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Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games of the year, was released last week. A dystopian game set around a city inspired by Blade Runner, it had all the ingredients for a perfect storm of hype: it’s been almost a decade; its creator, Warsaw’s CD Projekt Red, was behind one of the best games of the last decade (The Witcher 3, think Game of Thrones but grimmer); stars Keanu Reeves, who is just as popular with gamers as he is with everyone else. Eight million people had reserved and paid for the game before its release. But since December 10, everything has gone terribly wrong.
On launch day, the reviews were good, even great. Many critics praised Night City’s fictional realism, its striking architecture of skyscrapers and grimy alleys; They loved the invigorating gunplay, the sassy characters, and the neon swagger. Some expressed reservations about the game’s rather adolescent tone and its eagerness to objectify women’s bodies, neither of which came as a surprise to anyone who had been watching the game’s marketing.
But soon those first criticisms gave way to complaints from irritated players. The game they had waited for years was flawed, the code clearly unfinished. Strange glitches prevented people’s adventures in Night City, or the game crashed so frequently that it was barely playable. Several scenes were reported to have caused epileptic seizures, prompting the creator of the game to tweet: “We are working to add a separate warning in the game, in addition to the one that exists in the game. [end-user licence agreement]. Regarding a more permanent solution, the development team is currently exploring that and will implement it as soon as possible. “
On December 18, Sony withdrew the game from sale on its PlayStation digital store and offered refunds to anyone who had purchased it, an exceptionally rare event that I only remember happened once before, when the 2013 Ashes Cricket game crashed so fantastically. which was withdrawn from sale and never seen again. The current situation is costly for Sony and CD Projekt Red, which are now losing sales in the run-up to Christmas.
Technical errors and glitches are a reality for video games, the result of an intensely complicated development process involving hundreds of artists, programmers, and animators working together on a gigantic, rapidly updating program. In Cyberpunk 2077, these range from hilarious (a man standing on a street corner casually smoking a gun instead of a cigar, a pedestrian who falls to the ground and transmutes onto a patio table) to obnoxious (characters disappearing at the random or walking through the landscape) to infuriating (random crashes that interrupt your game or halt your progress, slowdown that makes a game unpleasant to look at). Cyberpunk suffers from all of them, even on the advanced PCs it was designed for, but they are especially bad on the less powerful Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
These issues were overlooked by early reviewers because CD Projekt only gave them access to the most stable PC version of the game before launch, and under a strict nondisclosure agreement that prohibited showing any actual footage. This attempt to control the message has backfired, making it appear that the developer was trying to hide the game’s problems and enraging gamers. Until it can be fixed, which will cost even more expensive months of development time, it will not be available for sale on PlayStation again.
The creators of Cyberpunk 2077 have issued a series of apologies and promises to get it right. It may seem impossible that such a prominent game, which has been in development for so long, with so much money behind it (the game studio owners I have spoken to estimate that it cost over £ 300 million), could be released in such a state. It certainly points to trouble at CD Projekt, whose staff must surely be exhausted after months of overtime during the pandemic; the game had already been delayed twice since April to allow more time for improvement.
But in the end, no doubt feeling pressure from its shareholders, CD Projekt released it in an unfinished state, betting that players would stick with it and that it could be fixed relatively quickly. Another delay would presumably have been even more costly, with millions already spent on television advertising and global marketing. The result is exceptionally high-profile controversy, bad will from players, and a defeat in the company’s stock price.
It is an indictment of the way the gaming industry currently operates that this sort of thing is happening more frequently. I’m thinking of Bethesda’s Fallout 76, a game about surviving with other players in the ruins of retro-futuristic America after nuclear war, which launched in October 2018 in a notoriously gruesome state. (Two years later, it has been improved and upgraded to a completely different game, pretty good.) I also have traumatic memories of trying to review Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, when the character I spent a week driving with and dressing up in glitzy clothes suddenly disappeared without a trace due to technical issues. It is now one of the most played and profitable games ever.
Thanks to online updates, in 2020, the launch of a video game is not your destiny. Despite these controversial first weeks, in another three to six months, Cyberpunk 2077 will probably fix itself, and it may even end in black numbers. But a fiasco like this leaves a mark on a developer’s reputation, even if it ends up working well. This year, people have been even more desperate than usual to escape reality, and paying £ 50 for a game that barely works feels like an extra kick in the stomach.
