Because it’s a fantastic game.
It should never have come out for last gen consoles. That is a fact.
That was 100% it’s downfall. I don’t know what executive said “But it Haaaass to run on them” - I guarantee every engineer there knew it would be a disaster on the older gen. I know they said at the beginning that it would, but they should have just sucked it up and said “Look, folks, we’re sorry, it just can’t run and you won’t have a good time, so it’s next gen only. We’ll see you in Night City when you can”
I bet many of the engineers did and then their management told them that they have to do it anyway.
It would have saved an absolute mountain of bad press. And upset customers.
It was quite literally the reason why it hit 70k players, NVIDIA. cdpr, allegedly, got wads of money to become the tech demo for the green team, which made the red engine require an overhaul that killed its performance on old gen consoles. Nowadays it’s used as a benchmark. If you look at the player chart it peaked during CES and cratered back down to almost half of the 70k Tassi (aka mouthpiece) is touting. What really is a team worth exploring is how CDPR knowingly deceived millions of people, and thanks to the short memory of the Internet and (likely paid) puff pieces like this, has regenerated its image (and stock price) to a point that quite literally they got away with what they did and saw no consequences. It’s appalling that companies no longer pay when they cheat customers.
This is also a strong message on media literacy. There’s two main types of bait, rage and circlejerk, Tassi enacted the second with this puff piece. A real journalist, would have looked at the average player count of the last few months and used that, but no, “journalist” Paul Tassi chose to make a point from a blip caused by an event that EVERYONE could be aware of and, “journalist” Paul Tassi, should be aware of. This is so disingenuous that it becomes a master class on how media influences people with distorting information.
Edit: As another point, “journalist” Paul Tassi purposefully omits the genial Stardew Valley which usually clocks in close to double the playerbase of Cyberpunk (among over 10 single player games that overtake or compare, like FM, Don’t Starve, Terraria, RDR2, HoIIV, et al).
so, the point about shitty journalism stands, and is actually a good point.
the point about calling CP2077 basically a scam and deceptive is not that good of a point.
afaik, the major problem player in the botched release wasn’t CDPR themselves, although they do deserve some of the blame, but Sony:
Cyberpunk was supposed to be one of the flagship/tech-demo titles of PC (Nvidia), PS4 (later PS5), and XBOX (whatever stupid ass designation it had at the time…xXxBoXOnExXx or some shit? …whatever).
development started on the PS4, then it was decided that PC release should happen at the same time as console release, so the PS4 version got ported to PC.
then the PS5 released, so development moved to PS5, which came with a bunch of upgrades and updates to the engine and other components. as one would expect.
same thing happened with PC hardware: new specs, new features, better performance, etc.
then, about 2-ish years (?) before release, along comes Sony and notices that “hey! the original contract said you’d release on PS4!” and CDPR obviously said “well… that’s kinda not possible anymore. the game can’t run on outdated hardware due to its performance requirements.” and Sony threatened with lawsuits and insisted on a last-gen release.
and THAT’S where all the (major) problems started: CDPR was forced (by Sony!) to backport the MUCH more advanced version that was expected to run on MUCH more powerful hardware, which proved borderline impossible.
this proved to be such an enormous undertaking that development on the actual game basically stopped, as they pretty much had to develop an entirely new game for the old console.
given the recent news about Sony, is it really any surprise they made a completely ridiculous decision regarding software they obviously don’t understand the ramifications of?
like i said, CDPR definitely deserves some of the blame here, but most of the blame lies with Sony for enforcing such a ridiculous, and technologically unfeasible, requirement without any understanding (or rather, wilfull ignorance) of the scope of said requirement.
Sony literally would have rather not sold ANY game than adjust their contract. they were being completely unreasonable, yet CDPR commonly gets ALL of the blame, which again, they only deserve a small part of.
The game looks absolutely amazing on an AMD GPU, without realtime raytracing.
Several years ago now, I managed to get it to 4k90fps on a 6900XT, with basically all settings on ultra/psycho via some ini tweaks, custom FSR values, just no ray tracing, using ‘old school’ cube maps and light sources and what not.
And that was all running in Proton, on linux, as well.
Nvidia absolutely barged in and said hey guys guess what, we completely obliteraterated the entire history of how lighting works in game engines, here’s our new extremely pretty but extremely, astoundingly inefficient lighting engine, rewrite your entire game engine and game to make it work on your custom engine that’s been cooking for 10 years without any notion of this new lighting paradigm.
EDIT: I should add that that is 90 ‘real’ fps, no frame gen, just early FSR.
It always cracks me up, the dudebros buying 2k GPUs because MUH PCMR and then use framegen to play with console input latencies…
FML, we’re breeding intelligence out of the gene pool at speeds that threaten the survival of the species.
I think trying to make the game run on the measly 8 gigs of ram, 1.8ghz cpu, and a GPU that’s worse than a Radeon 7790 would just make an awful experience. The minimum specs for 1080p all low settings is a CPU and GPU that are over twice as fast.
Have to disagree on the GPU part – I first played it with a 970, mostly on medium. It can be nearly maxxed out (no RT) on a 6600XT, which I used for my second playthrough (on Linux).
So you’re telling me I can play this on PC and don’t need to get the PS5 version? insert happy ogre noises here
PC is the way.
Ironically, I get more issues with the game now, on patch 2.2, than I ever got when the game first came out and hadn’t been patched yet.
I feel like patch 2.2 specifically added in some performance issues and bugs. I played a lot on 2.12 and I remember it running a lot smoother/more consistent, but I haven’t gotten around to actually double checking it (I apparently have four versions installed like a crazy person).
It’s 4 years after release, but they only recently finished it.
At least they stuck to it, and were transparent about the state of things.
I’ve bought several early access games that I don’t play yet, because I believe they will get there at some point. My hardware doesn’t do cyberpunk 2077 justice, but if it did I would’ve bought it too.
They didn’t release it as early access. It was the full release. Then they finished it last year. That’s the issue.
They released it in such a state that Sony removed it from their store and offered full refunds.
It’s a freaking good game.
I never played it at release, but modded to the brim just before phantom liberty came out (yes, I know, bad timing), and I was blown away.
I picked up cyberpunk last summer (finally) and while it’s visually stunning and fairly immersive, I had some game breaking bugs where I had to reload several hours beforehand and redo certain missions until they triggered properly. Not once, but several times. And I didn’t even mod anything.
I think my favorite was fast traveling with Claire, ending up in the sky and falling out of the truck. Reloaded, did the mission again only to splatter myself and die because I got shot out of the truck. Third time she wouldn’t stop driving around the block. I let it go for a good half hour just to see if it would end but it never did. Eventually the AI just kept driving into the wall of a building. Reloaded….again.
There were a lot of others but that took me all afternoon just to finish that one race. I had probably a dozen similar issues throughout my playthrough and it really tanked my enthusiasm for the game. I’ll finish it eventually.
I played it for few days, got pretty far, but stopped playing because it’s just so repetitive.
The fact you’re downvoted for what is a legitimate personal experience is quite tragic. Lemmy should be better than reddit…
I watched a review on YouTube that said it’s a heist game at it’s core. So if that doesn’t click or the gameplay doesn’t do enough minute to minute to keep you interested, I can see it turning real boring real fast.
I can’t believe that game‘s been out for four years now.
Honestly, I thought it longer.
Oh yeah? well I’m doing seventy thousand and ONE steam players a night. Take that, CyberFlunk.
The gold standard in games retaining playerbases in this genre is Baldur’s Gate 3, which still puts up over 100,000 players nightly, though it released just over a year and a half ago.
“Released”…
Going off memory but I think BG3’s act 1 was out before cyberpunk or close to the same time. I had 100+ hours before the game released, and it was with huge gaps of play time. I think it was in Beta for at least two years.
Well… Cyberpunk was basically an unfinished alpha when it was released.
Also, BG3 has no major DLC.
it was (mostly) fine for PC. it was only absolutely abysmal if you were a console player.
For PC, although there were bugs, it wasn’t as buggy when comparing it to like a bethesda title. It just got a lot of vitrol because its of the very rare moments in time where the console version of a title was unplayable(as when something is usually unplayable, its usually the oppisite)
Cyberpunk was basically an unfinished alpha when it was released.
I played it the day it was released on pc, the only issue was how shitty the cars drove. But you could change the setting so bikes were usable
Consoles were different, but PC I never really had issues.
On launch it was surprisingly playable on Stadia. My first playthrough was entirely on Stadia.
Fluff piece has the typical fluff piece inconsistencies. Chief among them, utter lack of disclosure.
I mean I upgraded my PC just to be able to play it when it came out and now I want to upgrade again for Path- and Raytracing.
Wait for DLSS4, the mfgen is series 5 exclusive but the transformer model with the improved performance is being ported all the way back to the 2000 series. Might get the performance uplift you need without buying anything if you already have an RTX card.
And if nvidia doesn’t do it, modders likely will. Been running framegen on my 2060 since long before patch 2.13, and the mod version is better than the official one in my opinion.
I think players are beginning to appreciate the work put into the game and understand the true depth of the world, characters, and missions.
It’s a fundamentally great game with a catastrophic launch that now is just a memory.
A launch that taught companies they can in fact release unfinished games and still outsell everything they have previously done
That is… not the lesson CDProjektRed learnt
That is the lesson their investment board learned. It caused strife in the company because of the divide it showcased between those who made the company, and those who own it.
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How is player count meaningless? Even for single player games, that’s the most important number to gauge the ongoing interest in a game. Every player contributes to the strength of the fandom.
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It means it’s selling well and people are playing it long term.
