JoIt’s amazing that reports about a company forcing its employees to work overtime for months or even years to meet an arbitrary deadline can dampen your enthusiasm for a video game.
This phenomenon is so common in game development that it has its own little euphemism: “Crunch.” And many of the most prominent studios use it: Rockstar Games, creators of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto i Red Dead Redemption franchises, is famous for its use and the technical marvel of The Last of Us Part II came in part from the overwork that reportedly resulted in at least one hospitalization.
Up there with them is Polish developer CD Projekt RED, a company that has been requiring six days for its workers to launch its long-awaited new title in 2020, Ciberpunk 2077. But despite all the hard work these employees do, he’s just not prepared.
Given the hype surrounding the company, it is somewhat surprising that it is mostly derived from a single release: in 2015 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While the first two games in the series were well received, the third became an absolute phenomenon, making its creators the most respected developers in the industry and the source material popular enough to warrant a series. of eminently showy Netflix starring Henry Cavill The Wizard 3 and its infinite reissues have resisted Bethesda Ancient parchments, and CDPR’s superior technology and storytelling ribs are often cited as an example of how Bethesda might be instead of how they are. That’s why it’s ironic that no Bethesda game has ever been as unstable at launch as Ciberpunk 2077.
The game is inspired by the pen and paper RPG series Cyberpunk, which is inspired by similar articles Blade Runner, Neuromantic, etc. It is an adventure of hundreds of hours in which you play several times to see everything that can be seen in all the ways in which they can be seen. You are V and you have problems. When a job that infiltrates Night City’s largest corporation and possibly the whole world goes wrong, your brain begins to merge with that of an anti-capitalist rockstar / “terrorist” named Johnny Silverhand, played here by always play Keanu Reeves. And this process is potentially lethal, so you have to figure out how to stop it, and maybe the corporation that caused it.
Although it doesn’t look like it, Cyberpunk first it’s a role-playing game and so I wanted to play a role … but the game makes it harder than expected. For one thing, you can’t be “cool,” which is weird for a game so obsessed with looking like it. But what seems to be thought of as “great” dialogue options always comes out at least 25% too aggressive and 50% too difficult. It is a game about merging with an anti-capitalist created by a company dedicated to capitalism to the fullest. It is an anti-corporate service of a company whose boss deceived investors about the conditions under which he forced his employees to work, only to “apologize” internally when he was publicly called for it. You really can’t put less than that.
You can feel the focus on the aesthetics at the expense of the soul from the first moment, on the comprehensive screen of character creation. The interface is clearly designed with the mouse in mind and apparently no effort was made to make it work well on a controller … but there is also a penis length slider. And while I would have preferred the game to be more enjoyable to play, I can’t help but appreciate your attempt to make this game as elegant as you can imagine. But these penises have been causing quite a stir, as players quickly realized almost immediately that the fully molded limbs were busting the characters ’pants, and he immediately turned to Twitter to show off their merchandise and sink into the company that let them do it. The move has also caused concerns with streamers, such as when the hugely popular PewDiePie restarted its game flow after inadvertently exposing V during character creation due to concerns about platform nudity restrictions. It all feels a bit like a kid’s impression of what a “mature” video game should be, aggravated by the apparent failure to really try how a painful appendix would interact with the game’s tight outfits.
It’s not that he’s convinced anything has been tested successfully. High-budget “AAA” games usually have trouble launching, but that’s the next level. And while it’s obviously the management’s fault, it’s also the fans ’fault: when the game was delayed (for the third time) from November to December, the developers were harassed and received death threats from the same idiots titled which expelled women home game developers during the height of Gamergate. I can’t imagine what they would have faced if the game was completely missing in the 2020 window and yet it should have been.
There are even several patches, the game continues to see complete locks every few hours, and I’ve rarely spent more than ten minutes without finding any bugs. Most are quite minor and, from time to time, even funny: characters and cars that are transported or disappear completely; an enemy is trapped on the roof and dies immediately, appears in another character’s virtual space and sees his eyeballs float in front of me until they allow me to move again, but sometimes they are actively harmful: a mission would not begin because the game did not recognize the internal timer, another was stopped because a door that had to pass refused to open. At one point, I was forced to face a flickering screen effect for about twenty minutes because the game forgot to turn it off after a few seconds.
This issue has become an issue that the CD Projekt RED was forced to release on Monday a statement apologizing for the state of the game on consoles in particular and setting out the next steps, including a schedule of updates which he hopes will address the “most prominent issues.” in February. It’s such an unfortunate state of affairs that the company even offers refunds to understandably compromise players, with a special emphasis on those using state-of-the-art hardware, where massive performance issues abound. (Fortunately, I saved myself by playing the PlayStation 4 version on the newly released PS5 in its impressive compatibility mode with later versions, which substantially smoothed out the frame rate).
Although let’s say you wait until February and clearly you should: what will you get then?
Well, Ciberpunk 2077 is an open world game in the line of one Grand Theft Auto: you have a big, densely packed city to explore on foot or by car with a full day / night cycle and even a basic weather system. There are dozens of shops to enter and so many random people to talk to, many of whom have their own stories you can jump into, whether you follow the main plot or not, resulting in a seemingly endless series. of concerts, as well as street crimes to stop.
Plus, it’s a first-person action game that includes fist, blade, and science fiction shootings * and * a stealth game where you can hack machines and make silent demolitions. There’s also a crafting system, a weird detective system, and throughout it, you gain experience points that will allow you to unlock more skills that will allow you to do better than before. Is it like that a lot. And if all you care about is the breadth of content, Ciberpunk 2077 it has the potential to keep you busy for literal years.
But the real part of the game of this kitchen sink and kitchen experience is, above all, right. The driving is overly floating and I really didn’t like the amount of shots each enemy dropped with a bullet sponge. The game clearly wants you to play tactically, using stealth and hacking to slowly and methodically choose your targets, but at some point I got bored or frustrated by the technical mistakes of artificial intelligence and wanted the weapons to burn.
“Like everyone else in the world, I’m a big fan of Keanu Reeves and making Johnny Silverhand your frequent companion was inspired and made the most outstanding experience easy.”
But CD Projekt RED made a name for itself with its global construction and storytelling, and in the first, Cyberpunk it’s a resounding success: open worlds in the first person require an almost absurd amount of detail, as you can even go so far as to examine it. And Night City yes. It’s an awesome piece of virtual design that only gets more impressive as missions take you to buildings with deep, complex, and unique designs. There is so much care and craft that it’s impossible not to be impressed or even amazed by what keeps you from being able to throw yourself. Of course, it is expected from a team of hundreds of overworked.
The story is more mixed. Like everyone else in the world, I’m a big fan of Keanu Reeves and making Johnny Silverhand your frequent companion was inspired and made the most outstanding experience easy. I was less in love with the myriad of other characters and factions I could get involved with (or not).
Probably the most fundamental scene of the first game involves an argument that turns into a murder, which you see behind a two-way mirror. You cannot move, that is, there is absolutely no excuse for several times during this sequence, one of the characters to stand directly in front of the other, blocking * both sides of the view. This kind of basic staging question is baffling and baffling. Did no one see any of these sequences?
Then there is the dialogue. Usually, when you are offered options in a conversation, one or two will progress the story, while the others are optional flavor text that will end up going back to the initial choice. Unfortunately, it makes no sense for the game to really understand what you have and what you haven’t said, which causes successive lines to be read in very different tones and the information to be repeated as if it were new.
And frankly, I’m amazed at all of that. Entering Cyberpunk 2077, I had expected a broad and deeply compelling experience for the developer’s genealogy and its long development cycle. I thought all this overwork would result in a game that contrasted with his excellence: so good that all his work would feel almost justified, though I regretted the situations in which it translated. But all those people were convinced that this was Game of the Year or the generation or even the decade they were wrong. It’s just one more game, albeit awesome. And we, as a culture, really need to be okay with that, because great games are just things they enjoy and not what underpins their identity. The problem exists because players want games as large and complex as possible, and management pushes their employees to their limits and beyond to force them.
Johnny Silverhand wouldn’t like it. We shouldn’t do that either.