Read this before buying ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ on PS4 or Xbox One

At this point, we have seen enough. We are three days away from the launch of Cybperunk 2077, a sprawling open-world sci-fi epic that’s honestly one of the most technically impressive games I’ve seen on my high-end PC. On other machines, however? Not that much. These three days have been an endless parade of memes and disappointment in every corner of the Internet, and it seems that there is only one real option here: if you plan to buy. Cyberpunk 2077 on the base model PS4 or Xbox One, for yourself or as a gift, please reconsider. Or at least wait.

For a deeper dive into just how broken this is, I’d recommend Eurogamer. Long story short: resolution ranges from 720-900p, frame rate can drop to 20 when driving, textures take forever to appear, and even beyond that, the thing can be incredibly buggy, with NPCs spawning. in T-poses and all kinds of other glitches. The thing has become a magnet for memes in recent days, and for good reason.

Even on Xbox Series X and PS5, I guarantee extreme caution. People have been able to play the game on these consoles, but they are playing a backward compatible version of Xbox One and PS4. That means there are still tons of general graphical glitches and issues, even with increased hardware power. Our own Paul Tassi showed the difference between the high-end PC version and the Xbox Series X version, and it’s not pretty:

If you head to the subreddit for the game, there is a lot of anger and disappointment – the prevailing sentiment is that this is an unfinished game.

This may not be the case forever – in the case of the Xbox Series X and PS5, this game is likely to come much closer to high-end PC parity when CD Projekt Red releases the version of the game intended to run on those machines (no date yet). And even on Xbox One and PS4, we’re likely to see improvements over time – CD Projekt Red has said it will release a patch for PS4, but it doesn’t seem likely to address many of these concerns. There will be more, but at this point, I won’t believe it until I see it.

But that is then, and it remains speculative. At this time, there is nothing to indicate that this game should have been released for Xbox One or PS4, and that is a major lack of confidence on the part of the developer. There’s an argument that this is just a game built for powerful PCs at heart, and you shouldn’t be playing on older hardware. But the game costs $ 60 on Xbox One and PS4, just like on Steam. And the people who paid that money for this game are getting an unacceptable experience.

It’s a disappointing punctuation mark in what has been a long, long history. But for now, it just isn’t worth using the latest generation hardware.