C.Yberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games this year, was released last week. A dystopian quest around a big city inspired by Blade Runner, it was all for a perfect storm of hype: it’s been nearly a decade since it was made; its creator, CD Projekt Red Warsaw, was behind one of the greatest games of the last decade (The Witcher 3 – think Game of Thrones but grimier); he is the star of Keanu Reeves, which is as popular with gamers as it is with everyone else. Eight million people had ordered and paid for the game before it came out. But since December 10, it has all gone wrong.
On launch day, the reviews were great – great, even. Many critics praised Night City’s fictional astronomy, its stunning skyscraping architecture and grubby alleys; they loved the animated gun, the bally characters and the neon swagger. Some expressed doubts about the game’s relatively teenage tone and willingness to oppose women’s bodies – none of which came as a surprise to anyone who had been keeping an eye on the game’s marketing.
But these early reviews soon garnered complaints from humble players. The game they had been waiting for years was flawed, the code clearly unfinished. Strange wisdom hindered people’s events in Night City, or the game collapsed so often that it was barely playable. Several scenes were reported to have caused an epileptic seizure, prompting the game maker to tweet: “We are working on adding a separate alert to the game, in addition to the existing one [end-user licence agreement]. In terms of a more permanent solution, the Dev team is currently investigating that and will implement it as soon as possible. ”
On December 18, Sony withdrew the game from a sale on their digital PlayStation store and gave a refund to anyone who bought it – a very rare event that I can only remember once before, when the game went live. Ashes Cricket 2013 broke so dramatically it was taken out of sale and never seen again. The current situation is very costly for Sony and CD Projekt Red, both of which are now missing out on sales in the run – up to Christmas.
Technical bugs and wisdom are the realities of life for video games, the results of a highly complex development process in which hundreds of artists, programmers and animators work together on a fast-paced, gigantic program. In Cyberpunk 2077, these range from hilarious (a man standing on a street corner smoking a pistol instead of manure, a pedestrian falling to the ground and moving into a patio table) to planting -out (characters disappearing at random or walking through scenes) to infuriating (random crashes that interrupt your play or stop your progress, slowing down which makes a game mis- pleasant to look at). Cyberpunk suffers with them all, even on the advanced PCs designed for it – but they’re especially bad on the less powerful Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Early reviewers missed these issues because CD Projekt only gave them access to the more stable PC version of the game before it was released – and under a strict non-disclosure agreement that prevented it from showing real images. This attempt to control the message has gone back badly, revealing that the developer was trying to hide the game’s problems, and annoying players. Until it can be repaired, which costs more expensive months of development time, it will not be resold on PlayStation.
The creators of Cyberpunk 2077 have issued a series of apologies and promise to get things right. It may be impossible for such an obvious game, which has been in development for so long, with so much money behind it (game studio owners I spoke to pretend not to cost to make more than £ 300m), launched into such a state. He certainly points to problems at CD Projekt, whose employees have to rest after months of extra time during the pandemic; the game had already been delayed twice since April to allow more time for development.
But in the end, no doubt feeling pressure from his shareholders, CD Projekt released him in an infinite state, accepting the gamble that players would stick to and that it could be fixed relatively quickly. Another delay would seem to have been even more costly, with millions already spent on TV advertising and marketing around the world. The result is an extremely high-profile controversy, ill-will from players and a stereotype on the company’s stock price.
It’s a testament to the way the games industry is currently operating that this sort of thing is happening more and more. I’m thinking about Bethesda’s Fallout 76, a game about surviving other players in the aftermath of a retro-future America after a nuclear war, which launched in October 2018 in a terrifying state. (Two years later, it was developed and updated to a completely different, very good game.) I also have fond memories of trying to review Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, when the character I spent a week driving around and suddenly dressed up in flash clothes without a trace due to technical issues. It is now one of the most played and profitable games in history.
Thanks to online updates, in 2020, video game publishing is not the destiny. Despite the first weeks of controversy, in another three or six months, Cyberpunk 2077 is likely to be established, and may even end in the black. But a fiasco like this leaves a mark on a developer’s reputation, even if it ends up doing well. This year, people have been even more desperate than usual to escape reality, and paying £ 50 for a game that barely works feels like an extra kick in the juice. .