Did CDPR waste the opportunity of having one of the best games this gen?

I think most of us agree that Witcher 3 is one of the best games last gen or at least one of the best RPG games last gen.

I have beaten Cyberpunk 2077 v1.23 for the first time on my pc and currently on the second run and I got to say this game is fascinating! The game hits the similar notes the Witcher 3 did for me. It had interesting characters, well written dialogues, solid gameplay and great story overall. However, since the game had a premature release, it's still littered with bugs as I have encountered a game crash, freeze and enemies pop outs (they can pop out of no where) yet that didn't stop me from liking it.

Sometimes, when I think about it I can see myself hating the game if I bought it at release as it had more bugs. I would also like it more if it was more polished and would quite possibly consider it one of the best games this gen.

But what about you? If the game didn't have major bugs and had its minor design issues fixed like difficulty scaling at release, how much of that will affect your opinion about it?

Cyberpunk 2077 last gen version should have been cancelled or pushed back, but its too soon to be written off.

CD Project Red will no doubt continue to patch the game plus there's a next gen update to come and probably some free dlc.

Cyberpunk 2077 has definitely underperformed even though its sold really well, but perception can very quickly turn as we've seen many times in the past.

I tried to play some of this recently. I love the setting, but everything else is such a mixed bag that I just don't see myself playing anymore of it. The nail in the coffin for me was getting a random call from some lady to go check out one of their random missions and I didn't want to... and then I got another... and another... and at that point I was done.

Personally I enjoyed cyberpunk a whole lot, it is one of my favorite recent games.

But I do suspect that the hype was too much for what the game really is even if we had avoided all of the technical issues.

There are flashes in Cyberpunk of the same high quality writing and storytelling found in the Witcher 3. However, it has a lot more issues than just the technical problems. It has core design problems and overall feels confused about whether it wants to be an RPG or a GTA-like.

The Witcher 3 was renowned for having just tons of amazing quests, and while there are some quests in Cyberpunk that rise pretty close to the level of the best quests in The Witcher 3, the ratio of quality to filler in Cyberpunk is a lot less favorable than W3.

I'll give Cyberpunk 2077 another go after all the possible bugs are fixed with patches which I believe will be either at the end of this year or sometime early next year. I enjoyed what I played of it, but the bugs were too much for me. I hope CDPR call pull a No Man Sky and fully fixed the game and even expand on it. I personally wasn't expecting another Witcher 3 because of how completely different the settings and gameplay are, but I was expecting CDPRs same excellence, especially since one would think they'd learn their lesson after what happened during Witcher 3's debut release and how it was filled with performance problems. I guess everyone can't be Guerilla Games. They went from a hit FPS series with Killzone, to a third person action game in Horizon Zero Dawn, and it turned out to be one of the best games to come out last generation.

Honestly I don't think this is particularly true at all. The Witcher 3 is positively littered with filler, it's just that Cyberpunk is very direct with presenting its gameplay to the player so that the deluge of quests can feel very overwhelming, and often very difficult to properly filter as to what is a proper quest and what's just part of a checklist.

Nobody had Geralts cell number to call and tell him about all the monster nests, bandits, and bounties he had to take care the moment he was in range of them is all.

Cyberpunk feels like a sequel to a game that never existed. Imo they should've started small with highly curated districts and semi-open world gameplay & unique skills. Make it similar to Deus Ex, then slowly branch out with sequels into a highly detailed open world.

Instead, they tried to push all of their ideas into a stupidly ambitious game that doesn't quite deliver on anything. I didn't hate the final game, but it felt like bleh soup, and they tried too hard to make something they clearly didn't have the experience to make.

We are talking about an impossible theoretical here. Would I have enjoyed the game a lot more if it was a lot better? Yah definitely. For the first time in ages I was in the minority of users that played Cyberpunk on PC from the initial release date and encountered very few bugs and the ones I did see were inconsequential and mostly cosmetic like weapon descriptions not fitting in the pop-out description box. Something about Cyberpunk hit all the right notes with me where I just enjoyed going around and doing sidequests, especially after I settled into a build that worked really well with my preferred playstyle. To me it was a solid 8/10 experience.

Bigger picture, they obviously fumbled what could have been a solid new entry in the rather small category of sci-fi RPGs. In fact they fumbled it so hard that I don't know if there is any way to course correct. When your game becomes a meme, a literal laughing stock anytime it is mentioned then it's hard to shake that reputation. The reasons for why the development and subsequent release were so disastrous are complex, but at the end of the day yah it's very sadly a wasted opportunity. As a lover of all things sci-fi it was exciting to see a big AAA RPG that wasn't more swords, dragons and skeletons. For me personally what I got wasn't bad, but it could have been so much better.

It was fine, they never made an fps before so i knew it was going to be lacking in that respect, the early gameplay footage confirmed that for me so i wasn't expecting it to win any awards anyway, and it ended up being exactly what i was expecting.
I didn't like the characters much or the story, the ending wasn't great and they didn't captialize on the potential of the world.
So from my point of view they didn't waste the opportunity, as harsh as it sounds they didn't really have it in the first place.

I enjoyed the game, 7/10.

As somebody who cashed in their first and only ever request for a refund for a digital purchase on a base PS4, I'd say CDPR actually hit the bullseye on an opportunity to show me just how deranged publishers can be when they see the dollar signs get too big for their wallets. Even if the game, y'know, functioned Cyberpunk would have had a pretty lackadaisical structure to it and slightly better than average combat, but given that it was more of an Impressionist slideshow than a video game certainly didn't help.

I like 2077 more than Witcher just because it's a shooter and not Witcher combat.

Thats not to say I only play shooters, quite the opposite. But that was what kept me away from Witcher 3. I never finished it despite knowing the story is amazing just because I didn't enjoy PLAYING it.

That said, I think 2077 ultimately falls victim to the same issue with me. The writing and story(from what I've played) is good but the gameplay mechanics are meh. Again, I can just tolerate them more because at least the combat is just point and shoot.

I think I just don't like CDPR games. They just can't seem to make the mechanics click for me. Which bums me out beyond belief.

I feel like I'll get around to playing both this and Witcher 3 at some point, but not sure when.

The reputation damage is permanent, or at least until they make a new game not associated with cyberpunk and then they have got to knock it out of the park. Cyberpunk, even if it pulls a no man’s sky, has so much bad rep at this point that I don’t think it’s gonna recover. Honestly, I’m surprised they didn’t do a mass effect andromeda with it and just drop support and walk away, at least then they would be out of the zeitgeist a while. Or, if they continued to support, just do themselves a favor and shut the hell up until they have a truly major update. Again like No Man’s Sky, hello games apologized, shut the fuck up and not make a peep until they got the big content updates.

I dunno, man, I think cyberpunk was ok, I didn’t hate it, but the damage is done, we can’t hop timelines. I think CDRP is better served moving on

@tartyron: People are too fickle for it to be permanent. Witcher 4 gets announced and more of even the games most vociferous critics will probably trip over themselves to preorder it.

This is a really good point. Witcher 3 had just as many if not more filler quests, but the presentation of them was so much better (you discover them on your own and have a choice of whether to even pay attention to them, versus getting a HUD pop-up, permanent "alert" notification on your quest list that makes it feel like you're missing something important, when you're really not) that people didn't notice as much.

I would argue though, that that presentation is just as much a part of the design as the quests themselves, and this shortcoming really damages Cyberpunk. In fact, it manages to do the impossible and make me retroactively like the map activities in Witcher 3 _less_ because of these similarities.

As far as OP's original question: in my opinion, without the glaring bugs, Cyberpunk would have been just as divisive. Hype is part of that, but separated from even the lofty promises of the marketing, there's just enough shortcomings and dealbreakers that affect some players more than others, that I doubt we'd ever get a consensus of "one of the best games of the generation."

(If I'm being maddeningly vague here, it's because I've talked about the specifics of this to death on these forums, lol)

I agree. All they have to say is something like: "Cyberpunk HA! HA! am I right? am I right? Well mistakes were made but now we're here to announce the continuing adventures of Geralt of Rivia with the Witcher 4!"

All those boos will suddenly become cheers.

It's truly wild that of all the things they could've borrowed from the Mass Effect series, it was Mass Effect 3's quest system that made its way into Cyberpunk. At least with that game, you had dozens if not hundreds of hours of prior context for who Shephard was to explain why everyone was in their DMs on every planet, but there's absolutely no context for V getting phone calls and text messages - sometimes at the same time, and sometimes from the same person - the moment they cross invisible borders into new territories as though s/he were at a John Wickian level of infamy when the story seems to make them out to be pretty two-bit at the beginning.

I never said Cyberpunk had more filler content by total volume than The Witcher 3, only that it comprises a higher percentage of the overall content. In the Witcher 3, The Points of Interest are the main filler. These are the bandits camps, monster nest, etc. that are all designated by a "?" icon on the map. Outside of those, you have the 50-70 hours story and dozens of hours of side quests and Witcher Contracts that are all high quality and well worth experiencing.

Cyberpunk has a much shorter story and fewer meaty side quests. A large portion of the overall content is comprised of the active crimes and gigs. Gigs are the most frustrating because you don't really know what you're going to get. Some of them are pretty good, on the level of the more interesting Witcher Contracts. However, many are just cyberpsycho fights or 2 minute combat encounters. There's no way to know until you do them.

I've had playthroughs of the Witcher 3 where I ignored every single Point of Interest that lasted like 115 hours. My 100% playthrough of Cyberpunk was about 105 hours and it felt like close to half of that taken up by active crimes and lame gigs. There is some great content in Cyberpunk, but the story is pretty short and far fewer meaty side quests than The Witcher 3. The only type of content that is about equal in volume between the two games is the low tier stuff.

I think gigs are all pretty comparable to the standard tier of Witcher 3 side quest. They put more effort in set dressing for them I think but at the end of the day I'm still gonna go fight a drowner or whatever.

If I am doing busy work a part of me prefers at least that it was a phone call that said hey go fuck these guys up.

That's just not true. At best, Gigs are the equivalent of Witcher Contracts, which are themselves the lowest tier of side quest in Witcher 3. Some Gigs rise to the quality of Witcher Contracts, most do not.

If you say so.

The primary difference to me is that Witcher 3 has more dialogue frontloaded before telling you to do the same sort of content that Cyberpunk might in a text message or whatever.

@ll_exile_ll: There is plenty of boring filler in Witcher and I say that as someone that enjoyed the game and expansions. It also doesn’t help that 90% of the game is turning on Witcher vision and following tracks to a fight. In that department Cyberpunk at least allows for multiple approaches to a set scenario.

Witcher 3 had some good writing but it wasn’t like an amazing game to actually play. There was a serious lack of variety in what you actually did.

Never said there wasn't. But you can skip it all and there's still 100 hours of good content. More of the overall content in Cybperpunk is low tier stuff. There's great stuff too, no doubt, but it makes up a smaller portion of the overall package.

The critical path for Witcher 3 is not much longer either so I dunno about getting 100 hours out of that if you're goin' around skipping filler.

The main story in Cyberpunk is like 20 hours at most. The Witcher's is like 50 hours.

Okay but 15 of that is trying to find Dandelion so I think we're pretty well balanced.

I'm pretty sure that the recently dropped version 1.3 isn't going to change anyone's opinions.

I for one just want my goddamn hair dressers (without using a mod). I just wanna flex on some basic bitches in the Maelstrom club, and I can only do that with proper color coordination. My hair, nails, dress, and shoes have to match before I can Shepard Shuffle to On My Way To Hell. Is that too much to ask CDPR?

It really seems like the whole game needed ANOTHER two years., Its not that they just pushed it out with bugs, they pushed it out without the level of writing, the amount of content, the interconnections to make mission part of the whole story, and just little things.

They game needed so much more content, some much more fine tuning and so much more branching paths to work. Its not like CD Projekt RED doesn't have money, they had more than enough to keep spending to make the game complete and functioning. But, they were greedy, and they wanted a payday now...so they slaughtered their own 'golden egg' laying goose.

At this point, their next game would have to be ridiculously good to even start gaining fan's faith again. They made a billion dollar mistake over what might have merely cost them a few million in salaries over another 18-24 months.

Unpopular opinion (maybe), but I think they got up their own butts with Cyberpunk. They drank the hype kool-aide as much as all the fan boys, and they thought that what they were going to release, even with some bugs was going to have them winning awards left and right. Sure there were some people working on the game that knew it wasn't what it could be, but I think too many people believed their shit don't stink.

To answer the OP, no, this would have still been a mediocre game even with the bug fixes. Ubisoft side quests, mixed with an Edgy Deus ex esque story.

I really, really enjoyed Cyberpunk. I played on Series X though, so it ran at a solid 60 without any crashes or major bugs, which I know wasn't most peoples' experience.

Loved the main story, loved the side stuff. I think peoples' expectations of it were a little OTT. They thought it was going to be life changing. For me it's the best example of the Bethesda Fallout/Elder Scrolls formula to date, but it was still just a good example of that, rather than something completely new and revolutionary.

For me, the bugs in the game are its least problem. The biggest problem is gameplay. I just don't find anything interesting and fun to do in the game. All the gameplay feels simple and is lacking depth.

The other huge disappointment is "immersion". The character can have insane amount of stuff available everywhere, items are being teleported (into trunk of the car), the city is dead just like in all other open world games, the environment is not very interactive (can't move items around), etc.

Most of those were probably expected considering what kind of games CDPR has done before but I was still hoping they would do things differently this time.

Not directly game related but one huge disappointing is how game media treated the project. Even after having a change to play the game they were still hyping it and failed to explain how the gameplay feels. Instead of saying "FPS feels great" they could have explained that FPS is probably great if you like Borderlands but not that good if you are more into ARMA or Tarkov.

As a PC gamer I don't know about "generations" but I truly hope CP2077 wouldn't have been one of the best of games of "this gen consoles" even without all its bugs.

I always thought W3 story was terribly paced. Now, everyone who has read the books know that they aren't exactly all that interested in the main story either, and instead focus on side stories and the various characters Geralt and Ciri come across. I guess it might have worked if all the major side stories in the game had been good, but in my mind the only memorable one is the Bloody Baron, but even that story is abandoned after you find out what happened to the wife, only to have a 10 minute resolution 10-20 hours later. All the major side stories also end with "sorry Geralt, but Ciri is in another castle" which gets old very fast. It's the last couple hours where the characters actually shine, and it's telling that the decisions that affect Ciri's and Geralt's fates are made during that time. Anyway, I think W3 is overrated and I'd rather replay W2 a couple of more times. That game has the decency of not being 50+ hours for little reason. The quests and gameplay are not good enough to support the amount of time required.

That's CDPR's fault though. If you watch the trailers and interviews, they are hyping features that straight up aren't in the game, and don't get me started about the AI and city life.

Honestly I think an extra year of development (and getting rid of those last gen ports) would have done wonders for the game. I don't know if it'd mean it would become one of the greatest RPGs. Because while I appreciate that the story is a lot more singular than I thought it would be, I found it nowhere near as involving as it could have been considering the themes its trying to explore.

Basically I think Cyberpunk was always doomed to be a disappointment.

Hopefully, they fix that in the next Witcher game.

I actually played through CP2077 1.5 times. I enjoyed it for the most part. Admittedly, I was playing on the Series X thru BC, and it ran fairly smooth and looked nice. When the proper next-gen patch arrives, I may try another playthrough on Nomad, as I have not played as that character type.

@siamesegiant: It really does feel like they are directly competing with Bethesda and funny enough they both release their games early 😂.. just look at cyberpunk and fallout 70.

I hope this is a win-win for us!

Far as I can gather though the actual game itself wasn't that interesting though. Even if it ran perfectly I heard a lot of reviews say the actual story and gameplay was kinda disappointing

You could see from a mile away that the amount of hype this game was getting, it was never ever going to live up to the expectations. It seems we go through this cycle in gaming every few years, and every time these is a new batch of gamers who just can't set their expectations reasonably. That is not to excuse the bugs and the poor performance, but those things will be fixed if they aren't already and I am looking forward to playing this on PC once it gets its first major sale. Right now it's kind of impossible to get a read on the actual quality of the game from forums.

I haven't even bought this game yet,(on sale), but I see two quick takes, perhaps hot ones;

One is that CDPR had three tries to get The Witcher to it's most refined. And according to many views I do read of, they accomplished just that. Cyberpunk is their first stab at a whole new universe, and no, not much of what made Wither 3 great auto-carried over.

Second is the fair in my mind, criticism of the media by some posters. The media did their part in the loop with CDPR in generating and re-cycling the hype and buzz prior to Cyberpunk's release into the real world. It reminded me oddly enough of Kane and Lynches big build-up on Gamespot so many years ago, where I do believe there was even a skin of the game on the site for it's release. That doesn't seem to happen much anymore on dependable sites, I think...

But there is little to contain the media out in the aethor, when there is something a little too built up. In other words, the media could have been more careful, and less assuming it all, as an easy ride.