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Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received,” CDPR dev says (www.pcgamesn.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Cyberpunk 2077 faced a tough reception at launch, but with the Phantom Liberty DLC nearing launch, one CDPR dev feels the RPG was better than history records.

…uh, no. It was a hot mess at launch.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (18 children)

Nevertheless, Platkow-Gilewski also says that he feels the original version of Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received.”

“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive. Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. We knew that the game was great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff.

“That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like ‘let’s do this.’”

Yeah, I actually can get behind this. They got a lot of crap for the technical performance of the last-gen console version, partly because there was no current-gen native version. Having played it on PC day one my impression was that it was rough-to-normal (still better than day one Skyrim). Design-wise, the combat parts and open world design are the least interesting parts of it to this day, but even at the time I thought the narrative elements and obviously the visuals were great.

Just to sanity check this, even with the torubled launch the PC version reviewed with an average of 86 on Metacritic and sold very well. It was a technically rough launch and they should have delayed the console ports at the very least, but it's not a bad game.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago (10 children)

"(still better than day one Skyrim.)"

I'm glad you mentioned this because I almost never see anyone make the comparison, and skyrim didn't get nearly as much hate despite that fact. I remember if you were playing on PS3, walking into water would crash your game, and it was like this for the entire first year of the game on PS3. It also had a problem where save files that were too big would guarantee save file corruption. It was the definition of unplayable for lots of people.

Not saying cyberpunk is better than skyrim, just explaining how dire the launch for skyrim was, many people have forgotten just how rough around the edges skyrim was.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had "open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years" maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.

Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.

Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?

[–] socialjusticewizard 1 points 2 years ago

Skyrim wasn't novel or first to market in that regard. It was just furthering the gameplay of its own prequels. Your timeline seems weird in several ways though... Wow was seven years old by the time Skyrim released.

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