Cyberpunk 2077 Grieving Thread

[Road Work Ahead]

This. Ironically a lot of indie slav companies are producing better video games than CDPR at this point. My most anticipated game release this year is from a bunch of nerdy Ruskies (Owlcat Games) who released their first game in a horribly buggy state much like Cyberpunk, but had worked tirelessly to patch the game and having played the alpha of their upcoming game, it looks like they've learned a lot from their previous mistakes.

Owlcat is in a pretty good place with the pathfinder license. They worked most of the big kinks out of their engine, added a turn based mode, and have a ton of pathfinder APs they can convert. I was hoping the next game would have been Strange Aeons, but I've fine with Wrath of the Righteous.

 

[McAfee'sCorpse]

I'm just glad Crowbcat's back.

The guy is a legend.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Wtf happened to this company since 2015? They might actually collapse at this point.

A new studio head/lead thought he was super duper awesome and all the old Witcher 3 devs took their checks and walked because he was a stupid cunt. So they hired bargain bin Canadian/American devs and then proceeded to fucking work them to death because the fucking retard doesn't know how to manage shit.

Like Cyberpunk 2077 had no pipeline whatsoever, so you had people making shit that was already made or working on features that were already shitcanned. It was a management nightmare.

I've honestly written the studio off at this point. They used their reputation as the 'good guys', lied blatantly to everyone (even their shareholders), have basically conjured up false footage and massive manipulation (really only the second time this happened in recent memory), paid more on marketing than on the actual game and are completely unrepentant and do not acknowledge the massive problems and lack of features the game has, even without the optimization issues.

Its the fucking massive lies, arrogance and complete blindness to problems that really piss me off. Of course, their lawyers probably told them to admit nothing but that Crowbcat video is just fucking lol. It just shows how much they fucking outright lied in trailers, marketing materials and demos.

My advice: go indie or go home at this point.
...Figuratively speaking at least. At the very least try some smaller studios' games.

With how incestuous the AAA industry has become (and how that doesn't seem like it's going to stop anytime soon), you'd be better off looking outside of those studios to independent companies for things; they're essentially to the current industry what AA games were way back when. Granted: not all of them are gonna be winners and you may have to do some legwork and search for stuff that may fit your interests, but you'll definitely find something out there that will peak your interest.

That and: and I cannot stress this enough, don't buy into the hype. Look at user reviews afterwards and make a decision then if you should buy it. Because more often than not, the things that you're getting hyped for are smoke and mirrors meant to pull people in. Albeit Cyberpunk was a very special case in that it was Aliens: Colonial Marines-levels of lying to your face.

Hey if he still hasn't gotten back to you later, I'll gladly take you up on that offer: I'd love to try that game out. From the little I've seen of it, that game looks right up my alley.

Yeah, my advice is look to AA studios, which CD Projekt used to be before it exploded. I made this comment in the Star Wars thread, but a lot of entertainment is made to be flavorless gruel now. There's very little niche left in the AAA space. Which is why you have to look lower. Look at AA and indie devs.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an exception, definitely. It is exceedingly rare for a company to outright fucking lie to your face like they did and basically conjure fake demos. Most of the time you're going to see downgrades or things removed and added as DLC. Not completely made up like Cyberpunk 2077 was. Cyberpunk is honestly a rare case, very few studios have done this before. Its Aliens: Colonial Marines levels of lying, so its basically the second example of something like this happening.

It was going to be hard to predict how badly CD Projekt would fuck up the title. Even in my wildest dreams I would not have expected them to fuck up basic features like cops, PC skeletons and meshes and having no (literally no) customization to basically anything. Yeah you can throw mods on your guns, but they don't look different. You can't color them or customize them for different parts. Even something like Ghost Recon Wildlands had more customization than this, which is not something you could have expected.

remember, they wanna do cyberpunk multiplayer next





wait, you 100% the previous yakuzas? don't some of those have so nasty mahjong cheevos?

I guarantee that Multiplayer will be filled with a fuckton of microtransactions and try to copy Red Dead 2/GTA V Online. I've already written them off and I've got better games to play.

EDIT:
Allegedly people found by exploring the executable that MP would be peer-to-peer. Fucking lol. Cyberpunk 2077 will be a hacker's paradise with the way these fucks code shit

 

[419]

wait, you 100% the previous yakuzas? don't some of those have so nasty mahjong cheevos?

Yes, but it's worth mentioning this is only really a detriment if you're OCD enough to want to 100% the game. If you just want to enjoy a decent story with some good brawler gameplay then that's entirely optional and you can safely skip out on a lot of that.

Even if you do want to go through that hassle, mah-jong in some cases isn't even the worst thing to sit through. The catfight game in Yakuza 0 was arguably a lot worse than any of the other completionist stuff series-wide.

On the topic of Cyberpunk, if your game ends up getting mogged by a fucking LEGO game of all things you need to ask yourself some serious questions.

 

[April Ryan]

Owlcat is in a pretty good place with the pathfinder license. They worked most of the big kinks out of their engine, added a turn based mode, and have a ton of pathfinder APs they can convert. I was hoping the next game would have been Strange Aeons, but I've fine with Wrath of the Righteous.

Kingmaker is, no joke, my favorite infinity engine style game at this point, others may do individual pieces better but as an overall package it even beats BG2. Yes its full of jank and the kingdom mechanic is woefully underdeveloped but I would still happily recommend it to anyone looking for a game with even a pretense of actual role-playing.

Add to that the fact that to get the best ending you have to romance the bad-guy remains one of the funnest things ever put into a game.

However it could be a bad omen that they have repeatedly said similar thing to CDPR about how everyone complained about the previous game being too long and so they have deliberately made the new one shorter, but the different mythic paths should hopefully give greater replayability, if playing as an angel then a lich then worm-that-walks all end up being fairly similar I'm going to be pissed.

 

[Dark Edea]

You can all tell me I'm wrong but that doesn't make Twilight Princess not shit.

If you want to play a good wolf-themed Zelda game, play Okami.

 

[X Pac Heat]

remember when demos said "work in progress" and it meant shit would look BETTER at release and not get downgraded a million times?

what the fuck happened to this retarded industry?

 

[SiccDicc]

remember when demos said "work in progress" and it meant shit would look BETTER at release and not get downgraded a million times?

what the fuck happened to this retarded industry?

Diversity initiatives, really. They're not hiring based on quality applicants anymore.

 

[Back me up!]

remember when demos said "work in progress" and it meant shit would look BETTER at release and not get downgraded a million times?

what the fuck happened to this retarded industry?

Idiots with money will never learn that fire is hot and will keep touching the stove forever and ever.

Taking Secret Assholes advice, you know what is a really good AA Studio quality game? Mad Max. Play that if you want a open world game that is real fun, good, and fits 100% perfectly with the movie franchise.

I also have high hopes for Everspace 2 but gonna wait for it to get out of EA before jumping in.

 

[❄️❄️❄️]

My lingering thought after playing the game through (having a decent stab at all the side quests I could find) is that the plot was massively "Keanufied" once he came onboard.

The ongoing Cyberpsycho theme present in the side quests (Regina/Lizzie) makes me think that was originally meant to be far more prominent. The Peralez questline too - but that could just be DLC setup?

The Crafting/Looting mechanics are unbalanced as all fuck. On one hand, the game wants you to upgrade your weapons and other items to power up. On the other hand, a random looted common rifle is likely to be just as powerful. Crafting feels pointless when you're literally handed weapons that render your previous work worthless.

The UI is abysmal. For example, let's say I want to refill my inventory with pistol ammo. I am not told anywhere that I can craft ammo, so let's say I found out about it on the internet. To start, open up the UI and begin scrolling almost the entire way down the second tab of the crafting menu. At some point, you will find four ammo box thumbnails in a row. You must now mouse over each one to select the correct pistol ammo. You can then select "Craft" to craft a craft a box/crate of ammo. How much a box/crate contains is not stated. You must click the button once per box. There is no way to craft multiple at once. If you craft over the arbitrary limit (700 rounds) that the game does not tell you about, then the components are still consumed but no ammo is made. Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?!

I found Cyberpunk 2077 to be a frustrating experience. With some upstream changes, made early in development, I think we could have had a very interesting and clever game. What we have instead is a confusing mishmash that feels disconnected and dull.

 

[Fougaro]

Sorry if it has already been brought up, but CD Projekt Red have been hit with another class-action lolsuit from their investors.

 

[Ruin]

Sorry if it has already been brought up, but CD Projekt Red have been hit with another class-action lolsuit from their investors.

CDPR is about to learn that putting a "Does not reflect the final state of the game" watermark on their trailer does not mean they can release a buggy broken piece of shit with none of the promised features and be immune from consequences.

 

[April Ryan]

CDPR is about to learn that putting a "Does not reflect the final state of the game" watermark on their trailer does not mean they can release a buggy broken piece of shit with none of the promised features and be immune from consequences.

Thing is, fans tried to go after Bioware because of the mass effect 3 ending debacle, complained to adverting watchdogs and such, pointing to the blatant lies they told in interviews and hype material, and the watchdogs basically said "yeah it sucks but its not illegal or anything". If it was just fans pissed off at bull-shots and over hype they would not be in any trouble.

Their problem is that they directly lied to investors about the state of the product, that is super no-no. Fans crying "this is shit you said it would be awesome" gets ignored by politicians, rich people losing money because a stock price collapsed because some retard fucked up then lied to cover their own ass gets their attention, and there are laws on the books dealing with this exact scenario.

 

[Secret Asshole]

My lingering thought after playing the game through (having a decent stab at all the side quests I could find) is that the plot was massively "Keanufied" once he came onboard.

The ongoing Cyberpsycho theme present in the side quests (Regina/Lizzie) makes me think that was originally meant to be far more prominent. The Peralez questline too - but that could just be DLC setup?

The Crafting/Looting mechanics are unbalanced as all fuck. On one hand, the game wants you to upgrade your weapons and other items to power up. On the other hand, a random looted common rifle is likely to be just as powerful. Crafting feels pointless when you're literally handed weapons that render your previous work worthless.

The UI is abysmal. For example, let's say I want to refill my inventory with pistol ammo. I am not told anywhere that I can craft ammo, so let's say I found out about it on the internet. To start, open up the UI and begin scrolling almost the entire way down the second tab of the crafting menu. At some point, you will find four ammo box thumbnails in a row. You must now mouse over each one to select the correct pistol ammo. You can then select "Craft" to craft a craft a box/crate of ammo. How much a box/crate contains is not stated. You must click the button once per box. There is no way to craft multiple at once. If you craft over the arbitrary limit (700 rounds) that the game does not tell you about, then the components are still consumed but no ammo is made. Who the fuck thought this was a good idea?!

I found Cyberpunk 2077 to be a frustrating experience. With some upstream changes, made early in development, I think we could have had a very interesting and clever game. What we have instead is a confusing mishmash that feels disconnected and dull.

You could not be any more wrong about crafting. Crafting is OP as FUCK. If you invest in it, you will make the game trivial. All your clothes will equal up to 3k+ armor and your guns will be doing thousands in damage, making every fight yawn inducing. I assume you've never tried to craft mods where you can get +800 armor to clothes/damage and shit. You will NEVER find a gun on the ground better than what you craft if you have enough points in it. If you go early crafting and make mods and race for legendary quick hacks, congrats, you have broken Cyberpunk over your back and nothing will touch you on any difficulty. Money is mostly useless except for buying Cyberwear (only because you can't craft it). I NEVER bought a car because driving was fucking trash. I just used a motorcycle to avoid the retarded no AI cars.

Oh, and I have a feeling that they did the 'craft one thing at a time' because they rushed the game out and knew about the limit on saves, so they wanted to try and prevent people from corrupting their saves. Which is why its agony to craft anything in more than one amount.

CDPR is about to learn that putting a "Does not reflect the final state of the game" watermark on their trailer does not mean they can release a buggy broken piece of shit with none of the promised features and be immune from consequences.

Thing is, fans tried to go after Bioware because of the mass effect 3 ending debacle, complained to adverting watchdogs and such, pointing to the blatant lies they told in interviews and hype material, and the watchdogs basically said "yeah it sucks but its not illegal or anything". If it was just fans pissed off at bull-shots and over hype they would not be in any trouble.

Their problem is that they directly lied to investors about the state of the product, that is super no-no. Fans crying "this is shit you said it would be awesome" gets ignored by politicians, rich people losing money because a stock price collapsed because some retard fucked up then lied to cover their own ass gets their attention, and there are laws on the books dealing with this exact scenario.

Oh yeah. In the US, they might be totally fucked. In the US, companies have a LEGAL responsibility to protect their share prices and be honest with stockholders. Making up total bullshit and passing it off as real to increase your stock price...yeah, we typically call that fraud. I mean the stock price dropped a billion fucking dollars. And that is 2 out of 4 law firms that were thinking about suing.

I hope they get fucked over a barrel for this honestly. I mean, if they were honest to the shareholders but not gamers, that's one thing. But to lie to shareholders? Oof, don't know how you can fuck up that bad. Making rich people lose money? Yeah, not smart.

I mean, the fucking retard thinks this:

Badowski tweeted a statement addressing three claims from the article, starting with the accusation that the demos were faked.

"It's hard for a trade show game demo not to be a test of vision or vertical slice two years before the game ships, but that doesn't mean it's fake," he wrote.

"Games are not made in a linear fashion and start looking like the final product only a few months before launch. If you look at that demo now, it's different yes, but that's what the 'work in progress' watermark is for. Our final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was."

Will fucking save him. Like what, you purposefully made the UI worse? You purposefully took out character options when they were in there? It makes no fucking sense what he's saying. Work in progress my fucking ass. Things are typically downgraded graphically. They're not fucking removed when they objectively look better. Its clear shit was not developed and the whole thing was a fucking lie. I don't buy this bullshit excuse for a fucking second.

That's why this game will NEVER get the 'No Man's Sky' treatment and people are fucking delusional if they thing so. I mean, he even said this shit:

Badowski also disputed that Cyberpunk 2077's launch was "disastrous," as the article suggests, pointing to the critical acclaim it achieved on PC.

"As for the old-gen consoles, yes that is another case, but we've owned up to that and are working super hard to eliminate bugs (on PC, too -- we know that's not a perfect version either) and we are proud of Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and artistic vision."

They're proud of a game where fucking San Andreas is more feature rich and a Lego game has better fucking traffic AI. They think that's perfectly fine and something to be proud of. Its never getting fixed and they're going to ignore its problems and try to copy GTA online with massive amounts of microtransactions.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Diversity initiatives, really. They're not hiring based on quality applicants anymore.

I'm going to disagree and say it sounds like alcohol combined with hubris was the more likely cause.

It's poland so expanding the business usually means building an executive office bar where as before you just had a community minifridge. You know how tech companies in America have wastes of fucking time like diversity seminars? Eastern Europe has on the clock drinking. Like at 6 am when you've been there all night and it's fucking cold outside, it's time to hit the hard stuff to warm you up.

 

[SiccDicc]

I'm going to disagree and say it sounds like alcohol combined with hubris was the more likely cause.

It's poland so expanding the business usually means building an executive office bar where as before you just had a community minifridge. You know how tech companies in America have wastes of fucking time like diversity seminars? Eastern Europe has on the clock drinking. Like at 6 am when you've been there all night and it's fucking cold outside, it's time to hit the hard stuff to warm you up.

Except they hired predominantly from North America after their manager fucked over the Witcher 3 team. They also prided themselves on hiring so many women in an interview. They may be behind the times on what diversity means to appease shitholes like ResetERA - which they have a community PR guy there - but they were making a concerted effort regardless. If they had a fucking bar, I can guarantee you none of these faggots would be whining about overtime and crunch.

Maybe the occasional black eye, but not the crunch.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Except they hired predominantly from North America after their manager fucked over the Witcher 3 team. They also prided themselves on hiring so many women in an interview. They may be behind the times on what diversity means to appease shitholes like ResetERA - which they have a community PR guy there - but they were making a concerted effort regardless. If they had a fucking bar, I can guarantee you none of these faggots would be whining about overtime and crunch.

Maybe the occasional black eye, but not the crunch.

I mean honestly, they hired Canadian C-Teams and worked them like in a gulag and gave them contradictory orders. It was management's fault completely that this happened. The developers they hired weren't capable and the managers weren't capable of well...managing. I actually don't blame the devs. I blame management. It was management's choice to lie in commercials and trailers and make a fake demo. It was the managers who didn't establish a proper development pipeline and worked on the engine at the same time as the game itself. The rot is at the top and if you read Badowski's statements, its obviously his retarded fucking decisions that fucked development.

 

[Ruin]

Did the whole thing where they allegedly hired the atrocious animators and character modelers from The team that made Mass Effect Andromeda turn out to be true or just a rumor? I believe it based on how shitty the finished product is.

 

[SiccDicc]

I mean honestly, they hired Canadian C-Teams and worked them like in a gulag and gave them contradictory orders. It was management's fault completely that this happened. The developers they hired weren't capable and the managers weren't capable of well...managing. I actually don't blame the devs. I blame management. It was management's choice to lie in commercials and trailers and make a fake demo. It was the managers who didn't establish a proper development pipeline and worked on the engine at the same time as the game itself. The rot is at the top and if you read Badowski's statements, its obviously his retarded fucking decisions that fucked development.

I'm not saying they aren't to blame, if anything I'm saying that manager is likely the one that suggest hiring expats from Canada. He constantly made bad decisions and just in general was a terrible lead. Not sure who he sucked for the position, but it must be the only thing he's good at.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Did the whole thing where they allegedly hired the atrocious animators and character modelers from The team that made Mass Effect Andromeda turn out to be true or just a rumor. I believe it based on how shitty the finished product is.

I could have sworn that they did but you'd have to go through five fucking years of articles to find it. I know for a fact they hired English-speaking devs on the cheap and bled devs regularly, so it is hard to tell. All the articles I'm getting are comparing CD Projekt Red to Bioware and just constantly talking about how fucked the game is.

I'm not saying they aren't to blame, if anything I'm saying that manager is likely the one that suggest hiring expats from Canada. He constantly made bad decisions and just in general was a terrible lead. Not sure who he sucked for the position, but it must be the only thing he's good at.

Badowski is actually the co-founder of CD Projekt Red. He was probably, "I'm fucking awesome, give me this, I am the lead now." and then proceeded to completely fuck it up on every level.