From Twitter: Cyberpunk 2077 refunds being offered by both XBox and Playstation
From Twitter:
Cyberpunk 2077: To ensure that every player can get the experience they expect on Xbox, we will be expanding our existing refund policy to offer full refunds to anyone who purchased Cyberpunk 2077 digitally from the Microsoft Store, until further notice. https://t.co/04TcniwVzy
— Xbox Support (@XboxSupport) December 18, 2020
SIE strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased Cyberpunk 2077 via PlayStation Store and want a refund. Please visit the following link to initiate the refund: https://t.co/DEZlC0LmUG.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) December 18, 2020
(Featured image is “1951 … Alistar Sim as Ebeneezer Scrooge!” by x-ray delta one and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
From Muppet History:
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I take it you played on the PC and had a good experience, Jaybird?Report
I am having good experiences with the PC, yes. But I went out of my way to build a machine that was capable of playing games like Cyberpunk.
I’m reminded of the Arkham Knight experience for PS4/PC… at launch, the PC version was unplayable. The PS4 version, however, was optimized.
It makes perfect sense for the PS4 players in that scenario to say “hey, I’m delighted with my experience” and for PC players to say “WHAT THE HELL THIS GAME DOESN’T EVEN WORK”.
The PS4 (and Xbox, apparently) players got baited and switched something hard.
Like, here’s how bad it is: Both Playstation and Xbox are *OFFERING REFUNDS*.Report
Yeah, I did some surfing and saw that. I just wondered about your own experience, since you were so excited about this game.
It’s strange to me that I really never heard of the Cyberpunk RPG, even though I’ve done tabletop RPG forever, and am quite fond of Shadowrun, for instance.
Reading up on it, it seems the game is more suited to our playstyle than Shadowrun is.Report
Unlike me, who tried to play on the PC and the game literally wouldn’t start. Wouldn’t even get to the splash screen, crashed straight out. No solution.
It’s just an amazingly rushed game. Which is amazing, considering how delayed it was.
It’s funny you mention Arkham Knight, because I was a third through that game on the PC before I became aware anyone else was having problems. It always worked great for me, and I didn’t have a super-fast machine. Go figure.
Granted, a game not working well on _consoles_ is kinda amazing. That is almost the premise of a console, it’s supposed to be extremely standardized. Which would mean…everyone is having a bad experience? Or…what?
At some point the game development industry needs to pause and do a hard look at itself, and try to figure out why it’s failing to do the basics of ‘producing a functioning product’.
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And there is an obvious reason : At some point, we started caring about graphics so much that is _all_ we care about, so games have to be calibrated up to the highest graphics. Which gives them not much development time, because they are trying to hit a moving target.
It’s not just bugs that this sort of development compression causes.
I mean, I’ve been reading things about how the open world in this game is actually incredibly shallow due to the game constantly cleaning things up, with videos of people looking away from stopped cars and the cars vanishing during a 360 pan. Sometimes you can literally catch them disappearing if you turn fast enough.
This is presumably due to lack of memory, but this is…very bad programming. For example, in the Fallout series, cells would reset if you were away, to keep the game remembering everything. But it took you not going there for a bit. Not…because you turned around.
That’s not a bug, although it probably is in _response_ to a bug, namely, the game used too much memory, so they set ‘cull unused asserts’ up to max. ‘Remove assets that are unused for .1 seconds’ So it works, but…is not a well-built game.
Same with Fallout 76. The game wasn’t exactly buggy (Well, it replicated some FO4 bugs that people couldn’t fix due to lack of mods), but it was very very not finished. It would just keep scaling things back it couldn’t handle…I’ve seen a review of that where someone’s entire team is fighting a vertibird _he can’t see_ because the game hasn’t bothered to render it because it was too far away….because it was trying to cut back on load.
How to _solve_ this problem, I don’t know. Fundamentally, the problem is what gamers prioritize. They need to stop caring about extreme photorealistic rendering of blades of grass. And start caring about… well-built games.Report
Yeah, I’m hoping that the modders can turn this game into something that is not only playable but enjoyable by more people that just those who happen to fall precisely within a few degrees of my demographic.
But this doesn’t seem to be a game that is built to be played multiple times.
I mean, I beat Arkham Knight twice, but that was in two different playthroughs that were five years apart.
In this very moment, I see myself as likely to beat this game, sigh happily, and put it down and uninstall it and I will play it again in…
2023? 2024? After all the DLC is not only out but on sale, and not only on sale, but on one of the 33% off sales?Report
The professionals that are turning out software disasters all need to be nervous after watching what’s happened with Adobe Flash. Adobe gave up the IP, said that anyone who wanted to write a player could. In less than a year there’s an open-source player with, IIRC, about 80% of the functionality and none of the security problems.Report
We can’t get to GPT-5 quickly enough.Report
I find it very annoying that no one seems willing to use open source game engines and develop them.
Or not just engines…I mean, the AI driving in Cyberpunk 2077 is supposedly really bad, to the point of not existing, and if you stop your car they just…stop behind you. In fact, it’s so bad you’re the only one who is allowed to drive a bike, because it doesn’t work at all for bikes. At least, that’s the rumor…someone correct me if they see another bike driving around on the roads.
This sort of AI is a solved problem. Like, for two decades. Hell, _actual_ computer-controlled cars can drive better!
It’s just all proprietary.
Games steadfastly refuse to have any sort of open source libraries that people can just use and develop, and honestly, the amount of proprietary libraries is fairly low also, mostly because there’s not a way to plug them in. If you license a graphics engine, you might get a few things, but not much.
Almost every game, or at least every game _studio_, is reinventing the wheel, and then trying to make their own wheel be able to do things other wheels can do.
Why?
Oh, right, because the important thing is the supporting fifty-million ray tracings so perfect you can make out the reflections of the shadows of people’s individual hairs.Report
From the horse’s mouth:
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Wait…isn’t this all about the ethics of gaming journalists?Report
That’s for you to question once you see all of the gaming journalists that gave this game a passing grade, I guess.Report
I would be shocked to find industry journos not totally honest about the industry they work for.Report
Well, apparently there were no PS4 or XBox versions available for pre-release review. This might have been for a reason.Report
Saw this, yelled out loud:
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You want to know how bad off the situation is?
My mom called me and said that the news was reporting problems with a game and was that the game that I was talking about?Report
Geeze guys. I’ve got a “decent” game rig and the game runs ok to good. I’m not maxed out on graphics though. That’s the first thing I turn down. I’ve only had a few glitches and stutters. It’s a decent game. It certainly can be better and I expect it will, but it is, in general, worth the price I paid. It’s not “Witcher 3” but I didn’t expect it to be that good anyway.
Did the folks complaining REALLYL check out their specs vs the published minimum? I did…Hell may computer is > 5 years old.Report
From what I understand, Steam has not significantly updated its refund policies.
But, boy howdy, Sony and Microsoft sure as hell have.Report
Golly!
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