[jds375]

Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

Performance/bugs aside, what about the completeness issues? How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

That’s my main concern - I’m sure the performance/bugs will be worked out. But will the game actually be finished?

[tidepod12]

>Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

The game, no matter what platform or settings, is rife with bugs. Many of the bugs, especially on PC, are not game-breaking bugs. Things like getting into a car and having it launch you 100 feet into the air before returning you to the ground is pretty amusing, sure. Being able to drive straight through other cars with no collision is actually convenient at times. Having your dong flop around while T-posing on top of a motorcycle is pretty hilarious. I think a lot of people are giving these bugs a pass because they're mildly entertaining... but they're definitely still issues that should be addressed, IMO.

I am having plenty of fun playing the game despite the "jank", but the bugs are undeniably there and completely immersion breaking. The game very quickly goes from being a serious game about sex trafficking, drugs, and evil corporations into a meme game about flying cars and funny looking character models... if you don't care much about immersion and just want to shoot things and look at pretty neon graphics, I can see why you would still love this game, but I can't imagine that was what CDPR intended.

[belorn]

Let's see here, from playing maybe 30+ hrs or so:

Never been launched into the air.

Never driven through any NPCs or cars without collision.

No wardrobe malfunctions. Slow loading of textures when switching armor through, in the inventory menu.

Once had a T-pose flickering for a few milliseconds while driving a bike.

My computer is a 4 year old system with a 1080 card, and I have not touched the graphic settings beyond turning off motion blur. I have had a few glitches but so far only one bug that actually annoyed me and force me to repeat content. After a long period of unsaveable and unskippable exposition scene, which I see as a bug in itself, I had a race condition where I tried to take control of a turret just as the turret died and I got stuck in the dead turret interface without any option to exit it. Those are the bugs that I suspect they are working to fix in the first few patches.

[hajhatten]

I've had none of the issues you mentioned above.

I've had some graphical issues sure, and a bad guy spawned inside a car once. That's in 80h so far in the game.

Everyone's experience is different, but don't say people don't pay attention. If they break the immersion for you, just stay away from the game for a while. It was the exact same situation with The Witcher 3, took a good 6 months for it to get good.

But they are still supporting that game after what, 5 years? I'm absolutely sure they will with this aswell.

[mekkkkkk]

Just wanted to offset the sibling comments by mentioning that I've experienced most of the bugs you describe and then some. And a ton of soft locks. On PC.

I had truly great fun for 40 hours, but it has slowly taken its toll. I'll be waiting for patches before diving in again.

[Ardren]

> I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

It feels dismissive, but I agree. It seems unbelievable that there could be such a massive difference in bugs just based on different hardware.

Did these people never have a bald 'V'? Or have other characters clip into them? Or spook an entire street by dodging? Or get a wanted star for shooting a gang member? Or not have the weapon accessory page not update after salvaging? Etc.

[jasonlotito]

What's funny is the number of people below your comment suggesting how they don't have problems, only to list a bunch of problems that don't make the game unplayable, including a bug that literally makes finishing a quest impossible, otherwise known as unplayable.

A game can be a buggy mess and CDPR should get called out for misleading it's customers by hiding reviews of the only officially released console versions (next gen hasn't actually been released yet). There are without a doubt lots of bugs. I have friends who enjoy the game who are still seeing the bugs.

It's okay if you like something that is still buggy. Don't be so insecure that you can't enjoy something even with it's faults.

Just don't pretend those faults don't exist.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> I'm convinced that anyone who says they haven't had "any issues" is either lying, has very low standards, or just doesn't pay much attention to detail.

I feel the same way whenever anyone talks about their Linux Desktop that way, but I still give them the benefit of the doubt because I have legitimately been in that situation with a game.

[jniedrauer]

> Things like getting into a car and having it launch you 100 feet into the air before returning you to the ground is pretty amusing, sure.

These types of bugs can be very hardware-specific. If people are playing on hardware similar enough to the game developer's workstations, they might not encounter them at the same rate that you do. Something to bear in mind.

[lrem]

I've had none of the issues you mentioned, some 40-ish hours into the game. I don't even get much in terms of visual glitches, other than sometimes a character's rendering starting slow (first a bald head, then the headgear, then the hair). The thing that saddens me is the terrible AI, in all its manifestations: terrible enemies, terrible drivers and terrible wanted mechanics.

Edit: come think of it: I somewhat often get the visual glitch of foliage which should have been obscured being visible.

[sudosysgen]

Personally I've only had two issues with the game so far beyond sub-par performance.

One is that the mission after "Transmission" didn't show up

The other was that trees would bug into view if graphical settings were too high.

All in all, it's okay except for performance.

[meling]

I don’t play games, but reading this commentary made me laugh!

[ignoramous]

> ...I can't imagine that was what CDPR intended.

Is it not CDPR. It is 2020 and thankfully it is coming to a close.

[TheGRS]

After about 20 hours or so into it I was pretty shocked to see people who have comments that say its a great RPG or that the gameplay is great. Because at least for someone who likes to try out lots of different games, not just the big tentpole AAA games that get released near Christmas, this game is exceedingly mediocre at gameplay.

Its one undeniable quality is that the story missions are compelling and interesting, because I keep coming back to them and I want to see where it goes. But if you take any of the systems in the game, they leave a lot to be desired: crafting, gunplay, sneaking, hacking, quickhacks (or this game's magic system), driving, side missions, voice acting. Hell I find even many of the animations pretty generic most of the time when they are outside of the main story stuff.

The bugs are immersion-breaking for sure, and I hate when I need to restart a mission because of one, but the game is otherwise pretty mediocre. I compare it to Skyrim, where the bugs were present, and the individual systems were sometimes pretty lame, but I otherwise was still immersed in the game world completely and was always having a ton of fun. It was greater than the sum of its parts. Cyberpunk is not.

[dleslie]

I've been telling friends that it plays more like Saints Row than GTA, and it's certainly nothing like Pillars of Eternity.

[cbozeman]

OH no... I've had plenty of issues.

A lot of weird graphical glitches. A game-ending bug that locks you into the Maelstrom base and prevents you from leaving (had to restart from an older save game to get around that one). Non-aggressive NPCs can't always be hit by melee weapons, meaning I have to let the gang members go aggro on me before I introduce them to Mrs. Sockety Wench.

As far as completeness, I actually take a little of an opposite position. There's a lot of really neat side quests, and if you read the shards, there's a ton of interconnectedness. I was hired to kill a corporate executive, then later in just a simple assault quest, I got a datashard indicating she put a hit out on someone.

And there's tons of intersections like this. The Delamain side quest is genuinely one of the best in the game.

Yes, NPC and vehicle AI needs a serious overhaul. Yes, the game probably needed another 12-18 months of development, but its still a decent game even with all these faults.

[prithee]

I am one of those who was initially disappointed with the game and its numerous failings, but later enjoyed myself upon completion so I will try to convey why.

The product is incomplete, this is correct. But there is a degree of incompleteness or artifice I am comfortable with if there are other elements that work. Same goes with actual role playing games. When I play this game I have to wonder what is artifice? what is incomplete? and what is a concession for performance that has gone awry? In 2077 I feel all of these each session, which is unusual.

But with me: Immersion breaking issues such as cars on tracks, don't bother me. Following the narrative (though far from perfect) was a source of "fun" and being "acceptable" for me. I would be wishing all of these elements were strengthened, over the massive effort put into of an open world that doesn't really provide. I'm going to be won over by these arcs, and core gameplay and not point to point hijinks and antics. I don't feel 2077 ever lied in there, or at least the experience I wanted.

For a while in games they don't have to be real cars, but I want them to "feel" like real cars. So we get a complete games in a year where the AI to work beyond the paths, and now what is involved? It will be more immersive for sure, but how much longer till it is complete? For some playing the game, squinting at the 3D models now rendered as car sprites in the distance is enough.

[kodt]

The two things you mentioned don't really affect the gameplay at all. I guess if you were looking for a GTA style sandbox game where you could just cause chaos in the streets it does not satisfy that. But if you want to explore a huge detailed city and do quests/mission etc.. it works really well.

The police spawning/ai issue is really dumb when you encounter it, but as long as you aren't trying to shoot random people in the street you don't encounter it.

The traffic is mostly just background detail. Again if your goal is to create a big traffic jam ala GTA then it won't be nearly as entertaining but in terms of just making it feel like you are in a living breathing city.. it gets the job done.

Many of the side missions are fairly detailed and interesting, it is fun just exploring the city and completing missions.

[trzeci]

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

Because I don't interact with NPC's and traffic. I treat these aspects more like a decoration to the game, not an interactive content. There is plenty of interactive content and side missions, so I have enough of fun spending my time there instead of killing NPCs and pretending this is a GTA, so that I can fight police.

[nahname]

There are bugs. After 60+ hours of gameplay, I can say Cyberpunk is significantly worse than the Witcher 3 was at launch.

The thing is, on PC, the bugs are mostly visual annoyances or obvious lack of polish. Menu's not updating, UI glitches in cut scense, etc... I've had the game crash on me exactly once.

The core game has a great story. The side quests are unique and interesting. Characters have depth. Combat is surprisingly good. Cyberpunk has all the things I need to enjoy it and I did enjoy it.

[amatecha]

I'm surprised by people saying they haven't had issues. Have they just not noticed the issues? Like characters in completely static, motionless poses? Every little while there will be an NPC stuck motionless somewhere, or sliding along the ground as if they are a, well, non-animated 3d model. UI elements appear when they shouldn't, and a prompt to "[C] Skip to next" is almost always showing at the bottom right of my screen, during pretty much all gameplay. Further, I've had repeated crashes of the game which actually crashed the GPU driver (NVIDIA) and required me unplugging and re-plugging my HDMI cable so the GPU would reset and work again (most people seem to just reboot their computer altogether in this case due to not knowing the unplug/replug workaround).

Outside of straight-up bugs, the performance is utterly atrocious even on "Low" settings, and my PC exceeds the recommended specs by quite a decent margin.

At the same time, CDPR's prior games have received a ton of post-launch support so I can only hope Cyberpunk 2077 will receive a good amount of improvements in the new year. Fingers crossed!

[amatecha]

Being unable to pick up items that are supposed to be lootable is a constant occurrence. Just earlier I had a quest NPC glitch out and cancel the dialogue options I was supposed to be able to potentially choose from, so they attacked me (as if I had chosen certain sub-optimal dialogue choices). During that fight (which shouldn't have even been happening), I defended myself with a single shotgun blast and that happened to send that NPC flying and .. through a chair... where the NPC then froze in place and became "deactivated", wouldn't fight anymore, couldn't be killed?? I was already going to reload the last save due to the dialogue glitch regardless, but... This kind of stuff is so commonplace, I basically save the game after almost every action. Already have 81 save files. :)

[knolan]

I’ve had very few issues. One dialogue failed to trigger and I had to load a checkpoint to continue. I had some minor RTX shadow issues in the Hotel heist mission. Last night after about 15 hours of gameplay I had my first CTD. The most annoying bug is how frame rate tanks when in a car.

The game definitely has issues and the patch notes for 1.05 show how there are severe scripting problems in many missions. However there are also huge disparities between the game running on different systems and even within subsets of PCs. The removal of AVX support is particularly interesting in this regard.

Apart from all that the game is very similar to the Witcher 3 in terms of its core gameplay and mechanics. So yes, the implementation of crowds and traffic is poor compared to what we see in GTA. The world is a very densely detailed backdrop and not much else. It definitely could have (should have) been delayed but that would not change much about the core of the game.

If you want a Deus Ex game from the folks who brought you the Witcher this is pretty good, if excellent at times.

[drzaiusapelord]

>haven’t had any issues with the game.

I try to be a kind and generous reviewer and it gets frustrating to hear people try to invalidate my experiences. I have a 2070 that runs this game just fine from a performance perspective but I've encountered multiple broken missions. I play stealth non-lethal, so me finishing a mission usually means lots of saves and a lot of time invested only to be rejected at the end because its too buggy to finish properly. Target NPCs not spawning, scripting logic errors, hostile NPCs just staring into space, broken pathfinding, broken GPS, etc. Its all here.

And as you say, completeness is an issue. Night City feels empty and boring to me. Sure its super pretty but so what? NPCs just give some canned smart-ass one-liner, traffic/life/pedestrians, etc are all simple robots. There's no "soul" in this game like in other virtual worlds I've experienced.

Also, so much of it is well written, but honestly, by game standards its where a YA novel would be. Think the first 3 Potter books, not the last 4. Its not challenging art. Its written on the 5th grade level especially Silverhand's snotty and dismissive sophomoric politics.

Lastly, its all feels so 'last gen' to me. I'm doing old school inventory management constantly because the game focuses so much on loot dropping. I can't dress up V like I'd like her to look because I need to use the top armor pieces I have. The driving feels 'cheap.' The driving GPS is not level aware so it'll take you several stories below where you need to be. The world V lives in feels dead, not vibrant and alive, which was their major marketing point.

I think the "there's nothing wrong with this game" crowd is either being dishonest or are just running and gunning speed runs and avoiding some of the more subtle bugs and don't care about this game being anything but a dumb and pretty shooter.

[malwarebytess]

>completeness issues? How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

I don't know what to tell you except that in my 10 or so hours of play I have had plenty of fun. The highlights of the game for me so far are the story missions themselves and the world -- the environment itself. Seems like a finished product to me, albeit a buggy one with a diminished scope from what people seemed to be expecting. Don't forget that they intend on releasing what was it 3 expansions of content similar to witcher 3? I'm interested to see how they use the world they created for that purpose.

[inerte]

I do have a beef with this too. I bought a perk called throwing knives and... there are no “throwing” knives! You throw your regular knife and you can’t pick it up again. You lose the knife.

[Sileni]

I remember that moment. I turned to my girlfriend and said "Whelp, guess we're not playing a stealth build".

[Der_Einzige]

Was looking for this comment. Game had no bugs for me on PC but was obviously an unfinished mess.

Mass effect 1 style gun progression? People hated it in 2009 and I hate it now. It's unneeded here, and that's just the very tip of this really large sized iceberg on just how much they fucked up gameplay / RPG elements

[ravenstine]

> Every single hacker news thread about the Cyberpunk fiasco has had a ton of top comments about they haven’t had any issues with the game.

It's really hard to reconcile with the sheer number of video clips I've seen of bugs that are totally unacceptable in even alpha level software. I have to wonder whether those who are claiming they don't have that many bugs have simply grown up in the current era of buggy games on first release, or if they're just being dishonest because reasons.

Just watch The Act Man's compilation of Cyberpunk bugs and tell me that game is worth full price.

[krzyk]

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

This is a minor problem, NPCs are a background, so it is nice to see that they have a brain, but it is more like "cute" not "OMG".

E.g. notice that in Witcher 3 you couldn't attack non-enemy NPC (e.g. you couldn't kill everyone in a village).

Big problems are bugs in quests that don't allow finishing them or a story that doesn't allow choice in most cases.

[Shivetya]

There are numerous large audience streamers doing just fine with the game. A few have described their issues and most are related to undelivered original promises of content that would have been in game. However I have yet to see one play on anything other than a PC

It is pretty easy these days to generate outrage and make an issue appear far larger than it may actually be. It also can be an incident highly isolated to subset of gamers who play the game.

[Shish2k]

> How can the game be acceptable or fun when cars run on tracks and NPC’s don’t have a problem being attacked?

This is such a surreal comment to me - like “How can Tetris be acceptable or fun when it doesn’t even have cars or NPCs in the first place?”

(Answer: because (for me at least) the game isn’t about those things)

[nirv]

The Cyberpunk 2077 game is already amazing in terms of art direction, level design and story wise. I would also argue that the game is excellent in terms of graphics, although it has massive issues with performance. In my opinion, in addition to a lots bugs, at the moment the weakest aspects of the game are the complete lack of NPC AI, as well as some emptiness in the game world outside of story and other quests. The latter is understandable, there is room for multiple updates in the future, without affecting the storyline, including massive online multiplayer game mode.

As for poor, or rather the lack of, AI and NPC behavior was mentioned as a "bug" that will be fixed at a recent CDPR board meeting. In 2018 CDPR were advertising full day cycle AI system for all NPCs in game. The promise was not fulfilled. At the moment there is simply no AI, like it's 2003 again. Including awful police spawns behind player's back with no vehicle chase.

However, users reported that rare glimpse of intelligence does exist in the game, perhaps through an oversight, e.g. police is actually able to chase player in a car[1] (for a short distance though), and some NPCs can actually be found in unusual places[2]. We don't know for sure, but it's believed that CDPR hastily trimmed all of the NPC and vehicle AI in the game. If so, we can only guess for what purpose. Maybe they didn't have time to polish it for the mandatory release date on December 10, or perhaps older consoles weren't able to process it. However, in its current shape NPC AI is at the level of AAA games from 15 years back (GTA: San Andreas), not to mention the CDPR's own Witcher 3. In fact, it is so awful that it is even good: it gives hope that AI system will get significantly overhauled with one of the game's upcoming updates (two major updates are expected in 2021Q1).

Nothing of that prevented me from enjoying this amazing game for 100+ hours with great pleasure. I haven't been as excited about a videogame as a kid since 2004, when Half Life 2[3] was released.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-OZqwjzNas

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/kewbai/...

[3] The Prey (2017) was an unexpected gem which I fell in love with, but I had zero hype since I didn't know anything about the game beforehand. I highly recommend reading Aphyr's (yes, that Jepsen's Aphyr) excellent Prey game review: https://aphyr.com/posts/344-prey-the-real-and-the-symbolic

[zkomp]

Nitpicking but San Andreas does have AI where police chases work and NPC do not feel completely brainless, and cars do not only follow tracks, it does not feel empty and lifeless.

[EugeneOZ]

Is it your first game ever? Any game has some bugs/imperfections. If you are expecting perfect open-world game without bugs and with mechanics every player loves - you’ll be waiting more.

[tracer4201]

I haven’t played the game and don’t play video games too often, so my thoughts here perhaps sound naive.

“NPCs not having a problem being attacked” and “cars running on tracks” could be intentional design choices, right? We can speculate that the game’s feature set is unfinished, but is it also not possible that this video game in its “finished” state just isn’t what people wanted it to be? Clearly there are bugs and I agree the product right now isn’t finished, but once any glitches and performance issues are fixed, I’m not sure if the gameplay will ever meet expectations.

Edit: not sure of why I have -5 points.

[tidepod12]

The biggesr gripe I've seen is that if it is an intentional design choice, it is completely contradictory to what CDPR promised. Through years of marketing they promised "unprecedented" levels of AI and interactability with NPCs. They promised things like situational police presence/response, etc. But currently, the game has NPC AI that's years behind (games released 5-10 years ago have better AI).

The fact that such features were promised is what is causing people to think (hope?) that these features are simply unfinished. If it is an intentional design choice and CDPR has no plan to improve them, that's a whole other issue with what was promised vs what was actually intended.

[cbozeman]

No. The game is simply not finished.

The problem with creating a huge open-world game and then stating in all your promotional material that this, "will be the most immersive open-world game we've ever created" means that it has to surpass, at a minimum, The Witcher 3.

However, you paint yourself into an even worse corner with that, because everyone's going to compare you to Grand Theft Auto series as well when you use the phrase "open-world game". And that's a real titan to go up against.

Its clearly obvious this game needed a bare minimum of 6 more months of development, if to do nothing more than fix just the bugs. But it really needs about 12-18 months of development just to add the features they claimed the game would have at launch.

[detaro]

If they designed it as that from the start while promoting it as an open-world, they made a serious judgement error, as cbozeman explained. If you promote an open world with cars, you need cars that act believable.

If they attempted to have it be a believable feature of the game world, it's apparently entirely lost on consumers (e.g. a world with stupid cars could be explained in an interesting way as one where only few exceptions actually drive themselves, whereas most just rely on stupid automations taking care of it - but you need to present that in a way people understand).

Some of the things people found also indicates that a few systems like this actually exist but are only triggered very rarely, which suggests they were intended to be there but disabled because they don't work well enough/don't scale.