Cyberpunk 2077 Has Tarnished CD PROJEKT RED’s Reputation Forever, Joint-CEO Believes

Tsing

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Cyberpunk 2077 may have improved dramatically since what many say was a disastrous launch, but no matter how hard it tries, CD PROJEKT RED will never be able to restore the level of good will that it had with gamers.

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People surprised by Cyberpunk's state seem to forget how awful the Witcher III was at launch. How short people's memories seem to be. Granted, Cyberpunk was worse but I think a big part of that was the runaway hype train CDPR created for the game over the better part of a decade.
 
Cyberpunk certainly had a rough launch, but in the end it was a really good game.

I don't think less of CDPR as a result.

I had more fun with Cyberpunk than I did with pretty much any other title of the last 5 years or so.
 
They made right on their product. CP2077 stands right there with BG3 in my mind.
 
I think it will go down like Witcher 3, we'll eventually look back on it, with admiration, like The Witcher
 
They already did, at least for those who actually played the game later. I personally don't think it was as terrible as it was made out to be even at launch on PC.

To me pledging allegiance to ESG is a much bigger blemish on their reputation.
 
MadMummy76 said:
They already did, at least for those who actually played the game later. I personally don't think it was as terrible as it was made out to be even at launch on PC.
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It really was. The thing is, Cyberpunk 2077 was a fun game at its core with a lot of the basic systems in the game being solid enough to be enjoyable. However, the game was unfinished. Basic physics were incomplete. None of the promised reputation systems were in the game and still aren't. There were abilities and cyberware that were incomplete. Meaning they didn't work. Their visual effects weren't even in the game and some like the cloak didn't even have a place holder effect.

The driving was awful early on and weapons weren't balanced at all. Some of the weapon classes were so overpowered they made everything else pointless. The stealth revolver build is a really good example of that. It could 6 tap Adam Smasher and one shot any other boss in the game. LMG's and assault rifles were completely worthless as it they had a time to kill of about a week and a half. Most of the weapon and armor mods were completely broken. Certain quality levels of these mods also didn't even exist.

I can go on and on. The game was in an alpha state. It literally took another two years of work to get the game into the state that it is now. Even then the final product is still scaled back from the original version of the game. Dogtown for example was an area that was sealed off and previously there, but incomplete. There are additional sections of the city like this that were only partially completed and fell victim to scaling the project back. This isn't by itself unusual, but there is a lot of evidence in game to this day confirming this as well as a great deal of this stuff still in the game but largely unreachable without being able to clip through the fences and invisible walls that keep you out of those areas.

The game was literally "just that good" in terms of its narrative, atmosphere and basic gameplay. People enjoyed it well enough to not get refunds and to keep playing it. It also helped that the game developed a mod community extremely quickly. That very much extended the life of the game until CDPR was able to deliver version 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty Expansion.
MadMummy76 said:
To me pledging allegiance to ESG is a much bigger blemish on their reputation.
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You got that right. Until companies abandon those ridiculous practices, they will continue to fail commercially. What's unsettling is that this is happening to a studio that's largely not US or Canada based.
 
Brent_Justice said:
They def. reversed the initial reviews by the launch of Phantom Liberty, that release flipped it, IMO, and was welcomed by gamers.
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I originally played through the game in its v1.3 state, and when I did, I found that the game was stable and bug free. I don't know how it improved after that, but I had no real complaints in v1.3.

I bought Phantom Liberty, but never actually got around to playing it.

I had already finished the main story, so I couldn't quite figure out how I wanted to get back into it again. Since Phantom Liberty was merged into the main story line, I'd either have to restart from the beginning, or start up my save game where I had finished it, and immediately get kicked into the phantom liberty missions, but with my way over-leveled character and weapons.

Neither of those options were desirable.

I did fire up Phantom Liberty to test it out, but I found that I could not play it. They changed some keyboard controls since the original game, making some controls hard-coded, meaning my keyboard setup no longer worked. I decided to quit and wait and try it again later. Maybe they'd fix the hard coded keyboard mappings in a patch later. No idea if they have yet. I haven't tested it.

When I fired up Phantom Liberty I also found that all of my save points from the "secret ending" of the original game were gone. I guess they wanted that gone?

I know I could remap the keys using the registry, but I never got around to it.

Even if they fix it - though - at this point - based on the aforementioned awkward merging of the expansion into the main story, I don't even know how I'd start playing it. Maybe I'll just wait until I forget most of the story, and do a from scratch re-play with Phantom Liberty installed.
 
MadMummy76 said:
To me pledging allegiance to ESG is a much bigger blemish on their reputation.
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They did? I totally missed this.

I will never install any other game store than Steam and GoG, so I guess I won't be buying CDPR games anymore then.
 
Zarathustra said:
I originally played through the game in its v1.3 state, and when I did, I found that the game was stable and bug free. I don't know how it improved after that, but I had no real complaints in v1.3.

I bought Phantom Liberty, but never actually got around to playing it.

I had already finished the main story, so I couldn't quite figure out how I wanted to get back into it again. Since Phantom Liberty was merged into the main story line, I'd either have to restart from the beginning, or start up my save game where I had finished it, and immediately get kicked into the phantom liberty missions, but with my way over-leveled character and weapons.

Neither of those options were desirable.

I did fire up Phantom Liberty to test it out, but I found that I could not play it. They changed some keyboard controls since the original game, making some controls hard-coded, meaning my keyboard setup no longer worked. I decided to quit and wait and try it again later. Maybe they'd fix the hard coded keyboard mappings in a patch later. No idea if they have yet. I haven't tested it.

When I fired up Phantom Liberty I also found that all of my save points from the "secret ending" of the original game were gone. I guess they wanted that gone?

I know I could remap the keys using the registry, but I never got around to it.

Even if they fix it - though - at this point - based on the aforementioned awkward merging of the expansion into the main story, I don't even know how I'd start playing it. Maybe I'll just wait until I forget most of the story, and do a from scratch re-play with Phantom Liberty installed.
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1.3 was an improvement over the original release version but still felt very much like an alpha version of the game. It still had many unfinished systems, items, etc. 1.5+ felt like the game was at least in beta and 2.0/Phantom Liberty actually was closer to what we should have had when the game launched.
 
Haven't tried it, but boy it got a ton of hype before the release - I don't think there was any way they could possibly have lived up to it. I haven't dug into it because W3 got a similar amount of hype and I just can not get into that game at all, and I think CP2077 will be exactly the same way.

If there is a lesson to learn here, it's control the hype. Don't overpromise; overdeliver. The problem is, when you are a publicly traded company, your stock price can literally thrive on just hype, and if you have long development cycles, you have to have something to show shareholders that you are still building value. It's crazy how the stock exchange can drive counter-productive business practices.
 
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