I say ‘surprising’ because sites like Den of Geek and PC Gamer seem to be having trouble reconciling ‘CYBERPUNK 2077 is a total failure’ with ‘the game in 2020 sold 13.7 million units and only 30 thousand buyers asked for refunds.’ There’s a lot of speculation on just why this happened, and it’s entirely possible that CD Projekt Red is spinning the results somehow*. But here’s another possibility: maybe the remarkably good sale/refund ratio is because most people bought this game for the PC.
And on the PC it worked fine. Well, as fine as any other new game does before its first patch. Don’t get me wrong: I understand that consoles cost money**, and that people like to be able to play games on them. But just because it sucked on the PS…5?***… that doesn’t mean that it sucked everywhere else. Personally, I wish they hadn’t done consoles at all and just gotten the game optimized on PC: I’d be getting the DLC faster if they had.
So I’m not surprised that CDPR is doing all right, after all. For all its flaws, CYBERPUNK 2077 is a fun game.
Moe Lane
*Because that’s what video game companies do.
**Why, one of them can cost up to half what I routinely pay for my gaming rigs. That’s a significant amount of change for a stripped-down, deliberately stunted computer.
***Okay, now I’m just being a jackwagon.
It is a fun, beautiful game. The end story is a bit of a mess (although I cannot tell if it is not intentional.)
I did not listen to any of the hype for this one aside from watching one trailer years ago, so I am utterly unaffected by the ‘They promised us this, this and this.’
And, until they started patching the damn thing, I did not have any bugs.
This is not to say the game is not flawed. Johnny is probably the best realized character (which makes a lot of sense) but the others can feel a bit shallow. The aforementioned ending noodle mass.
The skill and leveling system. I liked what they tried to do (a mix of both intentional putting points in things as well as an On Use learning like with the Elder Scrolls games) but it works out to having some odd character building.
Knife throwing. I LOVE the idea of what they tried to do. It is awesome. That shiny new knife you picked up? You could use it to fight melee. Or you could be a stealthy assassin and throw it into the back of some poor sod’s head. On the other hand, guys while it makes sense to have to go and get the knife from the body of said poor sod, it is a bad system when you have to go over to the body, pick it up and reequip every time. It kind of messes with the idiom of a cool, smooth killer.
I never did anything with knives; I was too busy reminding Night City why netrunners should be burned at the stake on general principles. Quickhacks are evil in that game.
Ditto.
I wasn’t happy with some of what they did. I’ve seen various comments online from people who are of the opinion that the story was rewritten to put more emphasis on Johnny after Keanu Reeves was hired to play him, and I can certainly see things that suggest that (for one thing, the introduction to Mil-Tech during the prologue seems like a decently developed hook for a plot arc later in the game that inexplicably got dropped – after they’d already animated the sex scene with your corporate contact). And they rewrote ‘Never Fade Away’ (it was originally a short story found in the original Cyberpunk rulebook – the one that came in the boxed set) to make Johnny a much bigger jerk than he was in the original story.
I set it down for a while, but not because I don’t like it. I really do need to finish it. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it.
Of course, I also need to finish my first play-through of The Amazing Cultivation Simulator. Too many games, not enough time.
Complaints?
There are some bugs. Nothing absolutely killer in my case. The worst was crashes that happened in a way that suggested memory leaks. Others included NPC drivers that had a tendency to do things such as drive long-wise through the concrete dividers that are placed to separate the street from the sidewalk (lots of animated debris got generated, but it didn’t appear to otherwise hurt the cars when this happens). Both of these should be fixed by now.