: temper your expectations. Take the L and move on. The sunk cost fallacy is real.

[shadowgovt]

> The sunk cost fallacy is real

I agree. That's why after deciding I wasn't having enough fun-to-bugs ratio in CP2077 about halfway through the game, I gave up and played something else. I've been playing quite a bit of No Man's Sky as of late. It's also buggy, but more fun. Satisfactory is a delightfully tight experience. Kerbal Space Program hides its bugs delightfully behind the overall "Failure is the point" game mechanics. Or I could play basically anything on a Nintendo Switch (main console, not the store) and get a nearly bug-free experience because Nintendo enforces some pretty stringent quality standards.

Everyone's preferences are different. Me, I don't get the buzz from the AAA-ness of a CP2077 to offset the annoyance of the underlying mechanics being kinda boring and kinda buggy.

... I'm not sure what to make of the comparison of playing videogames (an experience I spend double- or triple-digit dollars on for entertainment) to the experience of chores in real life, so I'm setting that aside.

[MayeulC]

Consider SQLite as a conterpoint before using superlatives. There are others.

Edit: well, of course, a game bug, even if game-breaking, isn't safety critical. Yo have to plan what to spend time on.