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CD Projekt Conference Call with the Management Board [pdf] (Dec 14)

304 points by rococode 6y ago

platz 6y ago
So, what sales-related project management questions for the CD Projekt Management Board does this answer for the HN crowd? Are people upset that this AAA game that is trying do everything on all devices for a huge audience doesn't perform well on the last-gen consoles on it's initial rollout?
- jsnell 6y ago
  Oh, come on. This level of transparency is really fascinating. What other gaming companies, or tech companies for that matter, do you remember going into the details of a bad launch this soon after it happened. Or really even much later.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - f6v 6y ago
    It doesn't seem like they address the main issues, like AI. I doubt you can treat the absence of major attributes of an open-world game, like car chases, as a bug. They're cleverly focusing on minor glitches and bugs in their talk.
    - yunyu 6y ago
      They explicitly addressed the AI point: So, for the first question – whether we’re focusing just on technicalities or gameplay elements; things like AI – for example. To be honest – these are the same for us, from the production standpoint AI and NPC behavior fall within the general category of bugs, so if I can give you an answer – I think it does actually include that as well.
      - f6v 6y ago
        But there's a big difference between bugs in AI and no driving or pursuit AI at all. That's why people aren't satisfied with their statement, they're trying to blur the line between bug and non-existent feature.
  - unpopularopp 6y ago
    Square Enix with FFXIV 1.0 They took full responsibility. Suspended the subscripton for months. People who subbed for at least 3 months before the shutdown got permanent discounted subscription in the new version. They changed the whole upper management of the division responsible of the game. And much more. Honestly there are 2 games that had a remarkable turn around from a total disaster launch: FFXIV 1.0 and No Man's Sky. Not sure Cyberpunk can do it too.
- goat_whisperer 6y ago
  Last-gen consoles? If it wasn't for the most recent delay of release date, Cyberpunk 2077 would've been released before PS5 and the new Xbox were even available for purchase. You're acting like people are trying to play this game on an NES. If the game ain't gonna work on a certain console, don't sell it for that console. Plain and simple. Or if you're going to release it anyway, at least let gaming critics review it and let the public make an informed decision, which CDPR deliberately didn't do. I'm baffled as to why so many people are defending this incredibly shady business practice by CDPR.
  - platz 6y ago
    I'm using their own terminology.
  - tristor 6y ago
    The complaints aren't about CP77 performance on Xbox Series X or PS5. They're about it's performance on non-X Xbox One and non-Pro PS4s. Which aren't just last-gen consoles, they're the lowest tier of last gen consoles. I don't think CDPR should have released the games on those platforms if they don't have their performance scaling right. I'm not defending their actions, but I think most people just have their expectations out of whack. CP77 is the first AAA game released in a long time that was built for PC first and ported to consoles, instead of the other way around. Instead of PCs getting crappy ports hard-limited to 60fps no matter how much GPU you throw at it, and crappy control schemes, the dregs of last-gen consoles got really poor performance and visuals compared to people on PS4 Pros, Xbox One X, and the latest 2020 gen consoles. It's not acceptable, but it's also hard to imagine how you could have made people happy when they're that far underpowered from a hardware department for a game like CP77.
    - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
      Thats funny because I felt like it was a port because of the horrible control scheme. You cant move slower, so you have to tap keys to move slowly, but tapping keys does dashes, exactly the opposite what you would want. Dig around some conf files to fix it. Crouch button is c, but it doesnt work during dialogue, even if you rebind the dialogue skip button that is also c by default. Its like nobody playtested it at all on PC
- vmception 6y ago
  Various AAA titles released over the last 4 years look better, perform better, and have better AI Alternatively they could have reskinned the Witcher and people would have been content This game will be good in 2021 when released again on the new generation of consoles
f6v 6y ago
If you watch game footage, it's obvious it's half-baked. However, so many people violated the number one rule: no preorders. This is literally the only thing gamers can do to incentivise developers to not release buggy games. But here we are again.
- notJim 6y ago
  Eh, I always appreciate the early adopters who provide feedback and pressure on devs to fix the games so that I can play a much better game 6 months or a year later.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Well yeah, same here. But seems like CDPR is happy about preorders. That's too many adopters to be called "early".
    - kuu 6y ago
      8 million of preorders, how could they not be happy?
- maerF0x0 6y ago
  is the inverted side of "no preorders" also "No epic games"? Something has to fund development and at a certain point investors will not risk the lack of sales. Versus a preorder is an actual sale.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    That doesn’t make sense as most of the money is invested long before a release date is even announced.
  - aspaceman 6y ago
    Preorders aren’t used to invest development, but rather recoup some costs. They also provide a signal to publishers that allows delays to happen. You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.
IronRanger 6y ago
The major underappreciated factor for this release is the impact of COVID lockdowns - particularly enforced WFH - on the final development of this title. For me this is the single factor which has lead to so many of the problems inherent in the game. You cannot just pickup a multi-hundred person digital interactive art project (ie. a video game) and shift it online overnight. Still, I think CDPR were right to release the game. Its good enough, content is complete, and they need to have the product on shelves before Christmas and before people lose interest in last-gen consoles. Having the product out there will motivate its staff - still stuck at home in Lockdown Poland - to work on the very public bugs. Its also interesting that Poland seems to have had basically the same COVID case and death profile as Ukraine, despite Ukraine having a significantly less strict lockdown (bars, restaurants, workplaces never shut this Autumn or Winter).
- jontaydev 6y ago
  There is a theory that development was restarted several times, most notably in 2018 to incorporate Keanu into the main story. It seems like they couldn't stick to a singular vision and shifted goals too many times.
  - f6v 6y ago
    Which I never understood: how is an actor supposed to suddenly carry the whole game? I mean, he's got those cool movies(where he plays the same guy over and over again), but he's no Jesus to be worshiped like that.
    - angelbar 6y ago
      Or Maradona
    - platz 6y ago
      You make it sound like having a leading role in a game is the highest honor in the land one can bestow upon an individual.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
pavlov 6y ago
This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of: "CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1] Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-developers-staff-bonuses-review-score https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-...
- CamelCaseName 6y ago
  Doesn't sound much different than getting paid in equity at a startup.
  - pavlov 6y ago
    There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.
    - nthj 6y ago
      This is absolutely technically correct. Practically speaking, maybe not so much. http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canthecomanytakebackmyvestedshares http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canth...
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      You can be employee #2 of a startup, receive a lot of stock early on and then see it dillute to fractions of a cent. Perfectly legal.
      - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
        That's what happened to Eduardo Saverin.
Merman_Mike 6y ago
> Hi, this is Michał Nowakowski – the second question; would having more developers help deliver the game on old-gens? In terms of delivering the game at a certain point, it’s really not about the number of people; it’s not like throwing in – in the last month – 200 or so people would actually help. So, the answer is no; this is not related to the fact that we could have thrown 300 or 500 more people into the fray and things would have happened differently. This is interesting info for someone like me that doesn't work in this field. It's something that I can understand intuitively, but it's nice to see that confirmed.
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Yeah it confirms the sort of teachings of the mythical man month.
- niea_11 6y ago
  There is a maxim from the essay "The Mythical Man-Month" saying that adding people to a late software project makes it later. It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
  - easton 6y ago
    That wasn’t really the analyst’s question though. He wondered given the size and complexity of the game, should more people have been on the project from the ground floor (not added in the last month once they weren’t going to clear the bug tracker), or was it a organizational/management issue that they couldn’t get something good from the talent they had?
    - niea_11 6y ago
      You are correct. I think that Nowakowski misunderstood the question, and assumed it's mainly about the delays.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
dotdi 6y ago
I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now. It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†. The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it. † Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?
- sleepybrett 6y ago
  I'm generally in the same place as you but I gotta say combat is pretty shit. The AI is bonehead stupid, I've killed a guy (not using a silencer) that was standing three feet from another guy and his partner didn't alert. Meanwhile 5 guys from outside the building did, rushed in the building then stopped dead and didn't ever shoot.
- briga 6y ago
  I mean, that's great for you, but people are bashing CDPR for a good reason: the last-gen console versions are unfinished buggy messes. In a few hours of playing I've had multiple crashes, constant bugs, drops to 15 FPS, just generally terrible performance. I've literally never played such a buggy game before. For a game that had 8 years of dev time the state of the game is pretty egregious
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    If it runs well on PC and current gen consoles, then they should have delayed the release on previous gen consoles. I'm going to guess that they released on all platforms at once because of contractual obligations.
    - ThatPlayer 6y ago
hertzrat 6y ago
That’s interesting: a lot of releases seem to sell up to 2-3x more in console than pc, but approx 60% of their sales are for pc. Is that because of Covid, or is it a trend?
d1egoaz 6y ago
Game wasn't ready for consoles, they just lied about it. And it looks like even the PC game feels incomplete "It's all style but no substance.". https://steamcommunity.com/id/outxider/recommended/1091500/ https://steamcommunity.com/id/outxider/recommended/1091500/ "Janky. If I can describe it with one word. 8 years of hype to launch what looks like an Early Access game. It's glitchy, it's buggy, it doesn't run well unless you have an RTX card and DLSS enabled. And that's barely passable. But those can eventually be fixed. The core of the game, the massive open world, is incredibly superficial, with nothing to do in it. CDPR crafted a beautiful, detailed world, with braindead AI and overly simplistic gameplay. There's no roleplaying involved like you would find in Deus Ex. There's no extracurricular activities that doesn't involve shooting a bunch of bad guys like you would find in Red Dead Redemption 2. You won't find tight gunplay like you would see in Destiny 2. The AI completely lacks any sort of intelligence. Enemies rush you without the sense of self-preservation. Oftentimes standing there letting you blast them in the face. Cops spawn literally yards behind you without any chase, or any threat. Walk a block down and they completely forget you exist. No bounty on your head, no search and apprehend procedures. But stand next to them for 3 seconds and they'll shoot you on sight. Really, there's not much to do except shoot things. Guns feel impactful enough, if you use revolvers or tech weapons, and melee combat is passable. You can go for a stealth or hacking approach, but those don't feel as good as just pulling the trigger on some thugs. Hacking is just pointing your reticle at someone, and then make a selection from the menu. And depending on what you chose, sparks just fly out of their head. That's it. The story is engaging, yet forgettable. This is a cyberpunk setting, but it's in appearances only. There's all these talks about megacorporations taking over the world, but only one corporation takes center stage. There's no political intrigue, no conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true, no investigation into a greater mystery. Keanu Reeves is literally taking your breath away and you go out to make sure that doesn't happen. Your personal backstory is forgettable. It's literally 20 mins long, and your entire introduction to Night City is a montage. CDPR failed the show, don't tell aspect. They could've squeezed in a few good hours of character development and worldbuilding with the opening hours. Instead, you get taken straight into Night City, told to care about certain things, and want to have this lofty ideal of becoming a living legend for some unknown reason. You don't have a story to tell, there's a story being told to you. The characters definitely carry the narrative, from Silverhand's personal vendetta, to Panam's sense of belonging, and Takemura's strong honor code. Regardless, I did enjoy this game. But there's so many glaring flaws that becomes hard to ignore. So it pains me to say, I do not recommend this game. The numerous technical issues make this equivalent to an Early Access title. But the gameplay loop, the promise of an immersive experience, a sandbox for you to get lost in are totally nonexistent. It's a beautiful world CDPR created, but it's just a glorified loading screen going from one mission marker to another. It's all style but no substance."
theSIRius 6y ago
The whole project feels terribly mismanaged. Even from the character editor it is obvious the game had to be scaled down in the last year to even ship. Considering the amount of crunch, it is heartbreaking it ended like this for every interested party. I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.
- Strom 6y ago
  I do get a sense of mismanagement as well, however the platform situation is a bit complicated. Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK. The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360. The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne. It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either. -- I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.
  - 6y ago
_cs2017_ 6y ago
Wasn't it obvious to anyone who play-tested on last-gen consoles that the game is nearly unplayable and so will receive horrendous reviews? Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year? After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions. "Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors. "We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.
- pavon 6y ago
  They overestimated how much they could fix in the time between the initial delivery and the day-one patch.
  - ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
    Yeah it reads to me more like they were pressured to release it quickly before the holidays by investors, and the decision makers didn't listen to those below saying that it just couldn't be done (to the quality everyone expected). I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      ...or it could have become Duke Nukem Forever, the game which was always just one year away, and was ultimately disappointing. DNF was a product of the culture of the 90s, and just didn't work when it was eventually released. There's a real risk that if Cyberpunk was delayed further, whatever cultural winds drive its sails (and sales) could shift and the game would stall.
TheGuyWhoCodes 6y ago
Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance. You can't even customize anything past the creation screen, no car paint jobs no hair cuts and no body modification, no transmog system.. They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do... Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen. Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game. They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.
- throwaway98765t 6y ago
  I’m playing on first gen threadripper and a 580rx card with no major issues, the game is gorgeous and I am having a blast. I agree that the AI is horrible and the UI is a pain, especially when you want to do things like sell a lot of items
- sniglom 6y ago
  I fully agree. It's mostly a fancy light show and not much more. Gameplay wise, this reminds me of games from the Xbox 360 / PS3 era.
- syndoch 6y ago
  The game has an overwhelming amount of very detailed content in the main job and side jobs, and also provides plenty of flexibility in combat if you explore the various upgrade systems. It's an evolution of the Witcher 3, not Grand Theft Auto. Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    > Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is. The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.
29athrowaway 6y ago
There are game companies where salaries are not paid until a release is delivered.
- mdoms 6y ago
  No there aren't.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    Yes there are, in Europe. e.g.: Crytek. https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees-not-paid https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees... A much better situation than CD Projekt, which is also a European company (from Poland).
- cgrealy 6y ago
  Not really. You might have a big bonus tied up in a release, but unless you're a self-funded indie dev (typically with single digit employees), you have to pay your staff. People aren't that desparate to work on games.
- dysoco 6y ago
  Is this even legal? I guess it depends on the country but doesn't sound legal at all where I live.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    The most common form of theft is wage theft. It is very common around the world. Contractors especially get ripped off all the time. "Hey, that tile is slightly off, I am not paying for any of this".
    - smabie 6y ago
      In my experience, it's usually the contractors that are the ones stealing.
- 6y ago
mikenew 6y ago
> we’ve actually shown console footage, but never on the last-gen consoles. The reason is that we were updating the game on last-gen consoles until the very last minute, and we thought we’d make it in time. [...] That was not intended; we were just fixing the game until the very last moment. This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.
- tolbish 6y ago
  It's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. There is also the lesser known axiom: it's better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.
  - zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
    It’s better to not be caught committing fraud than to be caught.
pvg 6y ago
Related from Wired/Cecilia D'Anastasio https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/ https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/
elgatonegro 6y ago
I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment- and my biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. It feels like a throwback to the dumbest action games of the 90s: here's a main story and a bunch of quests that you'll be completing on railtracks. Your choices don't really matter, the world is empty and soulless, the writing is lazy and you can't stop but keep thinking how superficial everything feels. There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account. Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  > My biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. What are some modern games that are like this? I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.
  - elgatonegro 6y ago
    The Witness was great as was The Talos Principle. SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.
    - Rebelgecko 6y ago
      I would add Spec Ops: The Line (depending on what online communities you're a part of this game is either hugely underrated or hugely overrated), and the entire Bioshock series. There also some simpler indie games like The Stanley Parable, Papers Please, and This War of Mine
    - akhilcacharya 6y ago
      New Vegas is a great example, and is better than I remember on this dimension [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4 https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4
shmerl 6y ago
Incumbent consoles hardware refresh cycle is so horribly long due to lack of competition, that it holds the whole industry back and damages progress. I tried the game on Linux (Wine + vkd3d-proton). Thanks to CDPR for at least giving the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance, even though they could make a native Linux release already due to all the Stadia work.
rossmohax 6y ago
No Mans Sky devs turned failure into a big win in a year or so after release. Miracles do happen, I hope CDPR can pull it off too.
thepete2 6y ago
"we started with a score of 70, but now it’s 79. If you filter those who have played 10 hours or more, the score is 85 –so the more you play the more enjoyment you feel." Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours
- mattnewton 6y ago
  Came here to post this. The obvious conclusion is that you are at the very least filtering out people who stopped playing because of game breaking bugs.
  - tester34 6y ago
    did he actually lie? he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
- tester34 6y ago
  did he actually lie? he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
  - thepete2 6y ago
    Maybe lying is the wrong word. But the conclusion that "the longer you play the more you enjoy the game" is very misleading.
uncomputation 6y ago
Why is everyone just talking about last-gen consoles? My partner has been playing on the PS5 and it still crashes at least every hour. Sure, not every 10 min but nothing to gloss over either. This doesn’t even mention the texture glitches, clipping, unachievable quest glitches, animation bugs, etc
- ThatPlayer 6y ago
  Most people still only have last-gen consoles, so that's where the majority is.
- miloignis 6y ago
  The next gen version isn't out yet, the PS5 is playing the PS4 version, so their complaints and yours are indeed for the same version.
  - uncomputation 6y ago
    Can’t believe I missed that, thanks
justforthisnow 6y ago
Provided how bad it’s AI is, would be even feasible for them to fix it?
jwiley 6y ago
CD Project forced their employees to crunch to get a game out, missed deadlines, and shipped a game that is buggy on some definition of last-gen hardware. Assuming all that is true: how is this news? This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. As someone who tearfully tried to play Doom on a 286, I have some sympathy but the level of outrage is hard for me to understand. In my experience playing the game on a PS4 Pro (does that qualify as a last-gen console? Not sure), I have experienced no game breaking bugs or performance issues that warrant the level of criticism here. Instead I have been blown away by the level of detail and beauty of the world they created and I personally am over the moon with the fact the game that I had been eagerly awaiting exceeds my expectations for it. Congrats CD Projekt, take a vacation, give some bonuses, let people upgrade their 5 year old hardware and chill out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- willis936 6y ago
  > This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. This is news because the quoted statement is false. In fact, the opposite is true. Every genre defining game of the past 35 years has had a genre defining gold print. CP2077 is a dumpster fire. It will never be considered a great because of its launch.
  - jwiley 6y ago
    I assume you’ve actually played the game on a console, and experienced game breaking bugs? Or maybe you subjectively consider the quality to not match your well thought out expectations previous to purchasing it? Can you please expand on your personal experiences with the game that led you to the dumpster fire conclusion? I’m also curious about your statement that every genre defining game has had a genre defining gold print. Can you point to one or more similar games that launched flawlessly across all platforms, on time, without negative reviews?
    - 6y ago
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
> After 3 delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game. We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles. It was the wrong approach and against our business philosophy. Management at game dev company ignores all team feedback about timeline and quality, instead promises an arbitrary release date and pushes to crunch to meet deadlines. What a shocker ;)
mgarym 6y ago
I've had the misfortune of interacting with some of the engineers at CD Projekt Red in the course of my job in the past. There is a serious competence issue. It's not surprising in the slightest bit that they have this many problems with their release. On top of that, those engineers were arrogant AF when I talked to them.
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  I'm genuinely curious, do you have more details?
tylermenezes 6y ago
They barely answers any questions. If the leadership team is not tracking the metrics they'd need to answer questions like "roughly how have last-gen console sales compared to expectations" or "are you seeing lots of refund requests", it's really no wonder they're in this situation.
overgard 6y ago
I'm really enjoying the game on PC, it runs reasonably well on my GTX 1070. I'm staggered how many bugs there are though. I run into one about every five minutes. So far off the top of my head: - NPCs floating in space - NPCs walking through solid objects - NPCs randomly spawning in view - I have a gun that wont fire if I use a scope on it - I have another gun whose model disappears in car chases - Some objects have meshes that duplicate (cigarette floating in space while the character is also holding it) - Randomly getting flagged by the cops for a crime when im literally just walking around with my weapon holstered - Quest goals not registering/having to repeat certain actions None of these are like a huge deal, sometimes it's even really funny, but dear god is it incredibly buggy.
- plasma 6y ago
  I'm curious how this could be happening, like do we think there is some 'job subsystem' bug that just causes game-tasks (whether its loading an image, or processing a message, ...) just randomly gets dropped and not processed? It sounds like such a systemic issue its not like a particular component (eg AI or rendering) is the issue.
  - meibo 6y ago
    Seems to me they have a lot of "show this at that time" bugs - I relatively often see UI elements that shouldn't be there or active layered on top of each other as well. Additionally to hands and props disappearing at random.
  - overgard 6y ago
    Just some guesses: - I'm figuring floating NPCs and walking through solid surfaces might be from incorrect navmeshes. IE maybe they baked them, moved some stuff around, and forgot to rebake. Or forgot to mark some objects static, etc. - Meshes disappearing.. not sure, thinking maybe theyre using some fixed size arrays to avoid reallocations but maybe theyre hitting a fixed size limit and things get evicted. - Weird spawns. Guessing this might be something like a broken line of sight calculation. Maybe similar to the theorized navmesh thing -- occluders could be wrong too
- 6y ago
lmilcin 6y ago
I was once to CD Projekt here in Warsaw, almost 20 years ago. I got a defective Baldur's Gate CD and got option to have it mailed or take it in person. As me and my friend wanted to play very badly we just went for a free HQ tour:) They were very nice about it.
rappatic 6y ago
I play PC with a pretty good rig (RTX 2080S and i7-9700) and performance has been fine. I do struggle to hit 1440p60 at high settings in certain scenes (driving in populated areas etc.) but the game has been pretty bug-free for me at least. I had some bad crashes on D1 but after the 1.04 patch I had no problems at all besides a single isolated animation bug where a single character's glass would hover six inches to the side of her hand. Maybe this is just me? I've been loving the game. I completed it and am starting my second playthrough. Honestly, my only complaint is that it's too _short_, and I think CDPR took comments about the Witcher 3's long length a little too much to heart. I would not have complained for a second if it was double the length or more.
bwang29 6y ago
we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.
bwang29 6y ago
“ we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.”
artellectual 6y ago
As someone who works as a leader of a tech team building a financial engine, from my personal experience. When teams are doing overtime it means some bad management happened somewhere. Either someone under-estimated the scope and was never adjusted / communicated, or someone couldn't keep promise of not changing things as a result the developers and final product suffer. Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new. After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out. This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product. Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made. How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?
- vlunkr 6y ago
  It seems like in the games industry they really want to advertise release dates or at least a release window for marketing purposes. Which results in the bad cruch periods, since you can only delay so much once you've stamped that date on it. This happens all the time, but this is an exceptionally bad example. On the one hand, I wish companies wouldn't do this kind of crap, but on the other hand, the consumers need to be more responsible. This game has already made back the development costs, so all this backlash will probably amount to nothing. It's harsh to say, but gamers will seemingly believe anything the marketing machine tells them hook line and sinker.
  - swat535 6y ago
    Exactly and this whole thing really solidifies the concept of never giving out specific deadlines unless you've basically completed the product and just doing minor touchups and even then you _still_ pad it by 2x. The problem however is that execs want exact dates and meanwhile marketing is just hyping up the product which yields to crazy expectations from consumers and this forces the engineers to even more crunch and degrade the quality of the whole thing. Vicious cycle indeed.
pie_flavor 6y ago
I have experienced exactly one bug, namely every tree within view-distance being visible through walls at all times. It is possibly the single most immersion breaking bug I have experienced in a video game and every time I see it I cringe. And, yet, twelve hours and counting.
- n3dm 6y ago
  Update your video drivers. Known issue.
partingshots 6y ago
Does anyone know what the timelines are for new DLC? Also, are Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series the only games that CD Projekt has?
chrysoprace 6y ago
In the last couple of months friends have asked me "are you gonna get Cyberpunk?", and some seem taken aback by my answer when I say I'm gonna get it next year. Usually when I explain my reasoning (which I apply to almost all new game releases), people seem to understand: a) There is no way of knowing if the game is gonna be good until real copies land in the hands of people who play games to have fun, instead of reviewers who are too worried about giving an honest review with the fear that they won't get future review copies or get sued. b) Games generally get steep discounts a year or so after release. This is not universal, but if you avoid buying into the hype then you'll save yourself a considerable amount of money. The only way to hold these companies accountable is to vote with your wallet, and so I always encourage people to reconsider pre-orders. I'll be eagerly waiting to see if the game gets the love it deserves over the next year and if it turns out to be a flop, it'll just join long line of over-hyped AAA release flops.
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floatingatoll 6y ago
For those wondering what all the fuss is about, CD Projekt Red is the company that released a popular game called "Cyberpunk 2077" with critical deficits on PS4 and Xbox One platforms.
lyx0 6y ago
I played it Day 1 and it runs reasonably well on my RTX 2080, nothing spectacular tho. I've had like 3 crashes in the 20 hours I've put in yet. I enjoy the game a lot, even with the bugs but what really let me down were the life paths. I started a corpo character, got some fancy tech and a lot of cash 5 minutes in, then I ride a cool flying car around, I felt good and liked my choice. 10 minutes later I'm in a bar and 2 people come up to me that I have a meaningless dialogue with, they steal the tech and cash and from that point on I'm just a regular street kid? It made no sense to me, I played on for an hour and then restarted as a street kid.
deleted 6y ago
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arminiusreturns 6y ago
I'm going to skip telling about all the bugs I have run into, so I'll just get down to what I think happened here. Two primary things: One) They targeted consoles when they shouldn't have. Cyberpunk is a game that should have been pc only first, and then later ported to consoles. They had a hammer (the engine) and saw nails (consoles), but in the game dev world the largest sets of complications come from trying to support different environments. The same can be said often in the normal software world, trying to be cross compatible when sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. When you do the math, targeting consoles, and especially if you go for last gen, the beancounter numbers show the ROI increase over just pc or just pc and latest gen are very high... and then instead of the development resources that should have gone into the AI, customization, bug-squashing, etc, go into console work. Two) They focused too much on building the individual quests instead of the emergent opportunities which abound. It seems like they spent too much time on hand crafting quest levels, especially the ones that involved Silverhand. Many quests have their own complete loaded levels you can't get to from the main game world. By doing so, they probably wasted tons of tester and dev hours on those individual levels instead of the open game world bugs and features. I suspect also that quite a few features just got ripped out and replaced with placeholders while the bugs get worked out more. There is no way the AI they touted so long ago is really in this state, for example, so I suspect if you give it half a year, lots of expected features will suddenly start showing up in updates and the game will end up in a much better state. All in all, I enjoy the game world, and it has moments where it really shines. It also has madness inducing and show stopping bugs that most normal players just won't put up with... (~100+ proc kills/game freezes to finish main story line on linux/proton). Why do beancounters always ruin everything they touch? What should have been one of the best games ever released was one of the best releases to ever money. Two years from now it will be primo, I'm sure. The question is will there be enough backlash to change anything? Given the amount of money they made and are still making, I doubt it. Different industry, same bullshit as everywhere else.
londons_explore 6y ago
Are there any videos of this "unplayable performance"? All the PS4 videos I could find barely stuttered and seemed well above the threshold of playable
dusted 6y ago
I am running a last gen system (PC) and the game runs fine even with everything on max (except for ray-tracing which I don't think look that good but hits performance a lot). I don't think CDPR should have released for old consoles, it's going to misrepresent the game no matter what, and just take extra effort.
alkonaut 6y ago
Wish at least one game studio/publisher would come out and say "We are just like any other software company. We work 40 hour weeks and have a healthy work/life balance. We don't have crunch time". As the industry grows ever larger, that has to be a good way of attracting talent.
- moritonal 6y ago
  It exists. The result is a slower-paced release process and "smaller" (as in, not absurd attempts at simulations of megacities) games, but instead forcing them to rely on story-telling and strong art. See SuperGiant games and their recent enormous success with Hades. https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre-and-hades-1838082618 https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre...
omega3 6y ago
It looks like there are major issues besides the bugs on the last gen consoles and a lot of promised features/content were not delivered: > no practical difference between life paths chosen > AI system broken/unfinished > length of the game + no replayabity factor > linear playthrough It has been suggested that the game was rewritten to accommodate the Keanu character. From what I've gathered this game is a solid 7/10. It's interesting to see so many nine and ten out of ten reviews from the "professional" reveiewers and the reviews from the players. This is a trend that has been going on for some time now.
T3RMINATED 6y ago
This is BS -- the game was built for old gen consoles!!! Its intent was never the PS5 period. They failed.

304 points by rococode 6y ago

So, what sales-related project management questions for the CD Projekt Management Board does this answer for the HN crowd? Are people upset that this AAA game that is trying do everything on all devices for a huge audience doesn't perform well on the last-gen consoles on it's initial rollout?

jsnell 6y ago
Oh, come on. This level of transparency is really fascinating. What other gaming companies, or tech companies for that matter, do you remember going into the details of a bad launch this soon after it happened. Or really even much later.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- f6v 6y ago
  It doesn't seem like they address the main issues, like AI. I doubt you can treat the absence of major attributes of an open-world game, like car chases, as a bug. They're cleverly focusing on minor glitches and bugs in their talk.
  - yunyu 6y ago
    They explicitly addressed the AI point: So, for the first question – whether we’re focusing just on technicalities or gameplay elements; things like AI – for example. To be honest – these are the same for us, from the production standpoint AI and NPC behavior fall within the general category of bugs, so if I can give you an answer – I think it does actually include that as well.
    - f6v 6y ago
      But there's a big difference between bugs in AI and no driving or pursuit AI at all. That's why people aren't satisfied with their statement, they're trying to blur the line between bug and non-existent feature.
- unpopularopp 6y ago
  Square Enix with FFXIV 1.0 They took full responsibility. Suspended the subscripton for months. People who subbed for at least 3 months before the shutdown got permanent discounted subscription in the new version. They changed the whole upper management of the division responsible of the game. And much more. Honestly there are 2 games that had a remarkable turn around from a total disaster launch: FFXIV 1.0 and No Man's Sky. Not sure Cyberpunk can do it too.
goat_whisperer 6y ago
Last-gen consoles? If it wasn't for the most recent delay of release date, Cyberpunk 2077 would've been released before PS5 and the new Xbox were even available for purchase. You're acting like people are trying to play this game on an NES. If the game ain't gonna work on a certain console, don't sell it for that console. Plain and simple. Or if you're going to release it anyway, at least let gaming critics review it and let the public make an informed decision, which CDPR deliberately didn't do. I'm baffled as to why so many people are defending this incredibly shady business practice by CDPR.
- platz 6y ago
  I'm using their own terminology.
- tristor 6y ago
  The complaints aren't about CP77 performance on Xbox Series X or PS5. They're about it's performance on non-X Xbox One and non-Pro PS4s. Which aren't just last-gen consoles, they're the lowest tier of last gen consoles. I don't think CDPR should have released the games on those platforms if they don't have their performance scaling right. I'm not defending their actions, but I think most people just have their expectations out of whack. CP77 is the first AAA game released in a long time that was built for PC first and ported to consoles, instead of the other way around. Instead of PCs getting crappy ports hard-limited to 60fps no matter how much GPU you throw at it, and crappy control schemes, the dregs of last-gen consoles got really poor performance and visuals compared to people on PS4 Pros, Xbox One X, and the latest 2020 gen consoles. It's not acceptable, but it's also hard to imagine how you could have made people happy when they're that far underpowered from a hardware department for a game like CP77.
  - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
    Thats funny because I felt like it was a port because of the horrible control scheme. You cant move slower, so you have to tap keys to move slowly, but tapping keys does dashes, exactly the opposite what you would want. Dig around some conf files to fix it. Crouch button is c, but it doesnt work during dialogue, even if you rebind the dialogue skip button that is also c by default. Its like nobody playtested it at all on PC
vmception 6y ago
Various AAA titles released over the last 4 years look better, perform better, and have better AI Alternatively they could have reskinned the Witcher and people would have been content This game will be good in 2021 when released again on the new generation of consoles

f6v 6y ago

If you watch game footage, it's obvious it's half-baked. However, so many people violated the number one rule: no preorders. This is literally the only thing gamers can do to incentivise developers to not release buggy games. But here we are again.

notJim 6y ago
Eh, I always appreciate the early adopters who provide feedback and pressure on devs to fix the games so that I can play a much better game 6 months or a year later.
- f6v 6y ago
  Well yeah, same here. But seems like CDPR is happy about preorders. That's too many adopters to be called "early".
  - kuu 6y ago
    8 million of preorders, how could they not be happy?
maerF0x0 6y ago
is the inverted side of "no preorders" also "No epic games"? Something has to fund development and at a certain point investors will not risk the lack of sales. Versus a preorder is an actual sale.
- TylerE 6y ago
  That doesn’t make sense as most of the money is invested long before a release date is even announced.
- aspaceman 6y ago
  Preorders aren’t used to invest development, but rather recoup some costs. They also provide a signal to publishers that allows delays to happen. You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.

IronRanger 6y ago

The major underappreciated factor for this release is the impact of COVID lockdowns - particularly enforced WFH - on the final development of this title. For me this is the single factor which has lead to so many of the problems inherent in the game. You cannot just pickup a multi-hundred person digital interactive art project (ie. a video game) and shift it online overnight. Still, I think CDPR were right to release the game. Its good enough, content is complete, and they need to have the product on shelves before Christmas and before people lose interest in last-gen consoles. Having the product out there will motivate its staff - still stuck at home in Lockdown Poland - to work on the very public bugs. Its also interesting that Poland seems to have had basically the same COVID case and death profile as Ukraine, despite Ukraine having a significantly less strict lockdown (bars, restaurants, workplaces never shut this Autumn or Winter).

jontaydev 6y ago
There is a theory that development was restarted several times, most notably in 2018 to incorporate Keanu into the main story. It seems like they couldn't stick to a singular vision and shifted goals too many times.
- f6v 6y ago
  Which I never understood: how is an actor supposed to suddenly carry the whole game? I mean, he's got those cool movies(where he plays the same guy over and over again), but he's no Jesus to be worshiped like that.
  - angelbar 6y ago
    Or Maradona
  - platz 6y ago
    You make it sound like having a leading role in a game is the highest honor in the land one can bestow upon an individual.
  - mhh__ 6y ago

pavlov 6y ago

This company has probably the shittiest gamified bonus system that I've ever heard of: "CDPR leaders would hand out tokens every month to staffers who went above and beyond, and those tokens were supposed to be transferrable into bonuses if the game met “certain criteria, like critical acclaim and a timely release,” according to the report." [1] Get paid in "crunch mode experience points" handed out by middle managers, who can apparently change the terms of this so-called bonus any time they want? Awful. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-developers-staff-bonuses-review-score https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/11/22170655/cyberpunk-2077-...

CamelCaseName 6y ago
Doesn't sound much different than getting paid in equity at a startup.
- pavlov 6y ago
  There's centuries worth of legislation about equity. You can still get screwed, but "I'm giving you the right to own shares in this company" means something in the eyes of the law. Getting paid in participation tokens doesn't.
  - nthj 6y ago
    This is absolutely technically correct. Practically speaking, maybe not so much. http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canthecomanytakebackmyvestedshares http://stockoptioncounsel.com/blog/standards-ownership-canth...
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    You can be employee #2 of a startup, receive a lot of stock early on and then see it dillute to fractions of a cent. Perfectly legal.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      That's what happened to Eduardo Saverin.

Merman_Mike 6y ago

> Hi, this is Michał Nowakowski – the second question; would having more developers help deliver the game on old-gens? In terms of delivering the game at a certain point, it’s really not about the number of people; it’s not like throwing in – in the last month – 200 or so people would actually help. So, the answer is no; this is not related to the fact that we could have thrown 300 or 500 more people into the fray and things would have happened differently. This is interesting info for someone like me that doesn't work in this field. It's something that I can understand intuitively, but it's nice to see that confirmed.

polishdude20 6y ago
Yeah it confirms the sort of teachings of the mythical man month.
niea_11 6y ago
There is a maxim from the essay "The Mythical Man-Month" saying that adding people to a late software project makes it later. It takes time for new people to become productive, communication becomes difficult and some tasks can't be "parallelized". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law
- easton 6y ago
  That wasn’t really the analyst’s question though. He wondered given the size and complexity of the game, should more people have been on the project from the ground floor (not added in the last month once they weren’t going to clear the bug tracker), or was it a organizational/management issue that they couldn’t get something good from the talent they had?
  - niea_11 6y ago
    You are correct. I think that Nowakowski misunderstood the question, and assumed it's mainly about the delays.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

dotdi 6y ago

I see CDPR being bashed a lot and I wanted to chip in: I bought the game on release day on GOG and am playing it on a Macbook Pro via Geforce Now. It's running very well for me. I've had 0 crashes. Very few glitches, and if, then they were cosmetic i.e. didn't cause any gameplay problems†. The visuals are absolutely amazing. Combat is very nice. The skill tree is interesting. Night city is beautifully immersive and the story is thrilling. I'm not much of a gamer, but I feel that I'll sink a large amount of time into this game. As of now, I can't stop thinking about the game when I'm away from it. † Although I almost had a heart attack as one time a bad guy that I had taken down just got up and sat back down on the bench he was sitting on before. He was still "dead" but just chilling on the bench. Hidden zombie mode?

sleepybrett 6y ago
I'm generally in the same place as you but I gotta say combat is pretty shit. The AI is bonehead stupid, I've killed a guy (not using a silencer) that was standing three feet from another guy and his partner didn't alert. Meanwhile 5 guys from outside the building did, rushed in the building then stopped dead and didn't ever shoot.
briga 6y ago
I mean, that's great for you, but people are bashing CDPR for a good reason: the last-gen console versions are unfinished buggy messes. In a few hours of playing I've had multiple crashes, constant bugs, drops to 15 FPS, just generally terrible performance. I've literally never played such a buggy game before. For a game that had 8 years of dev time the state of the game is pretty egregious
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
  If it runs well on PC and current gen consoles, then they should have delayed the release on previous gen consoles. I'm going to guess that they released on all platforms at once because of contractual obligations.
  - ThatPlayer 6y ago

hertzrat 6y ago

That’s interesting: a lot of releases seem to sell up to 2-3x more in console than pc, but approx 60% of their sales are for pc. Is that because of Covid, or is it a trend?

d1egoaz 6y ago

Game wasn't ready for consoles, they just lied about it. And it looks like even the PC game feels incomplete "It's all style but no substance.". https://steamcommunity.com/id/outxider/recommended/1091500/ https://steamcommunity.com/id/outxider/recommended/1091500/ "Janky. If I can describe it with one word. 8 years of hype to launch what looks like an Early Access game. It's glitchy, it's buggy, it doesn't run well unless you have an RTX card and DLSS enabled. And that's barely passable. But those can eventually be fixed. The core of the game, the massive open world, is incredibly superficial, with nothing to do in it. CDPR crafted a beautiful, detailed world, with braindead AI and overly simplistic gameplay. There's no roleplaying involved like you would find in Deus Ex. There's no extracurricular activities that doesn't involve shooting a bunch of bad guys like you would find in Red Dead Redemption 2. You won't find tight gunplay like you would see in Destiny 2. The AI completely lacks any sort of intelligence. Enemies rush you without the sense of self-preservation. Oftentimes standing there letting you blast them in the face. Cops spawn literally yards behind you without any chase, or any threat. Walk a block down and they completely forget you exist. No bounty on your head, no search and apprehend procedures. But stand next to them for 3 seconds and they'll shoot you on sight. Really, there's not much to do except shoot things. Guns feel impactful enough, if you use revolvers or tech weapons, and melee combat is passable. You can go for a stealth or hacking approach, but those don't feel as good as just pulling the trigger on some thugs. Hacking is just pointing your reticle at someone, and then make a selection from the menu. And depending on what you chose, sparks just fly out of their head. That's it. The story is engaging, yet forgettable. This is a cyberpunk setting, but it's in appearances only. There's all these talks about megacorporations taking over the world, but only one corporation takes center stage. There's no political intrigue, no conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true, no investigation into a greater mystery. Keanu Reeves is literally taking your breath away and you go out to make sure that doesn't happen. Your personal backstory is forgettable. It's literally 20 mins long, and your entire introduction to Night City is a montage. CDPR failed the show, don't tell aspect. They could've squeezed in a few good hours of character development and worldbuilding with the opening hours. Instead, you get taken straight into Night City, told to care about certain things, and want to have this lofty ideal of becoming a living legend for some unknown reason. You don't have a story to tell, there's a story being told to you. The characters definitely carry the narrative, from Silverhand's personal vendetta, to Panam's sense of belonging, and Takemura's strong honor code. Regardless, I did enjoy this game. But there's so many glaring flaws that becomes hard to ignore. So it pains me to say, I do not recommend this game. The numerous technical issues make this equivalent to an Early Access title. But the gameplay loop, the promise of an immersive experience, a sandbox for you to get lost in are totally nonexistent. It's a beautiful world CDPR created, but it's just a glorified loading screen going from one mission marker to another. It's all style but no substance."

theSIRius 6y ago

The whole project feels terribly mismanaged. Even from the character editor it is obvious the game had to be scaled down in the last year to even ship. Considering the amount of crunch, it is heartbreaking it ended like this for every interested party. I find it hard to believe that the launch of the new consoles did not have an effect on the launch date. CD Projekt could have taken the Rockstar approach, release the game on the last gen or PC and Stadia first, then polish and release on the second platform and then finish with the next gen. Releasing on seven or more platforms at the same time would not go well even before covid.

Strom 6y ago
I do get a sense of mismanagement as well, however the platform situation is a bit complicated. Stadia release was probably contractually obligated to happen with the first volley. It was a big bet for Google, they never shut up about how Cyberpunk will come out for Stadia. Based on a few reviews I've read, the Stadia version seems to have turned out OK. The PS5/SeriesXS versions are coming out in 2021. They don't exist right now. The reason the game runs on PS5/SeriesXS is backwards compatibility. That backwards compatibility didn't exist at the time when GTA5 was released for PS3/Xbox360. The PS4/XBoxOne versions of Cyberpunk should have definitely been delayed. However I think it's not just the holiday season that is a factor here. It's also that the new generation of consoles already came out. Rockstar managed to get GTA5 out for PS3/Xbox360 a few months before PS4/XBoxOne. It's clear that the PC version was the focus for CDPR - as it has always been for its games. It would have helped to schedule the PC version for later (like Rockstar scheduled GTA5 for PC - 2 years after PS3/XBox360) so that initially the focus could be on PS4/XBoxOne - it would probably have resulted in better reviews and a way more polished game. However ignoring PC for so long can be a hard pill to swallow for a PC centric developer - and indeed, they chose not to do it. According to the Q&A PC pre-orders made up 59% of their sales, so from a sales perspective delaying PC probably not the best choice either. -- I do wonder how the PS4/XboxOne version of Cyberpunk looked 6 months ago and how much progress has there been. Hard to imagine it being way worse, but if it has been consistently so bad then it's puzzling why there wasn't significant steps taken as the quality of the game on those platforms wasn't changing.
- 6y ago

_cs2017_ 6y ago

Wasn't it obvious to anyone who play-tested on last-gen consoles that the game is nearly unplayable and so will receive horrendous reviews? Presumably CDPR employees are not afraid to convey such bad news to the management. So why did the management still decide to go ahead with the release this year? After reading this transcript, I didn't find the answer to these questions. "Underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues": it's not like they needed to estimate anything. This is not an MMO that behaves differently after the million users log in. This is not a PC that behaves differently on unpredictable end-user's systems. This is not a game where problems only occur under some rare combinations of factors. "We ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game": signals implies some indirect evidence that can be interpreted differently. It seems, however, that the management would have a pretty unambiguous information at their disposal.

pavon 6y ago
They overestimated how much they could fix in the time between the initial delivery and the day-one patch.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  Yeah it reads to me more like they were pressured to release it quickly before the holidays by investors, and the decision makers didn't listen to those below saying that it just couldn't be done (to the quality everyone expected). I've been playing it on both PS4 Pro and PC and haven't experienced any game-breaking issues, and I was as hyped about this game as anyone (huge fan of the original RPG and CDPR in general), but I still would've preferred they just came out and said "We fucked up, we need more time" and delayed it until next year. People would've been pissed, media would've eaten them alive, but ultimately when the game came out it would've been 10x bigger than it is even now, and the game truly has potential to be one of the greats... after about another year of work.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    ...or it could have become Duke Nukem Forever, the game which was always just one year away, and was ultimately disappointing. DNF was a product of the culture of the 90s, and just didn't work when it was eventually released. There's a real risk that if Cyberpunk was delayed further, whatever cultural winds drive its sails (and sales) could shift and the game would stall.

TheGuyWhoCodes 6y ago

Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance. You can't even customize anything past the creation screen, no car paint jobs no hair cuts and no body modification, no transmog system.. They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do... Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen. Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game. They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.

throwaway98765t 6y ago
I’m playing on first gen threadripper and a 580rx card with no major issues, the game is gorgeous and I am having a blast. I agree that the AI is horrible and the UI is a pain, especially when you want to do things like sell a lot of items
sniglom 6y ago
I fully agree. It's mostly a fancy light show and not much more. Gameplay wise, this reminds me of games from the Xbox 360 / PS3 era.
syndoch 6y ago
The game has an overwhelming amount of very detailed content in the main job and side jobs, and also provides plenty of flexibility in combat if you explore the various upgrade systems. It's an evolution of the Witcher 3, not Grand Theft Auto. Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.
- dawnerd 6y ago
  > Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is. The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.

29athrowaway 6y ago

There are game companies where salaries are not paid until a release is delivered.

mdoms 6y ago
No there aren't.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Yes there are, in Europe. e.g.: Crytek. https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees-not-paid https://www.polygon.com/2016/12/10/13908156/crytek-employees... A much better situation than CD Projekt, which is also a European company (from Poland).
cgrealy 6y ago
Not really. You might have a big bonus tied up in a release, but unless you're a self-funded indie dev (typically with single digit employees), you have to pay your staff. People aren't that desparate to work on games.
dysoco 6y ago
Is this even legal? I guess it depends on the country but doesn't sound legal at all where I live.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  The most common form of theft is wage theft. It is very common around the world. Contractors especially get ripped off all the time. "Hey, that tile is slightly off, I am not paying for any of this".
  - smabie 6y ago
    In my experience, it's usually the contractors that are the ones stealing.
6y ago

mikenew 6y ago

> we’ve actually shown console footage, but never on the last-gen consoles. The reason is that we were updating the game on last-gen consoles until the very last minute, and we thought we’d make it in time. [...] That was not intended; we were just fixing the game until the very last moment. This is absurd. They didn't hide console footage because they were sure they'd miraculously turn around the entire game at the last second; they hid it because they didn't want people to see it so they could have massive launch day sales. If you're going to apologize just apologize. Don't pretend it was some innocent oversight.

tolbish 6y ago
It's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. There is also the lesser known axiom: it's better to pretend a problem doesn't exist than to admit wrongdoing and ask for forgiveness.
- zero_deg_kevin 6y ago
  It’s better to not be caught committing fraud than to be caught.

pvg 6y ago

Related from Wired/Cecilia D'Anastasio https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/ https://www.wired.com/story/cyberpunk-2077-bugs-reviews-nda/

elgatonegro 6y ago

I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment- and my biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. It feels like a throwback to the dumbest action games of the 90s: here's a main story and a bunch of quests that you'll be completing on railtracks. Your choices don't really matter, the world is empty and soulless, the writing is lazy and you can't stop but keep thinking how superficial everything feels. There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account. Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.

akhilcacharya 6y ago
> My biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. What are some modern games that are like this? I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.
- elgatonegro 6y ago
  The Witness was great as was The Talos Principle. SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    I would add Spec Ops: The Line (depending on what online communities you're a part of this game is either hugely underrated or hugely overrated), and the entire Bioshock series. There also some simpler indie games like The Stanley Parable, Papers Please, and This War of Mine
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    New Vegas is a great example, and is better than I remember on this dimension [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4 https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4

shmerl 6y ago

Incumbent consoles hardware refresh cycle is so horribly long due to lack of competition, that it holds the whole industry back and damages progress. I tried the game on Linux (Wine + vkd3d-proton). Thanks to CDPR for at least giving the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance, even though they could make a native Linux release already due to all the Stadia work.

rossmohax 6y ago

No Mans Sky devs turned failure into a big win in a year or so after release. Miracles do happen, I hope CDPR can pull it off too.

thepete2 6y ago

"we started with a score of 70, but now it’s 79. If you filter those who have played 10 hours or more, the score is 85 –so the more you play the more enjoyment you feel." Lying with statistics 101. It's obviously impossible that people who didn't enjoy the game played less than 10 hours

mattnewton 6y ago
Came here to post this. The obvious conclusion is that you are at the very least filtering out people who stopped playing because of game breaking bugs.
- tester34 6y ago
  did he actually lie? he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
tester34 6y ago
did he actually lie? he also stated that _overall_ score that includes everyone went from 70 to 79.
- thepete2 6y ago
  Maybe lying is the wrong word. But the conclusion that "the longer you play the more you enjoy the game" is very misleading.

uncomputation 6y ago

Why is everyone just talking about last-gen consoles? My partner has been playing on the PS5 and it still crashes at least every hour. Sure, not every 10 min but nothing to gloss over either. This doesn’t even mention the texture glitches, clipping, unachievable quest glitches, animation bugs, etc

ThatPlayer 6y ago
Most people still only have last-gen consoles, so that's where the majority is.
miloignis 6y ago
The next gen version isn't out yet, the PS5 is playing the PS4 version, so their complaints and yours are indeed for the same version.
- uncomputation 6y ago
  Can’t believe I missed that, thanks

justforthisnow 6y ago

Provided how bad it’s AI is, would be even feasible for them to fix it?

jwiley 6y ago

CD Project forced their employees to crunch to get a game out, missed deadlines, and shipped a game that is buggy on some definition of last-gen hardware. Assuming all that is true: how is this news? This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. As someone who tearfully tried to play Doom on a 286, I have some sympathy but the level of outrage is hard for me to understand. In my experience playing the game on a PS4 Pro (does that qualify as a last-gen console? Not sure), I have experienced no game breaking bugs or performance issues that warrant the level of criticism here. Instead I have been blown away by the level of detail and beauty of the world they created and I personally am over the moon with the fact the game that I had been eagerly awaiting exceeds my expectations for it. Congrats CD Projekt, take a vacation, give some bonuses, let people upgrade their 5 year old hardware and chill out.

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willis936 6y ago
> This essentially describes every ambitious, genre defining game for the last 35 years. This is news because the quoted statement is false. In fact, the opposite is true. Every genre defining game of the past 35 years has had a genre defining gold print. CP2077 is a dumpster fire. It will never be considered a great because of its launch.
- jwiley 6y ago
  I assume you’ve actually played the game on a console, and experienced game breaking bugs? Or maybe you subjectively consider the quality to not match your well thought out expectations previous to purchasing it? Can you please expand on your personal experiences with the game that led you to the dumpster fire conclusion? I’m also curious about your statement that every genre defining game has had a genre defining gold print. Can you point to one or more similar games that launched flawlessly across all platforms, on time, without negative reviews?
  - 6y ago

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

> After 3 delays, we as the Management Board were too focused on releasing the game. We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles. It was the wrong approach and against our business philosophy. Management at game dev company ignores all team feedback about timeline and quality, instead promises an arbitrary release date and pushes to crunch to meet deadlines. What a shocker ;)

mgarym 6y ago

I've had the misfortune of interacting with some of the engineers at CD Projekt Red in the course of my job in the past. There is a serious competence issue. It's not surprising in the slightest bit that they have this many problems with their release. On top of that, those engineers were arrogant AF when I talked to them.

FeistySkink 6y ago
I'm genuinely curious, do you have more details?

tylermenezes 6y ago

They barely answers any questions. If the leadership team is not tracking the metrics they'd need to answer questions like "roughly how have last-gen console sales compared to expectations" or "are you seeing lots of refund requests", it's really no wonder they're in this situation.

overgard 6y ago

I'm really enjoying the game on PC, it runs reasonably well on my GTX 1070. I'm staggered how many bugs there are though. I run into one about every five minutes. So far off the top of my head: - NPCs floating in space - NPCs walking through solid objects - NPCs randomly spawning in view - I have a gun that wont fire if I use a scope on it - I have another gun whose model disappears in car chases - Some objects have meshes that duplicate (cigarette floating in space while the character is also holding it) - Randomly getting flagged by the cops for a crime when im literally just walking around with my weapon holstered - Quest goals not registering/having to repeat certain actions None of these are like a huge deal, sometimes it's even really funny, but dear god is it incredibly buggy.

plasma 6y ago
I'm curious how this could be happening, like do we think there is some 'job subsystem' bug that just causes game-tasks (whether its loading an image, or processing a message, ...) just randomly gets dropped and not processed? It sounds like such a systemic issue its not like a particular component (eg AI or rendering) is the issue.
- meibo 6y ago
  Seems to me they have a lot of "show this at that time" bugs - I relatively often see UI elements that shouldn't be there or active layered on top of each other as well. Additionally to hands and props disappearing at random.
- overgard 6y ago
  Just some guesses: - I'm figuring floating NPCs and walking through solid surfaces might be from incorrect navmeshes. IE maybe they baked them, moved some stuff around, and forgot to rebake. Or forgot to mark some objects static, etc. - Meshes disappearing.. not sure, thinking maybe theyre using some fixed size arrays to avoid reallocations but maybe theyre hitting a fixed size limit and things get evicted. - Weird spawns. Guessing this might be something like a broken line of sight calculation. Maybe similar to the theorized navmesh thing -- occluders could be wrong too
6y ago

lmilcin 6y ago

I was once to CD Projekt here in Warsaw, almost 20 years ago. I got a defective Baldur's Gate CD and got option to have it mailed or take it in person. As me and my friend wanted to play very badly we just went for a free HQ tour:) They were very nice about it.

rappatic 6y ago

I play PC with a pretty good rig (RTX 2080S and i7-9700) and performance has been fine. I do struggle to hit 1440p60 at high settings in certain scenes (driving in populated areas etc.) but the game has been pretty bug-free for me at least. I had some bad crashes on D1 but after the 1.04 patch I had no problems at all besides a single isolated animation bug where a single character's glass would hover six inches to the side of her hand. Maybe this is just me? I've been loving the game. I completed it and am starting my second playthrough. Honestly, my only complaint is that it's too _short_, and I think CDPR took comments about the Witcher 3's long length a little too much to heart. I would not have complained for a second if it was double the length or more.

bwang29 6y ago

we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.

bwang29 6y ago

“ we do not have direct visibility of how this CD or digital download is being used by gamers and which machines they’re using – the newest consoles or older ones.”

artellectual 6y ago

As someone who works as a leader of a tech team building a financial engine, from my personal experience. When teams are doing overtime it means some bad management happened somewhere. Either someone under-estimated the scope and was never adjusted / communicated, or someone couldn't keep promise of not changing things as a result the developers and final product suffer. Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new. After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out. This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product. Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made. How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?

vlunkr 6y ago
It seems like in the games industry they really want to advertise release dates or at least a release window for marketing purposes. Which results in the bad cruch periods, since you can only delay so much once you've stamped that date on it. This happens all the time, but this is an exceptionally bad example. On the one hand, I wish companies wouldn't do this kind of crap, but on the other hand, the consumers need to be more responsible. This game has already made back the development costs, so all this backlash will probably amount to nothing. It's harsh to say, but gamers will seemingly believe anything the marketing machine tells them hook line and sinker.
- swat535 6y ago
  Exactly and this whole thing really solidifies the concept of never giving out specific deadlines unless you've basically completed the product and just doing minor touchups and even then you _still_ pad it by 2x. The problem however is that execs want exact dates and meanwhile marketing is just hyping up the product which yields to crazy expectations from consumers and this forces the engineers to even more crunch and degrade the quality of the whole thing. Vicious cycle indeed.

pie_flavor 6y ago

I have experienced exactly one bug, namely every tree within view-distance being visible through walls at all times. It is possibly the single most immersion breaking bug I have experienced in a video game and every time I see it I cringe. And, yet, twelve hours and counting.

n3dm 6y ago
Update your video drivers. Known issue.

partingshots 6y ago

Does anyone know what the timelines are for new DLC? Also, are Cyberpunk 2077 and the Witcher series the only games that CD Projekt has?

chrysoprace 6y ago

In the last couple of months friends have asked me "are you gonna get Cyberpunk?", and some seem taken aback by my answer when I say I'm gonna get it next year. Usually when I explain my reasoning (which I apply to almost all new game releases), people seem to understand: a) There is no way of knowing if the game is gonna be good until real copies land in the hands of people who play games to have fun, instead of reviewers who are too worried about giving an honest review with the fear that they won't get future review copies or get sued. b) Games generally get steep discounts a year or so after release. This is not universal, but if you avoid buying into the hype then you'll save yourself a considerable amount of money. The only way to hold these companies accountable is to vote with your wallet, and so I always encourage people to reconsider pre-orders. I'll be eagerly waiting to see if the game gets the love it deserves over the next year and if it turns out to be a flop, it'll just join long line of over-hyped AAA release flops.

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floatingatoll 6y ago

For those wondering what all the fuss is about, CD Projekt Red is the company that released a popular game called "Cyberpunk 2077" with critical deficits on PS4 and Xbox One platforms.

lyx0 6y ago

I played it Day 1 and it runs reasonably well on my RTX 2080, nothing spectacular tho. I've had like 3 crashes in the 20 hours I've put in yet. I enjoy the game a lot, even with the bugs but what really let me down were the life paths. I started a corpo character, got some fancy tech and a lot of cash 5 minutes in, then I ride a cool flying car around, I felt good and liked my choice. 10 minutes later I'm in a bar and 2 people come up to me that I have a meaningless dialogue with, they steal the tech and cash and from that point on I'm just a regular street kid? It made no sense to me, I played on for an hour and then restarted as a street kid.

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arminiusreturns 6y ago

I'm going to skip telling about all the bugs I have run into, so I'll just get down to what I think happened here. Two primary things: One) They targeted consoles when they shouldn't have. Cyberpunk is a game that should have been pc only first, and then later ported to consoles. They had a hammer (the engine) and saw nails (consoles), but in the game dev world the largest sets of complications come from trying to support different environments. The same can be said often in the normal software world, trying to be cross compatible when sometimes thats the wrong thing to do. When you do the math, targeting consoles, and especially if you go for last gen, the beancounter numbers show the ROI increase over just pc or just pc and latest gen are very high... and then instead of the development resources that should have gone into the AI, customization, bug-squashing, etc, go into console work. Two) They focused too much on building the individual quests instead of the emergent opportunities which abound. It seems like they spent too much time on hand crafting quest levels, especially the ones that involved Silverhand. Many quests have their own complete loaded levels you can't get to from the main game world. By doing so, they probably wasted tons of tester and dev hours on those individual levels instead of the open game world bugs and features. I suspect also that quite a few features just got ripped out and replaced with placeholders while the bugs get worked out more. There is no way the AI they touted so long ago is really in this state, for example, so I suspect if you give it half a year, lots of expected features will suddenly start showing up in updates and the game will end up in a much better state. All in all, I enjoy the game world, and it has moments where it really shines. It also has madness inducing and show stopping bugs that most normal players just won't put up with... (~100+ proc kills/game freezes to finish main story line on linux/proton). Why do beancounters always ruin everything they touch? What should have been one of the best games ever released was one of the best releases to ever money. Two years from now it will be primo, I'm sure. The question is will there be enough backlash to change anything? Given the amount of money they made and are still making, I doubt it. Different industry, same bullshit as everywhere else.

londons_explore 6y ago

Are there any videos of this "unplayable performance"? All the PS4 videos I could find barely stuttered and seemed well above the threshold of playable

dusted 6y ago

I am running a last gen system (PC) and the game runs fine even with everything on max (except for ray-tracing which I don't think look that good but hits performance a lot). I don't think CDPR should have released for old consoles, it's going to misrepresent the game no matter what, and just take extra effort.

alkonaut 6y ago

Wish at least one game studio/publisher would come out and say "We are just like any other software company. We work 40 hour weeks and have a healthy work/life balance. We don't have crunch time". As the industry grows ever larger, that has to be a good way of attracting talent.

moritonal 6y ago
It exists. The result is a slower-paced release process and "smaller" (as in, not absurd attempts at simulations of megacities) games, but instead forcing them to rely on story-telling and strong art. See SuperGiant games and their recent enormous success with Hades. https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre-and-hades-1838082618 https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre...

omega3 6y ago

It looks like there are major issues besides the bugs on the last gen consoles and a lot of promised features/content were not delivered: > no practical difference between life paths chosen > AI system broken/unfinished > length of the game + no replayabity factor > linear playthrough It has been suggested that the game was rewritten to accommodate the Keanu character. From what I've gathered this game is a solid 7/10. It's interesting to see so many nine and ten out of ten reviews from the "professional" reveiewers and the reviews from the players. This is a trend that has been going on for some time now.

T3RMINATED 6y ago

This is BS -- the game was built for old gen consoles!!! Its intent was never the PS5 period. They failed.