CD Projekt Exec Suggests Cyberpunk 2077 Launch Not That Bad, Actually, Dunking 'Became a Cool Thing'

I mean… it was literally broken for a lot of users, crashed constantly, and was nearly unplayable on the last gen systems, but okay. Sure.

Ooh man, the title of this article is like opening Pandora's Box. I'm sure the comments will be reserved and thoughtful 😂

It was definitely cool to hate on the game, but probably was well deserved. As I recall in their leadup to launch, when other games would have issues and get caught in the games media's crosshairs, CDPR loved to come out and claim they would never do such a horrible thing. Especially if you're going to flex on other studios like that, best be ready for the backlash when you screw up.

I still play an un updated version on the Xbox one S just to make glitch content. Its so funny most of the time, and unplayable.

The nerve of these guys to now start gaslighting what actually happened.

“Crashing every 45 minutes was a feature to remind players to take a break to avoid eye strain or something”

Michał Platkow-Gilewski

It was so bad that the PS4 version was de-listed from the PSN store for months. That is not something that happens frequently, and/or unless a game is in a damn near unplayable state. Has CDPR fixed the game? Absolutely. Is it in a significantly better state than it was at release? Absolutely. Is this guy re-writing history? Absolutely.

Was rather broken for me on PC..

Bought it on Series X after all the updates. So i have to take everyone’s word that it was in bad bad shape. From all i seen and read online it looked borderline unplayable. It runs great now and is a great game. Not sure when i will get around to buying the DLC. But i do want to play it. The game is still a little weird in the menu’s for me and could use even more polish. But it seems like it has came back from the dead from what i can see.

"The game came out broken, but we still sold heaps and made a big profit, which was a cool moment"

The best thing I can say about the rocky release is that I picked up the PS4 disc a few weeks after launch for just a few dollars and held onto it until the free PS5 upgrade was release and then sold it for like $25 and made money off the deal. The only other game I’ve seen have a crashing resale value at launch followed shortly by a surge in value was No Man’s Sky.

Yeah, lie to your fanbase and investors for over a year about the state of production and quality of your "finished," product In order to retain investor confidence and consumer preorders sales. Totally a great way to launch. Oh no biggie you lost much of your core talent due to oppressive working conditions and forcing them to lie for you.

So Glad it worked and in hindsight, rather than learn anything about it, you can have a good laugh.

👍👍👍 Real quality human beings right there.

Willies were sticking out of trousers for like 3 months. Come on.

lol ok. They're lucky it became a cool thing to say the game is "good now" because it's really just... not. Night City is pretty, but it's a nanometer deep

“Dunking”? Is this youth parlance?

I remember seeing the trailer of the game supposedly running on a PS4 Pro and thinking to myself "Something fishy is going on here." I canceled my pre-order there and lo and behold, the game launched in a very unflattering state.

I played it when it came to PS5 and honestly it's one of my favorite RPGs of all time now that its fixed. However to say the launch wasn't that bad is...not the words I would use to describe that launch. 😄

It was a poor launch on so many levels.
1. They didn't explain what was cut from E3 previews.
2. They didn't state there wasn't a PS5/Xbox Series native versions at launch.
3. Even being for PS4/Xbox One it ran like garbage, and should have been taken down from both digital game stores not just PSN.

This was a PC only game that was told to be made into a multiplatform game then the hype was place into the outer space. They tricked us all.

I played it all the way through on ps4 pro not a single problem 6 months after launch

@truerbluer Exactly, what a piece of crap. It was literally delisted from the Playstation store because of how bad it was.

This guy is VP for PR and probably never played it on PS4 or Xbox One. So this is pure propaganda. They hope that they can now „frame“ the story and let us forget what really happened. Don’t let them come through with it!

Maybe the game itself was good, but it was buried under so much technical baggage that it was not enjoyable. It was almost totally unplayable on last gen. Now that the technical issues have been mostly smoothed over and we've come to terms with the disparity between what was described vs what was sold, then yes, it's a good game. It's a good game now. It was absolutely not a good game then. This kind of revisionist spin is total nonsense and embarrassing to try and sell.

" even the first reviews were positive"

Wow, really? You mean the first reviews that were PC-only and handed out only to very select outlets while most were stonewalled until the launch embargo? And then the ones after that were bad? Huh, weird.

I played it on release on PS4 Pro. I experienced a couple of crashes and the odd minor glitch, nothing that really impacted greatly on my experience.

On the other hand, I fail to see how Redfall was was released in the state it was and also not removed from storefronts. It is the buggiest game I have ever played and freezes and hard crashes were numerous.

Discussions such as this need to be put into perspective. Each user experience is different, but for me, Redfall’s deficiencies are ten-fold those of Cyberpunk’s in its release state.

I played version 1.5 on PS5 and it kept crashing every few hours. Considering it was supposed to be a huge improvement compared to the release day, I can only imagine how broken it was

I'm actually quite happy it turned out as bad as it did on launch day because i picked up a spanky new copy for £10 as opposed to the £50 i would have dropped on it..i played it for a little bit (ps5) and i didnt think it was too bad but i stopped playing it until the native ps5 upgrade dropped and its now one of my favorite games. This guy is dillusional though and needs some proffesional help as i think he's had a break from reality..

They over-promised and under-delivered. The fact that you say there are aspects of the game you need to rebuild is never a good thing. This worries me that they haven’t learned at all and people are all too willing to let them slide now.

Let's see
–You lied to your fans about performance on console, even going as far sending a complete lie of a video of the game running on a PS4 like it was going to run regularly
–You told the media and YouTubers to keep quiet about what the game actually looked like, not only pretty much goaded them into lying to their owned audiences, but acting like everything was hunky dorey because you only allowed them to review the PC version, the least broken version at launch (which I'm pretty sure debuted with a 90 on Metacritic for some reason)
–Game was so broken at launch Sony removed it from their digital store for like 6 months and Microsoft had to put a warning on it for the Xbox One
–Got clowned on from being the saviors of the industry to another money hungry publisher who doesn't let their workers see their families

But yeah, rewrite that page in gaming history, I'm sure anyone with two braincells won't have anything to say about that

They gained a lot of respect for the Witcher series, which is imo the best series in the past two decades, but lost most of it after realising a half-baked 77thing on consoles. That's very stupid of them to mention their own greed again

"and even the first reviews were positive"
Yeah, because they only handled out review copies for the PC version instead of the absolutely broken console versions

The grudge some people have for CDPR is as if the dev team personally broke into their house, smashed up the joint, pi**ed all over the furniture, dissed their Ma and kicked their pets.

This is almost as laughable as their pre-launch claim "it runs surprisingly well on consoles"

I mean, aside from the performance issues which were a lot and like... not eve subtle, and the bugs that were plenty and very game-breaking... It wasn't terrible. But it also wasn't what they promised.

I think most people don't understand the real issue with Cyberpunk 2077, now that the bugs are fixed and the performance is stable... it's a good game. And for someone like me who loves the genre, it's probably the only game that gives me that cyberpunk dystopian vibe. But it is by no means a ground breaking game. It has a masterpiece-level story and voice acting, the gunplay is enjoyable and that's about it.

They promised us the most complicated, the most detailed and alive RPG game yet, and what they delivered was a normal game. The notion of those promises takes the game from being great to good, because it doesn't match your expectations in any way other than Keanu Reeves and Cherami Leigh, who -by the way- carried the entire game on their backs.

He can f*** off all the way to the curb with this nonsense take.

So its cool to scam people now? What a load of bull

My experience at launch on a base PS4 was that it had just the one crash, though it did have lots of performance issues and some quest triggers not activating properly. So from my playthrough it didn't seem as bad as some reports made it out to be, though I won't defend the game either. It certainly shouldn't have released in that state.

I wonder if he covers his eyes and ear and goes 'la la can't see anything, nothing to see here!' when confronted with the millions of clips of how broken the game was not just at launch but even after a whole load of patches

@Mintie in this post-truth world, he'll just describe all those clips as 'fake news' from 'haters'

I'd be really happy if push square brings up this article and user comments next time they speak with cdpr

I don't ever think this should have released on PS4/Xbox One. As it stands now, it's an absolutely fantastic game and I can't wait for the DLC.

I get that people would be annoyed but some of the hatred towards CDPR is really excessive.

What a moron.

Yes the game was the bad. We all remember how busted it was.

This is the wrong way to handle it. I would have said “we launched the game in an unacceptable state. I am not happy about it to this day. But I will say that our team has done a great job turning the game around. And I feel confident today to recommend the current version of the game to anyone who is interested in it.”

Honesty. That’s the way he should have handled it.

@ApostateMage

I don’t have a grudge. I’d say they’ve done a great job fixing the game since launch.

But the game deserved to launch in a much better state. The more damning part was that they lied about the condition of the PS4 and Xbone versions of the game. Which were absolute train wrecks.

@__jamiie

They stated they were targeting those two systems.

But I agree, they should have been canceled since it’s clear now that CDPR knew how busted those versions were in mid 2020. They should have refunded the pre orders right then and announced that the PC version would be the only version shipping that winter. A PS5 and Series version would come later.

@OrtadragoonX Absolutely. They should have focussed on current gen and PC.

Aah put a sock in it! The game itself was allright, the foundation and gameplay were solid but it was a technical disaster on last gen consoles. Crashes, bugs, glitches and a horrible framerate to an extend that made it borderline close to unplayable. I loved the atmosphere of the city though, it made me play halfway through on PS4 Pro. When i got a PS5 i finished it and it was a relief to see it perform decent there. It's a good game, the story, the city's architecture and atmosphere, the characters and shooting mechanics were all fine. The AI of npc's were and still are questionable at least, leaning towards poor when compared to a RDR 2 or GTA 5 which are much older games. The setting basically saved it for me. That said, i'm looking forward to the expansion though. Hope it adds plenty improvements to the AI and shooting mechanics.

@Powerplay94 Honestly it's the only reason I went out and re-bought a copy of the game again because I was like I want play this anime.

@XOF Unfortunately for many people that love the cyberpunk genre we don't really get very many games in this scale so I feel sometimes im kind of chained to it. I haven't finished it and probably won't because I have seen and hated the endings and don't get me started on the one-sided romances. But hoping that Phantom gives it what it needs.

@pharos_haven I get what you mean, but for me the only thing about the story that sucks is how little input we have on it. (Which isn't always bad, it's just that we were promised otherwise and it lowers the role-playing side of things). But yeah, I know what you feel. It's pretty much the only open world cyberpunk game and I'm really sad that it falls short on the open world part. Like you, I got my fingers crossed for Phantom Liberty. I hear good stuff but how can we trust them again?

Guess it's just a waiting game now. Either the DLC or hope for the sequel to be what this should've been.

I played on launch day
The game was full of big bugs
I turned off the game

@ApostateMage its gotten a bit out of hand. Its not a new thing though with cdpr as everybody seems to forget that the witcher 1,2 and 3 were all a mess on their respective launch days and they never got this level of flack (granted it was a broken game on ps4). Articles like this provide information thats relevant to somebody maybe but they also try to put out the smoldering embers with a can of petrol.

This is how you know that they didn't learn their lesson. Well.. no day 1 buy from CD projekt games for me if this is the attitude they're going to have.

Not that bad? It was unplayable on last gen probably still is yet they still released on that gen.

Played it on PS5 at launch so only experienced a handful of random crashes. Played it all the way through and then played it again when PS5 version came out to get the platinum. The PS5 version is a great game but the original launch made a permanent stain. Whenever I talk to someone who hasn’t played it, they have. Such negative bias toward it from what they heard about from launch.

@pharos_haven the Anime is awesome, that’s what got me to to back and get the platinum

@tangyzesty well, tbh it was because Sony doesn't allow refunds and CDPR wanted to refund everyone that made the claim.

I guess I am the only one that didn't have issues at launch. I saw a ton of glitch compilations, but I only had 1 or two crashes and a few open world style issues with AI pathfinding or bugged quests.

I definitely feel like this is a bit of revisionist history. On the one hand, the launch was received pretty horribly, but on the other hand it was totally cool to hate on the game. People that had no interest in the game or genre were coming out of the woodworks.