[chundicus]

I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.

I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.

The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.

[nightski]

The thing is CD Project Red has released it's games in a really rough state before. All of the Witcher games were brutal on release.

But every time they have not only released thousands of bug fixes/improvements for free, but also delivered large dlc/content updates.

The difference with CP2077 I believe is that it was just the highest profile launch they have ever had by a wide margin. They are too big now.

I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

[devonkim]

Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations.

CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.

I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.

[mywittyname]

> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

Same here. I bought it on PC via GOG, and while it was rough and unstable, I happily put about 100hrs of game play into it.

Honestly, they should have released it as under-development on platforms like Steam that support such designations. It's pretty common for studios to release games in an alpha/beta state. At least that way, gamers would know that they are getting a potentially buggy release.

For consoles, they straight up should not have released it until v1.07 at minimum. That's where they really screwed up. The game is in a much less playable state on the PS4, and console gamers in general are used to a much more polished gaming experience.

[zamalek]

> I don't regret pre-ordering at all, because they have always done right by me.

I bought the game a few days ago and, apart from the NVIDIA RTX timed-exclusive, I haven't run into any issues with it. It's already a touch above the usual Witcher release.

It's also worth noting that, at least from my perspective, there was a vocal crowd begging for the game on account of "something to do during the pandemic, assuming bugs warts and all". I'm not sure if this is why they released an objectively non-functional game to previous-gen consoles, but I would be inclined to believe the excuse.

[andoriyu]

I don't think the size of CDPR is the reason here. They are public company now. Which means they aren't lying to some potential players, but instead they are lying to the investors.

They made promises about work environment that weren't fulfilled.

They blatantly lied about previous gen consoles performance. PC gamers are used to games not running well, but main appeal is that games usually run within the baseline. CP2077 is unplayable on PS4 and XB1.

CP2077 isn't TW3 level of unfinished. I think CDPR has bitten off more than they can chew.

[okprod]

They also dragged out the release for a long time, all while continuing to build hype, like Anthem.

[rootlocus]

I played Witcher3 on release day, and it was nothing compared to Cyberpunk2077.

[b0rsuk]

Your memory might be failing you:

CYBERPUNK 2077: Lies, Excuses, & Sycophantic Fanboys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mKYZVtjgoY

CYBERPUNK 2077 - Early Reviews & CDPR TOTALLY Misrepresented the GAME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko33FH1IItI

CYBERPUNK 2077: INFLUENCERS & JOURNALISTS Are Also to BLAME

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJk5TJx6Hq4

[jgust]

It's a tragedy of the commons situation with gamer enthusiasts acting against their own best interest.

If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games", I don't see how any personal responsibility campaign has any chance of working for things impacting society at large such as climate change, overfishing, public health, etc.

[Sodman]

I don't think it's fair to blame this on gamers. With all of the hyperbole over various games being "broken", most people that are hyped about a specific game are just going to buy it and see for themselves. Unless it's literally unplayable (as may actually have been the case here), most people won't refund it.

This has been going on for years and years, it's just getting worse over time. It's always some variant of this conversation at $GAMEDEV_STUDIO:

Focus group feedback: Our test groups are noticing 10% of players are running into this bug/issue. It's frustrating them, but there are workarounds.

Management: All of our marketing materials target release date XX/XX/XXXX. If we try to fix this bug we'll have to push the release... How many people will _not_ buy the game because of this bug?

Focus group feedback: Nobody that would have otherwise bought this game would decide not to buy it over this issue.

Management: So we ship as planned, and fix the bugs in a patch.

Over time studios realized that you can get away with much bigger bugs affecting much larger portions of players. Ship sooner, start recognizing revenue, and push post-launch patches to fix the "really bad bugs". It's shocking how bad the quality has to get before it starts making headlines.

[rootlocus]

> If people can't delay gratification for something as inconsequential as "non-broken video games"

This doesn't make sense. The game was announced 8 years ago, and it was delayed 8 months. The company said the product was ready and they published a product that was not ready. I've delayed my gratification 8 years for it.

[falcolas]

This isn't on the players. That's very much in the same line as blaming someone driving their car for the Gulf Oil Spill.

This is 100% on CDPR management. It's their job to set the right deadlines, to manage expectation and hype.

They failed, and should be held accountable for that failure.

EDIT: Yes, downvote this. Support CDPR's management and their shitty practices with their employees and their lying to players and investors. I'm sure you'll love the games that come about as a result.

[lumost]

I wonder how much of this is broken QA throughout the industry. I burned ~60 hours in cyberpunk on a ps4 pro, the content of the game was fun - but the bugs were pretty dumb. Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred (which undoubtedly changed during development).

From a testing perspective It seems like it would require an impossible amount of QA time to vet all of the quest paths as a player, and it would be easy to miss game breaking bugs if QA testers were using manipulated save files. Issues like the bad police AI only crop up once in the main game, but are pretty noticeable throughout free roam.

If players want games to get bigger, will we need smarter and more automated QA tools? what would these look like?

[pythonaut_16]

> Q: Open-world games are often really buggy, because there’s just so much going on. But I experienced very little of that in my time with Breath of the Wild. How did you pull that off? Was it just a really extensive QA process?

> Dohta: There was another point that we developed during our QA process. We came up with a number of scripts that would basically allow the game to be played automatically, and allow Link to run through various parts of the game automatically. And as that was happening, on the QA side of things, if a bug did appear I’d suddenly get a flood of emails about it. That was one tool that we found to be really handy.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/11/14881076/the-legend-of-ze...

Breath of the Wild used a tool to do automated run throughs as part of their bug testing suite. This is just a quote from one interview, but if you do a bit of Googling you can find some good information about their development and planning process.

[duhi88]

From what I understand, they also promised a bunch of features that were never implemented. Maybe they're still to come, but it sounds like they are months away from fixing all the bugs, let alone implementing better AI and other things players complained about.

I bet it would have been met with less backlash if they delayed only the PS4/Xbox S versions. Players must expect some Day 0 bugs from games this large.

[fpgaminer]

> Many of the worst bugs originated in story pathways that would only be triggered if various conditions had occurred

I think the absolute worst bug I encountered was because of this, but I don't believe the story pathway that triggers it was uncommon. In fact, that condition apparently has a major effect on the story later.

Basically it was part of a main story quest where you have to wait a day for a character to call you before the quest can continue. But I never got a call. I saw a lot of threads on the issue, and it seems the bug happens if you did some optional dialogue right beforehand. But unlike other optional dialogue in the game, this optional dialogue was really hard to miss. I had to actively run past an NPC to avoid it.

I ended up losing about an hour of gameplay from that bug :/

I agree with you that it was likely because they changed something last minute and never checked it again; a QA failure for sure. And my theory is the COVID situation made QA testing a nightmare. Still ... that bug was brutal. Every "wait for X to call you" quest after made me anxious.

[ethbr0]

It's not rocket science. It's devs treating QA like second-class citizens and substituting (cheap) person-hours for proper technical tools.

Any sequence of events can be represented as a directed graph.

Any event check can be validated against that directed graph as feasible.

Instead, Bethesda (equally guilty) and CDPR seem to let their devs add whatever checks, and then trust QA to untangle and validate the infinite number of combinations.

tl;dr - open world games are incompatible with traditional QA methods and tools

[Pfhreak]

The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

That said, knowing you have a broken game and saying it's great is extremely avoidable and totally should stop. Tell me the game is a mess and let me play with it.

[falcolas]

> releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

Only if you're holding yourself to an impossible deadline. Given time – and, I'll argue, developers who weren't burnt out by the work schedule – and this could have been resolved. But they didn't take that time, they went ahead with a non-functional game just to meet the deadline.

They abused their developers to meet an (demonstrably) impossible deadline. This is a terribly way to run a business on many levels.

[enahs-sf]

Having played Cyberpunk on a PS4 and then a PS5, It is nowhere near what you'd expect from a AAA title in terms of quality. Had to stop playing it because it's not worth it to ruin the experience.

I can only imagine what the folks at Rockstar are thinking about this launch and what they can take away from it.

[MaxBarraclough]

> The problem isn't releasing a broken game. There's a huge challenge in making and releasing games and meeting a specific quality bar.

That's true for any complex product. There are reasonable expectations, and indeed laws, about products being fit for purpose. I don't see why video games are unique.

It's possible to patch them after release. This partially explains, but does not excuse, the pattern of games releasing in a broken state.

[outworlder]

> I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games

The game wasn't "broken" at all. I've finished it a couple of days ago. It works fine on the PC.

It wasn't a matter of releasing an unfinished game as in the "early access" model like you are describing. It was a matter of deciding to release the game in platforms that were underpowered, like the PS4.

[rasz]

Even stock poor spec PS4 wasnt as bad as media would led you to believe. It runs at 30 fps with occasional drops to 20 fps and seldom/very rare 15fps, MUCH better than past critically acclaimed games like Control which shipped garbage running at literal _10 fps_. Ps4 will also crash on you once every ~5 hours, probably not fixed memory leaks. Still game saves often so its not a problem, more of an annoyance. Other than that its smooth sailing.

You can check it out for yourself here https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor... CK is doing a full play thru on base PS4 and its fine.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Arguably, they just needed (much) more time to optimize the game for underpowered, older consoles.

Which would mean they released it unfinished, in a sense.

[macspoofing]

Absolutely the big studios should stop releasing broken games.

From a consumer standpoint - just wait a little. Don't get AAA games at launch. If you wait a few months, you'll get a much more stable game. If you wait 1-2 years, you'll get the game with DLC for $20.

[warpech]

I wonder if CDPR released the game at that stage because they thought that the window of opportunity on last-gen consoles was closing

[tstrimple]

Somehow I doubt Polish law is going to have much impact on the larger game industry.

[chundicus]

Agreed. By "this" I actually (confusingly) was more so referring to the general negative feedback Cyberpunk has been receiving.

[ekianjo]

There is no need for action. The only thing people need to do is to stop preordering games.