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Cyberpunk 2077 Bugs Hit CD Projekt (bloomberg.com) 148

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Numerous glitches reported by players as the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 game went live robbed creator CD Projekt of a stock surge on the back of encouraging advance-order sales figures. Poland's biggest computer-games studio sold more than eight million copies of the futuristic title prior to its official release, mainly using higher-margin digital distribution. Excitement around Wednesday's launch saw player numbers peak at more than one million, the most ever for a premier night on the Steam platform, and an industry record for a single-player production. Less positively, in excess of 17,000 Steam users gave Cyberpunk a rating of just 71%, with their complaints of bugs in the game pushing CD Projekt's shares as much as 7.5% lower.

Before the release, Cyberpunk's average rating was 91% on Metacritic, a website that aggregated journalists reviews. That less-than-perfect verdict also weighed on the stock earlier this week, paring its gains of almost 60% in 2020 as of last Friday. The stakes are high for CD Projekt as, after eight years of developing Cyberpunk, the game is the studio's only new franchise. The company said Thursday it's already working on fixes and is confident they will be resolved and that it wants to publish initial sales data before Christmas.
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Cyberpunk 2077 Bugs Hit CD Projekt More

Cyberpunk 2077 Bugs Hit CD Projekt

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  • Better give it a few more months then (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:07AM (#60815654)

    Not that this is really any surprise. Obviously this should have been delayed further, but "management" also obviously did not have the stones for that. A 71% Steam rating means many people got really, really pissed off and that also means the defects cannot be repaired fast.

    I think I will have a look again in April 2021 or so.

    • Re:Better give it a few more months then (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:40AM (#60815798) Homepage Journal

      There seems to be a severe lack of good project planners in the games industry. They grind away for 8 years, then crunch as it comes up to the Christmas release date, and still release a buggy mess. And they are not the only ones doing it.

      • All software development is like this. From operating systems to games.

        • This is actually the problem agile addresses. When release comes, you simply create a gold master with all the working features and leave the rest for digital delivery.

          Waterfall assumes your schedule is correct. Agile assumes your schedule was set by rolling dice.

          • Re: Better give it a few more months then (Score:5, Informative)

            by crgrace ( 220738 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:05PM (#60816080)

            And yet Agile methodologies still result in a steaming pile. And worse, you require your customers to beta test them (and often ignore their complaints).

            It makes one think the problem isn't really the development methodology.

            • Agreed. There's no magical organizational strategy that can turn totally innacurate estimates into a quality product shipped on time.

            • then wait 1-3 years for a new release that *might* fix the problem.

          • That's how it's supposed to work. In reality, Agile allows for scope creep because "Feature X can get added by release", but adding it introduces bugs that there is no time to fix, or takes longer than you think, and removing it makes someone sad and/or breaks other things.

          • Agile creates problems by allowing devs to set the schedule. Sorry about the bug, but the bug sprint is not for several cycles as we're busy rejiggering the framework again because that's where all interesting stuff is! Agile really only works if you have continuous delivery - ie, a web site. Even then there is so much uselessness happening, the UI changes for no reason, confusing the customer, just because the UI devs wanted something to do in the sprint. For actual shipping products that have customer

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

        Part of the problem is that when you have games that are planned that care in advance, there's no real way to know what ways the games industry will move. If they really did start work in 2012, they wouldn't have planned for things like ray tracing or known the capabilities of the next gen consoles. They may have been able to guess, but the problem AAA games hit is that what's acceptable for a "AAA title" is pretty much guaranteed to move in unpredictable ways, and that means that they're always playing cat

      • Is it that? Or is it pressure to meet certain deadlines by those that control the coffers?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yes, that is my impression as well. I have now had a series of disappointments. There are still good games coming out and there are mostly indy developers that carefully go through a long early access phase to make sure others have looked at things as well. Some even make that a major part of the design process. But working for 8 years and still messing it up is plain simple incompetence of the decision makers. They should have postponed this to Christmas 2021, no matter what.

      • to be a good enough project manager. The problem is that every time you make a game you're making something that's more or less never existed before. Sure, you've got a starting point, some expertise, etc, etc.

        Just the graphics programming alone changes drastically when you change styles like that (e.g. from Eastern Europe midlevel to cyber punk) and then you've got all the complexities of game design, quest design, basic game mechanics, etc, etc.

        If you want to see what a game's like when it's proje
    • it's a huge, complex RPG. These bugs are inevitable. Same thing happened with Witchers 1, 2 & 3. They'll patch 'em. You can wait if you want (I always do) but their games have a lot of replay value so it's not like you're out all that much by playing at launch and dealing with the bugs. It just means less bugs on your 2nd, 3rd or 4th play through.

  • shocked pikachu (Score:4, Informative)

    by known_coward_69 ( 4151743 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:08AM (#60815658)

    people sent death threats when the game is delayed and are now complaining about bugs. even then most have been fixed with day 0 patches.

    people should just wait a year or so to play these games if they hate bugs this much

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, quite a few people are stupid and not only want the cake and eat it, they also want it to be exactly as they fantasized it would be. Sure, the advertizing industry does a lot to trigger that behavior, but in the end anybody that lets themselves be manipulated in this way did it too themselves.

      That said, I will do a steam refund now, I hope that sends a clear message assuming a lot of others do it too. FYI, I have now several times gotten a steam refund without any problem for a pre-ordered game that o

    • "People" isn't one person. People having different reactions to the same stimuli is not hypocrisy. The individuals who are complaining about bugs are unlikely to be the same wonderful humans who sent death threats because a video game was delayed.

      My annoyance over the delays is simply that they didn't pick a realistic launch date to begin with. I'm perfectly fine with a game being released when its well and truly done. What I don't appreciate are companies that don't know how to determine that or properly h

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Different people care about different things. Shocking, I know.

    • people should just wait a year or so to play these games if they hate bugs this much

      It's a single-player game, right? So, waiting is an option.

      Multi-player games really only get one chance. Joining after everybody else has been practicing for a year is no fun, and if the game is buggy at release then after a year it's a ghost town.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        people should just wait a year or so to play these games if they hate bugs this much

        It's a single-player game, right? So, waiting is an option.

        Multi-player games really only get one chance. Joining after everybody else has been practicing for a year is no fun, and if the game is buggy at release then after a year it's a ghost town.

        This is probably also the reason why so many MMORPGs failed a while ago. Anyways, I just refunded my copy of Cyberpunk 2077. Will look again mid of next year or so. If the STEAM user reviews say it is fixed and works well, I will buy it again.

      • Joining after everybody else has been practicing for a year is no fun,

        Depends on the game. Despite the whinging about it from some, Skill-based Matchmaking [slashdot.org] has solved this in games that still have a reasonably broad player base. You're matched against players who are performing similarly to you. The upside is that you won't get repeatedly stomped, even as a noob. The downside (if you even view it as one) is that you'll be consistently playing against players who are at your level, so you're likely to win and lose with similar frequency.

        Anecdotally, I recently picked up an F

  • But I kind of got turned off with the reports of dildos strewn all over the city.

    • Come on, man. Everyone knows dildos are more important that bug squashing!

    • I was laughing so hard at the stream by Outside Xbox where the boobs clipped through the clothes, and her fully clothed character appeared nude in the mirror (bug, or goofy cyberpunk logic?). The developer was busy blocking the screen at times.

      Though I can't figure out the logic behind dildos on the street. I doubt you'll find dildos ending up on the sidewalk if you do a tour of any real life slum. It feels more like an intentional move to force the game into an adults-only mindset, or to annoy puritanica

  • people complaining about bugs and the people who sent death threats every time CD Project Red delayed the game a bit longer to fix said bugs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      I wonder if "people" are not monolithic and care about different things.

      • The implication isn't about the people, but cause and effect. Death threats caused the company to release the game with bugs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Anonymous death threats on the internet are a norm if you're even marginally famous, because internet is an amplifier for most extreme voices among many other things. You take those death threats just like you take the doomsayer screaming in the street that you're going to die. You ignore and go on with your day as if you never met him/her.

          Even I got a few death threats on the internet, and I'm a nobody.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DRJlaw ( 946416 )

      I wonder if there's a correlation between... people complaining about bugs and the people who sent death threats every time CD Project Red delayed the game a bit longer to fix said bugs.

      And if that Vann diagram has a small overlap, what?

      If the guy building someone's house is a year late and still screwing it up, you don't question the homeowner's sanity for wanting contradictory things, you question the competence of the builder.

  • With guaranteed sales in the form of pre-orders applying artificial pressure to get turds out the door before the buffing machine is even fired up why would a studio put effort into a high quality release.

    I look forward to playing this game. I think I'll buy it in a month or two. Honestly all those people who talk about buggy games, I don't know what they are on about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Pre-order is not a problem, at least on STEAM. You can get a refund and I have gotten one for several games now that were released unfinished or that did seriously over-promise.

      • Pre-order is not a problem, at least on STEAM

        Your ability to get a refund or not has nothing to do with the problem that pre-orders present. I'm talking here about motivation of developers not consumer rights of customers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Pre-order is not a problem, at least on STEAM

          Your ability to get a refund or not has nothing to do with the problem that pre-orders present. I'm talking here about motivation of developers not consumer rights of customers.

          So you think if they know that people can get refunds for a pre-order after release that has no impact on the motivation of developers? That one you need to explain to me.

      • > Pre-order is not a problem, at least on STEAM. You can get a refund.

        Usually it isn't a problem but there have been problems in the past. The Steam version of MS FS 2020 had a wrapper which downloaded yet-another-installer. It took so freaking long to download that people would have the normal Steam 2 hour return window "expire".

        Steam Users Are Asking For An Extended Refund Timer For Microsoft Flight Simulator [thegamer.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          > Pre-order is not a problem, at least on STEAM. You can get a refund.

          Usually it isn't a problem but there have been problems in the past. The Steam version of MS FS 2020 had a wrapper which downloaded yet-another-installer. It took so freaking long to download that people would have the normal Steam 2 hour return window "expire".

          Steam Users Are Asking For An Extended Refund Timer For Microsoft Flight Simulator [thegamer.com]

          It does depend a bit. But for botched releases, Steam is a lot more lenient on refunds. I have gotten games refunded that I had played for around 8 hours. Of course they will not refund a game where you have used most of the standard play-time. Also, you can just read user reviews before you play it at all and refund ad zero play time.

  • Works fine on my machine Â\_(ãf)_/Â (Score:3)

    by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:34AM (#60815766)

    Running on an ancient Ivy Bridge machine with a GTX 1070, it runs reasonably well at 1440p and I've only noticed one minor graphical glitch with the foliage glitching. It's very atmospheric and I'm enjoying the 80s cyberpunk vibes but I'm only a couple of hours in so I can't really judge the whole game but so far on the story or gameplay but feels pretty good so far.

    • This has been my experience so far as well. I had to do some tuning, but the game is running overall pretty well for me at 4k with an RTX 3090. I have pretty good specs, but mainly I wanted to bring up how surprisingly non buggy the game has been for me so far on the first day. I found my car to be hovering slightly above the ground and the game crashed on me after just one of many deaths... Honestly, I'm pretty shocked this is all I've encountered so far. Half Life 2 was far worse for me a month after rel

    • Same. Running on Coffee Lake and a GTX 1060. Only glitch I've had in ~4 hrs of gameplay is one person's thighs going totally invisible in the bar at the very beginning of the game. Otherwise its been a breeze with bugs so far.

  • Isn't that a very long time in AAA game development? With tech changing so fast, I wonder how the studio kept up. Would they have to keep optimizing/tweaking as hardware gets faster and faster as the years go by?

    • It's probably the game making the heaviest use of ray tracing to date, which just came out of tech demo status this year. Nothing but newer top-end cards from the last year or so support it. So they are on the bleeding edge, tech-wise. I'm guessing that has a lot to do with the graphical glitches and stuttering and 20 FPS that people are seeing on the PS4 version. That system was struggling to run games from 5 years ago.

    • I mean, it depends on what you mean by tech. The Unreal Engine has been on v4 for 15 years (they just released v5 this year in May). While graphics cycles a lot faster, there are a lot of content that moves fairly slowly. For instance, scriptwriting, world designing, mocap/voice capture all are technology agnostic. A lot of the animations are pretty portable too (although sometimes face technologies go through revolutions). Physics engines have represented rigid bodies, cloth and hair the same way to c

    • Bethesda (the game studio) takes maybe 5 serious years on a game. But there is also time spent before then working on concept and such. Ie, work started on Fallout 4 as soon as Fallout 3 DLCs were finished (2008ish until 2015). But a lot of that work doesn't care about the technology - the story, quest structures, concept drawings, etc. You can update the engine without having to start everything else from scratch.

      5 years isn't that long really. Plus only a minority of players want the highest end hard

  • When NPCs, don't do much but diss you and say "why did you press the F button" effectively... its not finished.
  • Imagine if GM stock dropped that much because Car and Driver wasn't huge on the updates to the latest Silverado, while the other car magazines gave it strong ratings?

  • Attacks on Cyberpunk 2077 are political... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:59AM (#60815866)
    Sure, there are bugs, clunky design elements... and we should expect better. However, make no mistake - attacks Cyberpunk 2077 and its studio are mainly motivated by politics. They refused to bend the knee and turn the game into woke propaganda and are now being attacked for that. This is just another round of GG, the barbarians are at the gates of gaming again, so go buy a copy of Cyberpunk 2077 now or in the future there will only exist games like The Woke of Us 2.

    • Re:Attacks on Cyberpunk 2077 are political... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @11:14AM (#60815910)

      I just read a story on Finnish national broadcaster's web site that talked about Cyberpunk's problems being about "catering to taste of a fairly traditional and stereotypical normal players, that make a lot of noise about their preferences and are of the same opinion about things."

      SJW attacks are seeping into mainstream even outside anglosphere. They're where anglosphere was ten years ago, when "normal player" was beginning to get portrayed in vaguely negative light. As contrasted to anglosphere today, where same player is openly derided for being "hateful, racist, transphobic, alt-right" and all other buzzwords used in far left political spheres.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        During character creation in Cyberpunk you can have any character with any genitalia. Your choices, regardless of your character body type are none, vagina, and penis (in 3 different sizes). Similarly, you can choose no breasts, small breasts, and large breasts with or without nipples regardless of your character body type. The game literally allows you to create both pre and post transition character. Yet the game is being smeared as transphobic?! This makes no sense to me.

      • "catering to taste of a fairly traditional and stereotypical normal players, that make a lot of noise about their preferences and are of the same opinion about things."

        What, that the game needs to be "skill based", needs to be "harder", needs less "hand holding", until the fans have built their Homermobile of dark souls + dota with the masochism dial turned to 11? I don't know if that's the case, but that's how I read that, where do you get your SJW bullshit from? I took it to mean it's another Jedi Falle

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Translation across two different languages does not carry the exact connotations you're desperately trying to extract from it. It says what stated above.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      If you browse through STEAM reviews, that is not what you find. What you find there is a game that was released significantly too early and missing quite a bit of release-readiness.

  • No issues other then an small finale download hiccup at launch time For me.

  • Never pre-order games, and wait until a few patches have been released before buying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Actually, asking for a refund for a pre-ordered game works fine on STEAM. I have done it several times now and always got the refund.

      • My method works better. No need to ask for a refund if I haven't bought it yet.

        Waiting also has the benefit of getting the game at a discount.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          In the end, it is a matter of personal preference. I am just pointing out that the pre-order does not lock you into getting it. At least not on STEAM.

    • My only exception would be if pre-ordering gives a significant discount or pre-ordering gives you access to the game in its current state, meaning the major gameplay mechanics are pretty much in place.

  • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @11:39AM (#60815986) Homepage

    Guys:

    The game won't disappear if you don't play it until, say, Christmas.

    Let it settle, the bugs get fixed, the price come down, etc.

    I absolutely do not understand the day-1 obsession with EVERYTHING from games to phones to online services.

    Let it settle, buy it later. It's not going anywhere.

    • I have a strategy to enjoy almost every game without the frustration and disappointment of early adopters. I always wait a year or two before buying games, sometimes more. Then I only buy the ones that hold onto a good reputation for the duration.

      This way I avoid bugs and launch issues. I can run the games on hardware that may not be cutting edge. Sometimes publishers have even patched away their dumbest anti-consumer nonsense at that point. Above all, this allows me to spend my time on games that are wel

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        But you miss out on exploiting all those delicious 0-days before they get patched. Unless they don't get patched, of course.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        I am literally in a "catch-up" phase lasting about 8 years or more.

        Bought myself a new gaming laptop (old gaming laptop was struggling, but was still GTA V-worthy).

        Now buying all the stuff that happened in-between, for cheap prices, and playing all the stuff I acquired over the years (freebies, giveaways, deals and just stupendous discounts) and never had the machine for.

        Discovery #1: Most modern games are shit.
        Discovery #2: Fucking launchers. Fuck the fuck off.
        Discovery #3: Always-on DRM.
        Discovery #4:

    • Or maybe game studios should go old-school and actually hire testers and QA engineers. Back in the days of consoles that used cartridges, studios had to do that or suffer the reputational and financial consequences of releasing crap. Hell, even on the PC side this was mostly the case before everyone had always-on high-speed internet. You had to actually QA the game before releasing because almost no one sends in those product registration cards; without which you'd have no idea who even to tell that you

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

        During a talk that Game Developers Conference the speaker explained that if a AAA game is released during the month of December, it makes a huge amount more money than if they release at any other time of the year. The difference is so significant that releasing a high-budget any other month of the year is almost a guaranteed loss. So they do absolutely whatever it takes to get that game out in December. It's actually better to release an incomplete piece of garbage and fix it in January, rather than del

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ledow ( 319597 )

        Buggy games have always happened. Dunno what games-of-old you were playing but they had just as many bugs and problems, if not more.

    • Except Anthem

      By the time even half of the lag, rubber banding, and/or connectivity bugs were fixed ~3 months after release, most of the player base had quit due to lack of content, remaining bugs, etc that even after "the big DLC" was finally released like 4 months late (and was too little too late), nobody even cares about "Anthem 2.0" / "Anthem Next" which is supposedly still in development

      My point being - if they take too long to fix the game, nobody will care about the game / remember it / hype di

    • Don't forget the concept of pre-ordering a digitally-distributed product ahead of the reviews.

      Get it early before supplies run out!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      It's not just games. It's everything. I used to want everything right away. Not anymore. I got tired of the high prices, issues, etc. I'm OK to get older stuff that are cheaper, less buggy, etc. I still use lots of old working stuff like iPhone 6+ (4S retired last year), analog audio, VGA and DVI, speakers, a KVM from Y2K, old printers, HD monitors and dumb TV from late 2014, W7, over decade old PCs, etc.

  • "Cyberpunk's average rating was 91% on Metacritic, a website that aggregated journalists reviews. That less-than-perfect verdict also weighed on the stock earlier this week" - so anything other than 100% isn't worth playing?

  • I knew this game was going to be buggy AF the moment I saw Spiff had done a "perfectly balanced" video on it. I haven't even watched it yet, but that's pretty much always a bad sign for a game developer.

  • I have been waiting for this game and pre-ordered it and I played as soon as it came out on Steam yesterday.
    But I didn't get far, created a character and started playing the Corporate side, at almost the start you have to go visit your boss inside the building you started in and sit in a chair. And right there it crashes, I tried several times and adjust graphics and restarted computer, updated drives, but still crashes in the same spot.
    I have read of other reports or people getting the same problem. I have

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @06:30PM (#60817540)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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