Reflecting on the Cyberpunk 2077 Saga
By: Ebtihej Sdiri
Tags: Gaming, Cyberpunk, Videogames, Features, Technology

Reflecting on the Cyberpunk 2077 Saga

CD Projekt Red, the game industry’s “rebels” have now become pariahs. Where will they go from here?

Imagine for a second you’re sitting at home, watching Blade Runner 2049. You have been waiting for years for the sequel to the widely acclaimed first opus. You press start only to realize the visuals look awkwardly raw as if no post-production had been done whatsoever. The sound mixing is horrible, the special effects are an atrocity, everything about them feels a little undercooked. Horrified you stop the movie, wondering what the hell happened. Now imagine that you just paid $60 for this monstrosity, you feel cheated, you feel angry — and that’s exactly how the poor souls who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 on last-generation consoles (PS4 and Xbox One) feel.

The console version of the game currently available on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One has been lambasted for its numerous bugs and glitches along with general poor performance on the systems. The visuals belong to the PS3 era and the game is so riddled with glitches that it’s almost unplayable. Some are so bad that they have become memes in their own right. One Reddit user found a glitch that had his character standing straight up and pantsless while riding a motorcycle. Cars of the future are reduced to two-dimensional squares when viewed from a distance. Speaking of cars: They tend to appear on top of characters unexpectedly or fall off the map entirely.

Now we are learning that Cyberpunk saves will become corrupted and unrecoverable if they reach 8MB in size. The size of a PS2 memory card. A 20-year-old system. What it means is that if you craft a lot of stuff, you risk wasting tens of hours of play — and CDPR’s only answer has been to issue a statement warning players that “the save file size limit might be increased in one of the future patches, but the corrupted files will remain that way.” Thanks, CDPR, really helpful of you.

The situation is so bad that — in an unprecedented move — CDPR decided to offer full refunds to all console players who were dissatisfied with Cyberpunk 2077. Problem is, they did so without coordinating with Sony and Microsoft — and in retaliation, Sony delisted the game from the Playstation Store. Then, in a burst of anger, the CD Project Red boss was caught liking tweets criticizing Sony for removing Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation Store.

Since the release, journalists uncovered that CDPR’s management deliberately lied to both consumers and journalists, trying to hide how poorly the game ran on last-gen systems. They even lied to their investors, telling them that the game was running surprisingly well on last-gen consoles. Needless to say, the investors are furious and consequently, some of them are preparing to take legal actions against CD Projekt Red for lying about Cyberpunk 2077’s issues.

At this point, the story of Cyberpunk’s launch has become a TV Novella.

If the game is a commercial success, it’s only because it sold more than 8 million pre-orders. However, because of the last-gen disaster, CD Projekt’s stock experienced a steady decline in December that has wiped out over a billion dollars of gains. While No Man’s Sky used to be the poster child for a game whose hype got totally out of control, Cyberpunk has managed to set a new gold standard for unfulfilled promises.

To be fair, not everything is bad about Cyberpunk. The story is compelling, the characters have depth, and the lore is pretty fantastic. However, Cyberpunk 2077 is supposed to be a video game, not a movie. Unfortunately, the hard truth is that even after patches and fixes, I don’t think Cyberpunk will ever become a “great” game, let alone a masterpiece.

Some reviewers have argued that Cyberpunk is a “great” game on PC and I can’t say that I agree with them. A review that doesn’t mention at least some of the design issues isn’t a review, it’s nothing more than a propaganda pamphlet.