How did we get here?
I can hold out until it’s $19.99 – this is normal for me.
I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal
Submitted 1 year ago by stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to games@lemmy.world
Comments
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 1 year ago
FunderPants@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like that ones got real bad reviews" and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.mp3@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I bought a used PS4 copy of No Man’s Sky for 5$ before the Next update came out.
Rooty@lemmy.world 1 year ago
FatTony@lemmy.world 1 year ago
One - two years is a mere blink to me now. I am patient, I can wait.
Clbull@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.
Flambo@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.
Having played at release, Hello Game’s issue was much less “large scope games take long to make” and much more “we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game”.
stephen01king@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Features that had to be cut because they lack the time to implement it, so basically “large scope games take too long to make”.
One feature was also removed because of player feedback, so the issue there is talking about features before they were tested. This issue stems from their lack of PR expertise, but it means they weren’t lying when they said it.
echo64@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It had seven years of development before it’s initial broken release.
SwiggitySwole@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s not as long as you’d think anymore, it’s why the bigger studios have massive teams working on multiple games at the same time
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
yes yes, its the awful customers fault for wanting a product they’ve been lied about.
God damn big bad evil customers!
sirfancy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Literally. Gamers be like
“No more crunch culture! Take your time and release when it’s ready!”
also
“Why do games take so long??”
BreadGar@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I mean ubisoft had the problem with all their games. Wait a year before buying a ubi game. It will be fixed and half price
crius@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This revisionism is quite tiring but I guess that the development companies are counting on it.
The problem with Cyberpunk was not “just bugs” but a 40 minutes video that tells lots of lies and was clearly stated as “fake” to drive up the hype for it.
What you see today was shown as if “ready” 4 years ago. And today we still can’t see the hacking as shown in that video.
On top of that there are all the design decision that are simply terrible but no amount of patches will fix, like the looter shooter approach to loot, levels on enemies, etc etc.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Agreed on all points.
And sadly its becoming a practice now.
Starfield is the latest example, While not as crashy/ buggy as Cyberpunk was… You can see the lack of finish, the amputated systems, etc etc, that scream that it is a half finished mess, just like Cyberpunk, and was shoved out the door way too early, just like Cyberpunk.
Phanatik@kbin.social 1 year ago
One of the few games I don't regret buying before release was Baldur's Gate 3 but that's an anomaly. Most games I'm happy to wait a year or more when it's in better shape.
ayaya@lemdro.id 1 year ago
It’s funny that you mention Baldur’s Gate 3 because the game is blatantly unfinished. Act 1&2 are pretty much 9-10/10 but Act 3 is like a 6/10 at best. I’m surprised it gets a pass where Cyberpunk didn’t because in my experience they are equally as buggy.
Quests breaking, characters not showing up where they should, continuity issues, etc. I just gave up halfway through Act 3 and started a new playthrough instead because I adore the first half of the game and it makes the latter half that much more disappointing by contrast.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 year ago
I agree completely. I’m even very forgiving when it comes to bugs and performance - especially when it’s a studio I trust will address them - but the huge swaths of obviously cut content combined with the way the story wraps up really gets to me and left me massively disappointed. I too still love the game for the gameplay and Act 1 and 2, but it really didn’t stick the landing in my opinion.
Even just things like the reactivity of your companions stands out; in Act 1 you could barely sneeze without everyone at camp chiming in with a comment about what just happened while in Act 3 you’ll do massively impactful things in both main story and companion quests and be greeted by the standard “Well met” or “hello soldier” at camp.
And that’s not getting into whatever scraps of the stated 17k different endings actually ended up not getting cut or the sorry state or the epilogues. Not even all companions get one!
verysoft@kbin.social 1 year ago
You get "Larianed" a lot in BG3 just like you did in DOS2, plenty of inconsistencies, annoying pathing and quirks that make you wonder if they even played their own game before releasing it. But to put it in the same vein as cyberpunk 2077 is kind of disgusting. CDPR completely lied about the product, it barely ran on most PCs and didn't even function on consoles.
BG3 while far from perfect, is much more of a game cp2077 will probably ever be and Larian are firing out patches left and right at the moment while CDPR are still forbidding reviewers to even use their own game footage.
ripley@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I agree. I have had major show-stopping bugs with main story quests in Act 3 and more crashes on the PS5 than I have experienced in any game by a huge margin. I love the game but it has been buggier than CP2077 for me as well.
Phanatik@kbin.social 1 year ago
Cyberpunk for me was not as buggy as for my friends. I find that a lot of the games I play on release aren't as buggy for whatever reason. It could be my AMD setup. It could be that I'm on Linux and use Proton or sheer goddamn luck. Callisto Protocol was fine for me but I've seen so many videos of the game running terribly and some crazy bugs.
The biggest problem with Cyberpunk was the performance. It ran horribly. The bugs were just the icing. My issues with Cyberpunk was that it felt hollow and lifeless. I loved everything about it but it just didn't feel like it had a soul.
My PC wasn't as beefy as it is now when Cyberpunk released so I felt that pain. I'm still on Act 1 on BG3 (because I insist on exploring everywhere) but I see that it has a huge amount of polish put into it. It makes sense that the earlier parts got more attention because that's what the majority of the players will experience. At the rate I'm going, Act 3 will be in great shape.
CoderKat@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Baldur’s Gate 3 is great at story and choices, which I think is where a lot of praise comes from. But it has a lot of really questionable issues with smaller mechanics.
The one I’m hating the most is how NPCs react to many summons and wild shape. Having a wild shaped party member makes most NPCs run away screaming, which is very painful in the NPC heavy areas of act 3 and basically discouraged you from even using wild shape or summon elemental, even though those are both incredibly powerful. You can dismiss the summon/wild shape, but it uses resources, so it sucks to do so. People have reported the bug for months but it doesn’t seem on the devs radar (they purposefully made NPCs run away – it’s a “feature”).
And just the other day, I discovered weirdness with warlock spell slots. Something about having used an elixer that gives me an extra spell slot (and then having consumed the spell slot) was preventing me from casting a warlock spell because it claimed it needed that spell slot, even though I had higher level warlock spell slots. So a bunch of my spells couldn’t be used!
Four_lights77@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I love BG3, but agree that it deserves some criticism for act 3 bugginess. Just remember Bethesda basically forced them to release a month early when they announced starfield was coming out on the same weekend.
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 1 year ago
Even with BG3, act 3 of the game is in much better shape than it launched with.
And their history of making "definitive" editions is looming a year or two down the road.
Oddly, as is their gameplay style of act 3 being the buggiest and least directed along with artificial difficulty of grouping the party in a tight clump via cutscene before the hard fights.
Still an utterly fantastic game despite those minor gripes.
fishy195@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Any game that has to release endings in patches means it wasn’t released as a complete product. BG3 is great, but it is so hypocritical that other games get dragged through mud for bad launches, but BG3 is getting nothing but praise despite releasing incomplete and full of bugs. I can forgive some stuff, but this hypocrisy and inconsistentcy in the gaming community bothers me to no end.
xT1TANx@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It would not be if you all would stop buying pre-orders
Mythosync@lemmy.world 1 year ago
With realistic expectations, the game has always been a good experience, imo of course. I did not follow any coverage of the game until after release, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect. I’m not excusing their shortcomings, but I feel like the community leaned hard into the “bad game circlejerk” as soon as it came out. I played once at release and got the worst ending. After edgerunners, I played it through three times, the last of which on very hard and with all the endings earned.
I enjoyed it! The 2.0 update is an interesting shakeup. I’m playing through a 4th time and having a good time
ensignrick@startrek.website 1 year ago
[deleted]Mythosync@lemmy.world 1 year ago
If I’m excited for a game, I try to make a point of not looking at the hype. Seems like the mainstream coverage has three phases:
- Hype
- Bad game circlejerk
- Retrospective (it was actually good)
Nice to know that other people have had similar experiences!
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I did get all the hype but after a lifetime of experience working in live performance marketing and software marketing, my position is that all marketing is a lie, and with limited experience in journalistic criticism, that too is as subjective as whether you prefer chocolate or strawberry ice cream.
in the end you experience something — regardless of the overall quality, some parts are better than others. And that’s it. That’s experience. Sometimes you love it, sometimes you don’t. Your fave is someone else’s least and vice versa.
Xanthrax@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m assuming you didn’t have a Playstation.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I do and aside from one serious bug that made me start over I had a good time with it, I think summer 2020. I didn’t finish my first playthrough and am waiting for it to install so I can start #2.
pijon@lemdro.id 1 year ago
I never played it but wasn’t the game still a buggy mess weeks, if not months after release?
Mythosync@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Going by the journalistic coverage of the game, yes. If you played on an XB1 or PS4, yes. I’m fortunate to have played it on a competent (not insane) PC and had little to no issues. It wasn’t bug-free, but the issues I encountered were minor and didn’t really bog down the experience tbh
iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They just added driving combat, which was in the launch trailer.
PlushySD@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For the I don’t know how many times… I was enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. It wasn’t BG3 quality but it was OK.
whofearsthenight@lemm.ee 1 year ago
They wouldn’t have nearly as many problems as they did if they waited another 6 months for the initial release. I have a pc with a 1060 card, and I bought it relatively soon after launch, and it was extremely buggy, and I could barely play even at low settings. I made it maybe a 1/3 into the game before I just gave up and decided to wait until it was improved. I just installed again last week and started another play through, and even pre-2.0 it was markedly better and I could get a consistent 30+ fps on medium.
That’s I think the issue. 2.0 obviously contains many more bug fixes, but that’s not really what that release is about and it’s been past just playable for a long time. I actually really like the idea of 2.0, which is not really a bug fix but rethink of some gameplay mechanics that make a lot of sense. Like, it was always infuriating that the best armored clothes in the game often looked absolutely stupid, so I like them making clothing pretty much just cosmetic, and then moving armor to the ripperdoc upgrades. Sure, they could have probably figured that out for 1.0, but once things get into player hands you are always going to learn something. Conversely, Skryim has shipped on every platform with a screen practically and ships every time with the same garbage ass inventory system from 2011.
So yeah, they (the whole industry) should be releasing games that are fully baked, but I really don’t mind the idea that they’re going to take a game and iterate on it more like a platform. I could see Cyberpunk being something I’m still playing in 10 years as long as they keep adding content and iterating, in much the same way that people are still playing the shit out of GTAV.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Okay, but you being able to eek out fun from it doesnt fundamentally change the fact that it was a buggy, broken, amputated mess that was released 2 years too early.
NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social 1 year ago
Cyberpunk is the soul reason I don’t preorder games anymore. Hype he damned.
ThugJesus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No man’s sky for me. Both are amazing games at current stage but with shit releases.
metaStatic@kbin.social 1 year ago
if you where hyped for NMS release it still isn't the game you where sold and never will be.
secondaccountlemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
soul reason
*sole
NegativeLookBehind@kbin.social 1 year ago
Ha, yes. Thanks for the correction.
metaStatic@kbin.social 1 year ago
The Australia tax is why I don't buy games at all, much less pre-pay for the ones I might want.
Shgrizz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hype is literally the only thing you miss out on by not playing games on release. If you get used to existing 3 years behind the release schedule, your gaming experience is vastly improved.
guacupado@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You didn’t need to wait 3 years to enjoy it. That’s on you.
UxyIVrljPeRl@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well i bought the 12 month humble choice last year and haven’t played a single on of them…
Sanctus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Increasing complexity, tighter deadlines, demand for highwr profit margins. Theres a lot of reasons and not all of them are necessarily bad. Its good that we can simulate what we can. I think the profit motive is just starting to show its ruinous powers as shareholders demand more and more.
Endorkend@kbin.social 1 year ago
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that's not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn't be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur's Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It's straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
all-knight-party@kbin.run 1 year ago
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it's less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don't think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
FrankFrankson@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
skabbywag02@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Don’t forget to pre-order their latest DLC!
Ashtear@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.
This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.
I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕
Moghul@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yup, I re-downloaded and started a new campaign this week, and I’m a little disappointed. All the prompts are controller prompts, I can’t rebind several of the actions, I can’t crouch or dodge, the game crashed 5 times in 2 hours last night, the FPS takes a dip sometimes between ‘scenes’ in the story, DLSS kept resetting when I was benchmarking, etc.
On the plus, the game still looks amazing, the story is still S-tier in my opinion, Judy is still Judy (I simp for Judy like it’s going out of style and you can’t stop me), the driving combat is a good addition, and the cop fights are good. I don’t regret downloading it right now, but I will be putting it down for a couple of weeks, and hopefully they’ll fix some of the nagging bugs
Zoldyck@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The only way the industry will learn is to simply not buy any if the shitty games. Plenty of other games out there that are worth it.
WHYAREWEALLCAPS@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Like games that came out three years before!
Murvel@lemm.ee 1 year ago
This is the new narrative for Cyberpunk 2077. I’m guessing cdprojekt greased some palms ahead of the new DLC realase.
But make no mistake, and don’t fall for it; cyberpunk is still a wholly buggy and unfinished game with extremely janky mechanics that will never be patched out.
If and only if you can overlook such issues, and I know from personal experience some can, should you consider paying for the new DLC.
SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org 1 year ago
People love to hate on this game but I bought it months ago and played it several hours. I didn’t see any bug I found noteworthy
fishy195@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It was a great game at launch, and it’s an even better game now. It runs like butter. Choose to not play for whatever reasons you have, but it is still a great game.
Schmuppes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’d like to disagree. Even if you disregard all the bugs I had and content/features that was promised and never included, CP 2077 was maybe a good game in 2020. I didn’t think it was great by any means.
Kbin_space_program@kbin.social 1 year ago
One review for the new DLC explicitly stated that he was requested by CDPR to use only their provided footage. "To avoid spoilers."
PorknBeans@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It was a very different experience for me. I had a blast playing this game when first released and didn’t find any game breaking moment. This could be due to me playing on PC? So with the latest patch I loaded up my V and found noting of merit had changed. Seriously I found it to be the same game with small UI and Skill changes. I was shocked to say the least, due to the enormous patch size. I still haven’t left training NC so I might find more changes but so far it’s still an enjoyable game.
Mandy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
New? Where have you been for 13 years
SuiXi3D@kbin.social 1 year ago
It’s weird - when I played at launch, I had precisely one bug that impacted my gameplay. Other than that, the game ran pretty smooth and was a joy to play.
Now mind you, I was playing on a PC with a Xeon, 64GB of RAM, and an RTX 2080ti. Nothing ram badly on that system three years ago. Nowadays the older CPU, slower RAM and admittedly older GPU without all the newest bells and whistles (DLSS Framegen I’m looking at you) can’t quite measure up to the latest titles.
Cyberpunk, at launch, was great. For me. Specifically for me. I loved it and still do. But this article hits a point for me that I’ve been struggling to find reason to write about without feeling like I’m ignoring people who primarily play on consoles or can’t afford a nice PC. Regardless…
Man it fuckin’ sucks how you can spend a huge amount of money on a new GPU and then four months later a new one comes out that blows it out of the water. New hardware is so much better and - because all the game devs are using that hardware to design their games both on and for - systems like mine that are still fairly new can’t run the latest games at high settings anymore.
It used to be that if you ponied up the money for a high-end rig, you could expect decent performance for years to come. But I guess blowing a grand on a GPU these days just means you’ll be doing it again in a year or something, instead of the decade or so before.
I’m not saying my PC is bad. Most of what I play runs excellently. But when I spend a grand on just a GPU I expect that GPU to run the newest games at high settings for a long time. Jedi Survivor, Starfield, both run like crap on my system. Never mind the 2TB NVMe drive everything’s installed on.
But I’m just bitching to bitch. Ignore me.
bouh@lemmy.world 1 year ago
CP77 was already a great game at launch. I am sad that so many games are barely in beta state at launch, but CP77 wasn’t an offender.
I consider this new launch a 2.0 or remastered edition. It didn’t need it, but it’s good it got it.
PoetSII@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Well you got here by waiting 3 years to play a game that was perfectly fine about a month post-launch.
As someone who played on launch, with less than “best” specs - it was fine. I had the odd T-posing NPC or texture flicker, but I had decent frames almost everywhere and had a blast with a great game.
wcSyndrome@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Hard to disagree with the article, it seems it’s safer to wait at least a few weeks or months to play a new game because there are often things to be fixed after launch. Many games have multiple ambitious and complex systems that need to be tuned post launch. Combine this with high expectations/hype that marketing teams foster and you have a recipe for regret and disappointment on day 1 experiences
Rottcodd@kbin.social 1 year ago
That's not a new thing though.
I first learned the wisdom of waiting until after the bulk of the bug-squashing was done before expecting to play a reasonably stable game with Oblivion, 17 years ago.
Granted that Cyberpunk 2077 was a particularly egregious example of the problem, but still...
ShittyRedditWasBetter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The game was great for from day one.I can’t recall any significant issues. The Xbox one and PS4 stuff was dumb as all hell and shouldn’t have happened but everyone overreacted on the rest.
secondaccountlemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Me as a patient gamer: “I dont understand the problem.”
Wrench@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
theragu40@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
secondaccountlemmy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean it WAS actually a broken mess from what I saw.
Im saying I always buy games on a deep sale well after it has been released so Im not particularly impacted.
AWildMimicAppears@kbin.social 1 year ago
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
NuPNuA@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Lot of missing features and loads of bugs. It just wasn’t what they hyped it up to be
agent_flounder@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Same. I’m still a little leery. Think I’ll give it another few months to settle down.
Weirdfish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I bought it at launch, and on PS4 it was actually an unplayable mess.
I’ve since gotten a PS4 pro, and still haven’t loaded it up again.
Pretty sure I’ll get a PS5 this year, so I’m thinking of waiting till the to play it.
With large games like this, I know I’m going to sink a lot of time into my first lay through, figure why not wait until I can do it right.
Shgrizz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
spizzat2@lemm.ee 1 year ago
And there are no downsides!