I'm worried about the planned Ciri Witcher game. I was really looking forward to it but CDPR has made it very clear they are perfectly willing to outright scam investors and their fans with Cyberpunk 2077.
I'm going to assume all their products are cons or lies until proven otherwise going forward.
Honestly, the loss of trust doesn't come back to me. I don't see it being fixable without basically scrapping the fucking thing yet again and basically axing the entirety of their middle management core because the problems seem terminal and unfixable without mass firings. You can't keep the same management fuck-ups and expect a different result. They clearly caught lightning in a bottle with the 'Witcher 3' and had no idea how to harness it. To fix this you'd need massive overhauls and DLCs. You'd have to devote all time and money to doing that and multiplayer doesn't factor in fixing it.
I mean, everyone here knows that middle and upper management is responsible and we're not seeing a reorganization of anything. Which means the same fucking mistakes are going to happen with none of the talent that made 'The Witcher 3'. I mean, when you start lying to shareholders and heads aren't rolling, your company is terminal. Companies have been burned alive in the US for doing that. That's really the largest sign of problems with CD Projekt. When you lie to not only your consumer base, but your stockholders? Your company is completely fucked. Showing completely doctored footage of a game and outright lying to investors? Even the corrupt SEC would have a fucking orgasmic field day with that shit.
So why in the fuck would I ever trust this company again when its management seems unchanged and not acknowledging its problems, especially when the lying to shareholders is a sign of a company in massive trouble? They can get bought by EA at this point, I don't give a shit, because frankly, they need to be fucking gutted because there's a lot of rot here.
In an alternate timeline we would have gotten a de facto
Ghost in the Shell game that's actually good. Oh the things that could have been...
Yeah, I remember
VERY early on you were supposed to be part of the police force in Night City. Your character would have been recruited in much the same way in the teaser trailer. This was probably the 'Witcher 3' dev's idea, because it basically would have been a large expansion of what you'd do as Geralt in 'The Witcher'. You're cruising around a Night City, hunting down serial killers while barely maintaining your own sanity in a neo-noir cyberpunk enviornment....holy shit.
I just imagine the intro track from Mindhunter Season 2 with BTK:
While you're surfing around Night City in a version of a Cyberpunked 1970s-1980s, where technology is changing and evolving and so are killers. A sweltering hot California summer, a mirror of the come down to the summer of love in the 1960s with the onset of the age of the serial killer. You'd be like in the prime age of the new serial murderer, new massive violence, ennui and dealing with your own mind coming apart. With a synth/New Wave, 70s-80s soundtrack with Bowie instead of Johnny Faggot and Keanu. Which was a huge fucking mistake. A combination of
Mindhunter, GoitS, Blade Runner and
Nightcrawler.
Can you imagine that shit? Instead of "WE'RE GONNA GET RICH YO SCIENCE LMAO" which is what Male V reminded me of, a discount Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad. The whole point of using an RPG system is to design your own ideas and campaigns around them. Throwing in all of these characters was like throwing Drittz in fucking Baldur's Gate (For anyone who doesn't know, Drittz was an author's OC character that was super awesome and nobody fucking liked). You make your own story, but instead you're just following lore. God I just so do not give a fuck about Johnny and the fact that he was supposed to be Bowie is even more egregious as Kojima made a Bowie song an entire fucking game. I know they wanted Kojima as a cameo, but here's a hint, get talent, don't fucking cameo it you fucking idiots. A weirdo David Bowie in your head is more original than a Keanu Reeves knock off character who sounds like an annoyed old boomer with a fucktarded grudge I could not give a shit about. Also the 'old net' with the AIs was like "Can't you just unplug the servers? Why is this a problem?" Completely and utterly glossed over. Its like they took the Astral from Shadowrun and basically made it tech and forgot why that doesn't fucking work.
Its fucking hilarious just how full of fucking shit they were. "We want to get away from one character and plot" *makes a game with one character and plot*. Its like someone fucking lobotomized the studio of talent. Which is of course what shitty management does.
Any idea what happened to the team members that quit? I'd like to hear that they started their own thing, but I guess that's kind of optimistic.
From what I remember reading, basically the same exact shit that plagued the entire company: Middle Management and Upper Management was utter fucking trash. Pettiness and being side-lined for being successful, shit like that. Also getting pushed aside when the Cyberpunk team grew massively as well caused a lot of them to go 'lol nope' and grab their check and leave. So the company basically mismanaged its talent and its talent fucked off.
The problem is this happened in like....what, 2017, 2018? Once the expansions were really done and the team was moved over to Cyberpunk full time. So its hard to remember. But I do remember a lot of them getting side-lined or chronically mismanaged by being asked to constantly scrap things or make one manager look good and shit like that. A lot of petty high-school bullshit among management types.
Its probably why they did the whole hire 'C-team' Westerners deal. They were probably far more pliable than the experienced Witcher 3 devs who probably lived off pure ethanol for its development period and didn't put up with that bullshit.
Then the managers actually had to fucking deliver something and oops, they were too busy being petty and deciding to 'fix it in post' to actually fucking make anything
Honestly you could have a linear character, but having their background shit work out with perks so you can circumvent some things. Basically how Dragon Age Origins handled a lot of their shit -- even the classes offered completely different alternatives to handling things along with the origins. Which... again, as I've said countless times, all of this has been done before and better. The very things they sought to do they never bothered learning from the prior works on how they did it, they fucked around and we got this mess.
It kills me the level of arrogance coming from CDPR. Like they're misunderstood geniuses and we're all too stupid to see what they were trying to do. I've seen what they were trying to do and I already enjoyed it, nothing they did was particularly innovative nor was anything they promised and failed to deliver. Everything they pitched something else did and succeeded at it. Everything they managed to deliver, they had no idea how to and they strangled the baby in the process.
Yes, there are MANY ways to customize a character in a linear story. Mass Effect was a linear story, but you could play through it 3 or 4 times and have multiple Shepards. The sheer incompetence of Cyberpunk 2077 blows my mind. It is a step backward at pretty much every level. It resembles an early aughts attempt at an FPS open world and STILL GTA San Andreas kills it. Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect both blow it out of the water story wise.
There's really no fucking excuse this game took as long as it did. The only reason it did was because they made 5 Cyberpunk games and scrapped all of them due to massive fucking incompetence and basically pushed the very last Frankenstein hodgepodge they had out the door. Which was just a bare-bones skeleton.
