I don't want to refund the game, I want to keep it, I have so far been enjoying it and I am playing on a base model PS4.
You end up in a situation where you either need to have to start from scratch, or you release a half-backed product and hope it all works out in the end.
It's one of the best examples of redemption of image I've seen in a game - also I'm a huge fan of VR No Mans Sky, it's one of the few AAA titles around.
Half-Life 2 was randomly crashing on AMD systems on launch. Valve was sometimes churning 4 updates/day. Then they requested some actual gamers with AMD systems to come to HQ for testing. After that point all bugs are ironed out in a week or so.
3700X / B550M / GTX 1660 here.
Yes, the game is buggy. But, IMO, there are deeper problems that that:
- The crafting system is absolutely useless.
- The loot and equipment system is basically a "looter-shooter". Which I dislike. And make the crafting useless.
- The game economy is messed up. Cyberware implants and vehicles are way too expensive. And there is no incetive to buy any weapons. The loop is "fight stuff, get stronger stuff, equip the stronger stuff and sell the rest". After four or five loops you have money to buy something useful.
- Big problems the targeting reticle for interacting with stuff.
- The car physics is awful. The minimap is too zoomed in. And driving in first person is a PITA.
- NPC AI is really lacking.
- Quest design feels a bit lackluster. There are less alterative choices and nuance than what's in the Witcher 3 [0].
- The world, while visually and architecturaly well designed, it is empty. There are no side activities. No hotel rooms to sleep in, no option to sit at the bar and have a drink... There is a gun range that is only open for a short quest!
- There seems to be a lack of consequence in the game. I blow up and steal stuff and beal blows to organizations and the game world doesn't change with that.
I'm enjoying the game. And plan to finish it.
But I feel like CD Project Red bit up more that it could chew:
- I believe a push to have the best and latest graphical quality (raytracing and the sort) harmed other parts of the game.
- With a game having so much "bling", they should've added more stuff to do besides fighting people and questing. The places are only meaningful if there are meaningful things to do there. (GTA 5 had the same problem. GTA 4 did not)
- Writing and quest design should've been iterated a bit more. As I usually say, "voice acting did more harm that good to RPGs". This mean that it is harder to iterate on quests and dialog because it's expensive to re-record dialog.
- The Witcher 3 was more streamlined, the world was simpler, and had less mechanics. It was easy to balance the different systems. As well as game physics.
[0] The quest 'Wild at Heart' in one of the first quests in the game and set the tone for the general quest design in the game. https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Wild_at_Heart
That idea with working Saturdays for weeks on end is just one example.
I remember my mother, an artisan working in a theatre, having essentially a full month or two of those before each opening night.
My father, an engineer with a decent salary, would still pick up additional work and spend entire evenings on it. Hell, the first PC in our family was bought specifically for this purpose.
All this wasn't perceived as weird or unusual, because during communism working Saturdays were the norm. The parents of my friends would also be mostly absent, making the most of the rapid economic growth of the 90s. Unemployment was also fairly high, so it's not like they had much of a choice in the matter.
This environment created a management culture that either doesn't feel the need to improve and innovate(because you can always leverage the low cost of employment or put pressure on workers) or doesn't even know how to do that, so it experiments a lot - with mixed results.
For the 3rd time? Not well, I've actually got back into console gaming after a near 10 year hiatus specifically for 2077, and to be honest after beating Watchdogs Legion and dealing with all of those bugs (also delayed online play due to bugs across all platforms) I'm actually ok just watching Youtube videos of people playing 2077 in HD rather than buy it myself.
I just wished most would not talk when playing, these youtube personalities are completely intolerable. And while I get that very embellished behavior is critical to their revenue stream, it's appeal is completely lost on and I'm perplexed by who would sit and listen to this for the 8+ hours they play for without wanting to jump out of a window head-first into concrete. Let alone pay them for the experience.
In a way it reminds me of that annoying friend we all had as kids and tolerated because his parents have him all the latest and greatest toys and games and junk food; how these people (Twitch specifically) managed to monetize this awful experience confuses the hell out of me when you realize the roles have been reversed.
I've always frequented arcades since I was a kid and now into adulthood, and nothing clears a room faster than an overly dramatic, and annoying player that wants nothing more than to seek attention.
With that said, this PR disaster is just par for the course for 2020, so maybe with a proper series of patches/updates it'll be all forgotten? I'll likely pick it up when its enabled multiplayer Online play and on discount, assuming they ever fix it on PS4 Pro.
In a related note - wanna know why linux will never be desktop OS? 2^64 distros a software vendor have to account for. And when one distro dies, several new ones spring into existence - like CentOS for example.
I agree for the general case, though; I'm hoping AppImage makes headway here; I'm not sure how it works with libGL, libEGL, etc., but my understanding is that for most libraries, it moves the "compatibility boundary" to the kernel's ABI. (I guess for libGL and friends, the use of glGetProcAddress etc shrink the compatibility boundary a bit too.)
It will be an amazing game once the patches progresses, and if you are tolerant I am sure it already is. I would expect decent in 2 months, great in 6 months, awesome in 1-2 years (unofficial patches/modding including). Just like many other open world games.
Personally, I'll wait for those 2 months at least, also due to getting better/smoother performance out of my current PC rig. I have no doubt its a game I will enjoy tremendously, again and again, it fits my preferred style very much.
Now you are assuming people having [next big game] in month N is as good as having it in month N+10. I think there is a large amount of gamers out there that would rather play a disappointing mess now, than a polished game later.
What they care is that the pricey AAA game they bought will be playable and enjoyable. Looks like it’s not.
Ie would you pay for a Bosch refrigerator 10 months before its release and delivery just because they wrote about it someplace? A bit ridiculous idea, don't you think?
You know, like we do with everything else we buy these days? (At least I don't just blindly buy stuff on a whim, and I don't think I am the only one)
50 years ago the quality of the code was much better. I expect some things from SW that I buy: 1. To run on normal HW (i.e. home PC or laptop dedicated mainly to web browsing and watching movies) or on the target HW 2. To have a usable interface ( Hello MS, Apple, Google - do you listen ?) 3. To be bug free or at least the main anoying bugs to be fixed. (Hello MS, Google - do you listen ?)(yes i paid for my Android phone)
>There are very few studios who can produce such quality prior to release (ie last Zelda), but I guess they are not under such pressure to release on many platforms in parallel just before christmas.
I'm impressed. So you are saying that a lot of "studios" produce crap and this is ok because other do it.
> It will be an amazing game once the patches progresses, and if you are tolerant I am sure it already is.
That's what they said about MS Windows too and look what it became of it.
> I would expect decent in 2 months, great in 6 months, awesome in 1-2 years (unofficial patches/modding including). Just like many other open world games.
See MS Windows.
> Personally, I'll wait for those 2 months at least, also due to getting better/smoother performance out of my current PC rig. I have no doubt its a game I will enjoy tremendously, again and again, it fits my preferred style very much.
Until one day when you had enough of its bugs, you smash the keyboard and the mouse in despair and you uninstall it.
That's hardly an apt comparison when you see they're focused on rich World creation with many layers of depth as opposed to the rather linear 'white square hits white dot' style games like pong.
They were clearly rushed/pressured by management to release after 8+ years of development and with so many people at home with nothing but free time to fill and 2 delays this year alone, its very obvious to see what happened. I'm guessing this was bound to occur. Especially when modern business models are based on creating a casino addiction model fixated on capturing eyeballs and creating discord online rather than delivering a solid working product from day one.
Personally, my biggest gripe with games/gaming is the lack of fulfillment you get for the time spent after having actually achieved things in real life. I now look it as wasted time not doing things that actually matter or improve my Life and those around me, whereas my teenage-self would have regarded such an addiction to wasting time as 'fun.' Had COVID not happened I definitely would not have picked up gaming again and would have been at an arcade if I had spare time and the inclination to play.
It's really the worst kind of time-sink now because I don't enjoy it and have mainly used it to distract me or to take a break from real-life. And I somehow got paid to play watchdogs legion, too...
Then again, CD Projekt is a relatively small developer, and Sony would probably think twice before treating a game by say, EA, the same way, so I wouldn't completely rule out double standards...
When you consider no PS4 footage was made available before launch, it seems to me that CDPR were intentionally deceptive.
Sony doesn't care about that. It's irrelevant, Sony is just protecting themselves from a potential class action lawsuit.
CDPR on the other hand, it's like they are asking for it. All that fiasco was very short term thinking.
I've been getting fed up recently with just how buggy PC games are and regretting not getting a console, but I guess the grass isn't always greener.
Condescending attitude aside, I've played multiple games on launch day, and I even worked as a developer in a major gamedev studio. The sheer amount of bugs, glitches, poor implementations, and missing QoL features are inexcusable. Especially from a game that spent 7 years in development and was delayed 8 months.
