HOW CYBERPUNK 2077 MADE HISTORY AND WHAT YOU SHOULD LEARN FROM IT

How Cyberpunk 2077 made history and what you should learn from it

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 21-12-2020
Online Games Bay

Cyberpunk 2077, new game from CD Projekt Red studio, premiered on 10th December 2020 and, just like rest of the year 2020, it was a painful experience. Although after about 8 years in production developers made history, I don’t think that was the way they wanted to do it.

Yes, it’s hard to avoid the story around most expected game of recent years, but don’t worry I’m not gonna spend a lot of time kicking the developers from CD Projekt Red for bugs and glitches, there are a lot of people doing it right now, so it would be redundant. Let’s just state the obvious, that on premiere Cyberpunk 2077 is buggy mess that seems more like early access game than triple-A title, and move on.

There are people, who just dived into the world of Night City and are very happy with the title, they don’t mind the glitches and bugs, they see it as teething problems that will be fixed later. And that’s completely fine with me - it’s their money, they can do and feel whatever they like, it’s not my place to lecture them. However the first lesson you should learn from Cyberpunk 2077 is to never pre-order game, no matter how cute it looks in marketing materials.

Why? For obvious reasons - if you pay the money in advance the developers will not have as much motivation to work hard on the title. Also almost every new game is buggy on premiere, it takes months to actually fix them and then it is good moment to make up your mind about buying the game. Yes, you can get through the title before the patches, but won’t it spoil the experience for you? Cyberpunk 2077 is buggy, but apart from that there are a lot of elements that have only been implemented on very basic level and, I assume, they will be improved with time. Wouldn’t you prefer to play the game that is actually finished?

Second important lesson is a bit less obvious - do not mistake marketing hype with reviews. If you browse through the reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 it is easy to spot that almost all major gaming magazines gave the game the highest ratings. How is it possible? You can read more in article Aggregate scores - how is this still a thing?. Basically no one before premiere wanted you to know in what state the game actually was - the developers did not wanted to spoil the premiere (after all they were suppose to get bonus based on Metacritic reviews average rating), publisher did not wanted to spoil sales, investors did not wanted to lose money, reviewers did not wanted to spoil good relations with CD Projekt Red and... that was the perfect recipe for fake reviews. And I don’t mean fake as in Trump’s "fake news", I mean fake like "we’ll look away when glitches happen, because CDPR will fix them before premiere, right?" approach.

Just imagine what it would look like if Ferrari was about to launch their brand new model that would be missing engine or the engine under-performed. Would you be happy to buy car described by reviewers as perfect, although none of them actually could be certain that it actually works? Cyberpunk 2077 certainly is not the first and not the last game to trick people into believing the final product will be the best they ever seen. But in reality those titles that actually are later considered best in their genre don’t need to advertise it 8 years in advance. Eight years is long time in gaming world - consoles come and go, new titles pop up every week and month and every brilliant, innovative and mind-blowing idea could already be in use in some other game.

And the third lesson is sort-of extension to article Before you drop the I word - if you plan to make your own open-world ground-breaking game take a hard look at the mess CDPR made. CD Projekt Red had great reputation for their work on The Witcher 3 and support beyond the game premiere. Of course now it is all gone through series of really, really bad decisions that surrounded development of Cyberpunk 2077.

From stating that game works "surprisingly well" on PS4 (if the state we see is surprisingly good then how low were their expectations?), blocking YouTubers and reviewers from publishing any own gameplay material before premiere to half-hearted apology when manure hit the fan - it was one PR disaster after another. And I don’t mean glitches or bugs, they are common thing (although the scale of the problem was really astonishing), I mean the game itself is... just ok. Simple loot shooter with elements of stealth, supported by good RPG elements and good story - those elements are ok.

But in case of game that was suppose to revolutionize the genre "ok" is far from what was suppose to happen. There are elements that we knew already from Borderlands, Deus Ex, LA Noire, not to mention the obvious, Grand Theft Auto games. So if you think you and your small, but dedicated, team can take on open-world title see how well respected developer messed this up. Huge city, full of interesting places, but at the same time lacking content, lacking original side-quests, lacking NPCs that would have something to say, lacking decent car driving experience... And notice that I did not even mentioned the technical problems with the game. Open-world games are hard to make, even harder to make them enjoyable, so be careful not to bite more than you can chew. It is easy to come up with idea for a game, it is easy to start making a game, but it is really, really hard to finish the development.

Perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 one day will have all the bugs fixed, perhaps it will be the best of its genre (although so many elements were taken from other titles that it is hard to assign single genre to this game), just like No Man’s Sky did in past. Oh yes, do you remember No Man’s Sky? It still exists, you know, they fixed problems with their title, they implemented the missing content, but it was years after premiere, after they missed their best moment. And that is the last lesson from Cyberpunk 2077 premiere - no matter how ambitious your game is, no matter how good reputation you had in the past, still you have only one chance to make first impression. I know it’s cliche, but in year or two will it still matter if they fix the problems, if they implemented all the things the game was suppose to have? For hardcore "fans" yes, for rest of the players? Doubt it.

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