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Cyberpunk 2077 was “better than it was received,” CDPR dev says
(www.pcgamesn.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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"(still better than day one Skyrim.)"
I'm glad you mentioned this because I almost never see anyone make the comparison, and skyrim didn't get nearly as much hate despite that fact. I remember if you were playing on PS3, walking into water would crash your game, and it was like this for the entire first year of the game on PS3. It also had a problem where save files that were too big would guarantee save file corruption. It was the definition of unplayable for lots of people.
Not saying cyberpunk is better than skyrim, just explaining how dire the launch for skyrim was, many people have forgotten just how rough around the edges skyrim was.
People tend to forget how broken games were at launch once they're no longer broken, which is why these days you only get broken games.
I think studios need to reassess what is a showstopping bug these days, because restricting it to hard blockers is no longer enough, but that may require people having a different perspective on these things.
But yeah "the game will eventually get into an endless crash loop if you play too much of it" is a pretty high bar to meet in terms of launching a broken game, and since I did play Skyrim on PS3 first, I may have a bettter memory of it than others.
I think there's definitely some room for interpretation here, some games suffer from basically being brigaded, and this OP actually points that out. Some games are cool to hate. CP2077 was one of those. Skyrim wasn't. People forgave it for a lot because it wasn't cool to hate.
Look at Horizon Zero Dawn. Same story. That game has incredible game play, some of the most creative and new ways to do it. But certain people - ahem - brigaded reviews and made it cool to hate. Which sucks because that game has an amazingly unique combat system. Really nailed an action based trapping and hunting instead of just overwhelming force or stealth.
Conversely people adored MGS5 and to be completely honest it was generic at best. Go figure it featured a hot naked woman with jiggle physics who couldn't speak and would die if she put clothes on.
Wait, did they brigade Zero Dawn? I mean, my impression of it is that they're cursed as a franchise with the worst possible timing, having released against genre-defining competitors two out of two times. If anything the impression I get from people is that it's the "deserved better" franchise.
You did get screwed if you tried to play Skyrim on the PS3. The hardware limitations on the console caused obvious instability in the game that I don't think they ever fully resolved.
But I don't think most people played Skyrim on PS3 so they aren't going to have that same experience. I know I didn't.
Except they released the game, in "enhanced" version, on the Switch, which is just old android phone hardware from several years back. The PS3 was totally capable of running it. The port simply failed - time constraint, investor pressures...doesn't matter. They chose to not make it better in the end when the hardware was perfectly capable of running the game.
The number of people that play a game on console is vastly underestimated by pc-primary gamers when previous titles by a developer were PC only. Skyrim on console was big. Big enough that they decided to port it to everything they could. You don't waste that kind of developer time and not expect a return...
Specifics matter in this case.
My quick review of specs shows the Switch having a 4GB of RAM to work with. Not a lot, but enough that even with the OS, you shouldn't run into too many problems.
The PS3 had 512MB of RAM. But actually, 256MB was dedicated to video, so it only had 256MB for the game itself. Oh, and the OS used a chunk of that. So, the PS3 has less than 256MB of RAM that is usable by the game. And that's where you are running into issues, especially in a game like Skyrim that is heavily reliant on memory for the amount of state the game tries to keep track of.
The point is a bit moot, in that TES got big on consoles as soon as Morrowind. Oblivion was already a console headliner.
I do think fewer people went with the PS3 version because people knew it was broken, just like Bayonetta or Red Dead Redemption. I would bet it still outsold the PC version at the time (that balance may have shifted over the years of re-releases and giveaways).
New Vegas and Fallout 3 were borderline unplayable on PS3 when they launched too.
Old timers keep warning people not to buy on launch. But every time a 'big' game comes along, there are a lot of people who ignore the warnings and do it anyway.
Witcher 3 was the same. Roach(horse) on a roof was a meme at one point. But CDPR wasn't as famous then, so far less people played that on launch.
Oh, and while we're at it, Witcher 3 isn't a true RPG either. Cyberpunk is quite a lot like Witcher 3 IMHO.
How quickly we forget that the Witcher superfans were absolutely livid about CDPR having dumbed down the potion system. I mean, I disagreed then and I disagree now, but "they dumbed it down for consoles" was a bit of a talking point at the time.
Now, the atrocious input lag and having to shimmy for five minutes to pick up a thing werre always bad, and they aren't even great after their passive-aggressive option to make it slightly better under objection.
Still, I do think Witcher 3 is the better game, I was just suprised to find out how many of its strong points do carry over to CP after hearing all the online rage at launch.
Mostly because Skyrim was still delivering a novel gaming experience of being able to explore for 100s to 1000s of hours without repetition. Despite the bugs it was first to market in an era where WoW and multiplayer was the premiere gaming experience. By the time Cyberpunk hit shelves the format was old news in the sense that we already had "open world explore this map for your entire jaded teenage years" maps for genres from viking to western to future dystopia.
Aside: There is a reason HBO could only reboot Westworld in 2016 and the concept was already stale again by 2018, it would have been unthinkably dumb to try it in, say, 2006.
Maybe without Fallout 4, Half-life 2±, Bioshock 3, and so on, the future dystopia thirst would have won out, but when you put all these options on the same steam library which one do people want to spend their time in?