Rambling thoughts about Cyberpunk 2077
Hello everyone, I’m emerging from my previously announced Christmas hibernation in order to ramble about the Shocking Scandal currently rocking the videogame world.
I know that much of my enormous and adoring fanbase is composed of people who don’t play a lot of games, despite my own status as a Big Time Gamer-Head, so I’ll briefly explain what I’m talking about. Here’s a condensed version of the tale of CD Projekt Red, and how they squandered almost a decade of good will in less than a week.
CD Projekt Red is a Polish game developer best known for making the Witcher games, which are based on the books that the awful (but somehow inexplicably popular) Netflix series of the same name is also based on. The first Witcher game was a relatively niche product, fitting into the nebulous “eurojank” category occupied by central and eastern European developers known for attempting ambitious projects that they’re not quite able to handle. Games like this tend to attract cult audiences, but usually don’t break into the mainstream.
The sequel, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, did break into the mainstream, earning CD Projekt Red a lot of clout, particularly from hardcore PC gamers feeling aggrieved over the increasing dominance of consoles. So for the third game, 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, they swung for the fences with a big, expensive open world project whose very first trailer heralded it as a “crowning achievement in the RPG genre.” As it turned out, a lot of people agreed with this hyperbole and the game ended up becoming one of the most highly acclaimed releases of the decade; it also sold like gangbusters, which elevated CD Projekt all the way to the big leagues (until this week they were nearly as profitable as Ubisoft, one of the biggest publishers in the industry) and allowed them to diversify into various other business avenues like buying GOG.com, a (formerly) highly-respected digital storefront.
It’s hard to overstate how much esteem CD Projekt Red was held in by most of the gaming community. The runaway success of The Witcher 3, coupled with practices like support for DRM-free releases and a tolerant attitude towards piracy (funny how that makes you well-liked by gamers) made them the de facto “good guys” in an industry where all of the other big players have seen their reputations tarnished over microtransactions, buggy game releases and various other Gamer Scandals. EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, even Nintendo to an extent have fallen from grace; only CD Projekt remained, the beloved cool uncle of the gaming world.
In 2012, after The Witcher 3 was announced but before it came out, CD Projekt Red announced that they were working on Cyberpunk 2077, a big-budget adaptation of the long running Cyberpunk tabletop RPG. In hindsight this was absurdly premature--the game didn’t actually start development until The Witcher 3 and its DLC were finished--but the long gap between announcement and release added to the myth of the game, causing many people to somewhat incorrectly describe it as a project “eight years in the making”, which would be an unprecedented timescale in the industry if it was accurate. The key thing to remember is that CD Projekt Red’s meteoric rise to fame happened in between that initial announcement and now; thus, Cyberpunk 2077 went from being an interesting game from a respected developer to The Next Game From The Witcher 3 People, and the hype levels rose accordingly.
The other thing that happened in between the game’s announcement and release is that CD Projekt Red went public on the Warsaw stock exchange. Keep that in mind, because it will become relevant later.
I should mention at this point that I didn’t like The Witcher 3, and for various reasons relating to their labour practices and social media antics I’ve had a somewhat negative attitude towards CD Projekt Red for a while. Thus, I approached Cyberpunk 2077 from a skeptical position; I was ready to like the game based on its setting and premise, and the gameplay videos released over the last two years looked impressive, but to me it wasn’t The Next Game From The Witcher 3 People, it was The Next Game From Those Guys Who Are Kind Of Dipshits And Whose Games I’ve Never Previously Liked.
Cyberpunk 2077 finally came out earlier this month, following several lengthy delays. Despite garnering positive reviews from press outlets (or at least, the outlets whose reviews appear on Metacritic), the reception from players was...well, picture a swarm of angry hornets being attacked by another, bigger swarm of even angrier hornets, and you’ll get some idea of the current mood.
Despite all those delays, the game was evidently pushed out the door far too early--as in, possibly up to a year too early--because it’s riddled with bugs and glitches to a degree not seen since the equally infamous Mass Effect Andromeda. Worse, it looks and runs horribly on the last-gen consoles; this issue was exacerbated by the fact that CD Projekt Red didn’t make those versions available to reviewers, which means console players had to make the decision to purchase on release day with no idea what they were getting. The company has tried to frame this as a consequence of optimizing and bug fixing up to the last minute, but I don’t believe that for two reasons: first, they were working on the PC version beyond the review embargo and right up to the moment of launch via substantial patches and they still sent that version out, and second, if they had any concern at all for informing consumers then they could have at least released some console screenshots or gameplay videos.
No, this looks like a clear indication that CD Projekt Red knew they were sailing into disaster and made a clumsy attempt to hide it. The reputational damage from this alone would be catastrophic, but when you combine it with everything else and some additional scandals that I haven’t even talked about yet...well, it’s been a bad two weeks for CDPR. As of this writing, the company hasn’t said anything about refunds, but it seems like it’s only a matter of
UPDATE: While writing this post, CDPR told Cyberpunk owners to contact either the store they bought the game from or the platformer holder they purchased a digital copy from in order to
UPDATE 2: Sony has delisted the game from the PSN store, possibly in retaliation for CDPR directing their customers to contact Sony and Microsoft about refunds, which evidently the console makers weren’t consulted on before
UPDATE 3: Sony and Microsoft are talking refunds, CDPR promised to refund people out of their own pocket if the place they bought their game from won’t play ball, multiple physical retailers are also offering
UPDATE 4: CDPR’s investors are making noises about lawsuits, there is no way this could possibly get any
UPDATE 5: A black doorway five hundred miles tall has opened over Warsaw, through which observers have seen giants with blood red hands and the names of abominable sins written across their flesh. Something is happening to the moon and
Sorry, things got a little hectic there. Where were we?
So I actually played about an hour and a half of Cyberpunk. It was going to my Big Christmas Game this year, but after hearing about the issues at launch I decided to test it out first to make sure it wouldn’t melt my PC.
And this is where we get to the other half of the story (yes, the bugs are only 50% of the issue here). A lot of people who aren’t running into egregious performance issues are still angry, because the game just isn’t very good. I didn’t get far enough in to encounter the apparent issues with NPC AI, or the shallowness of the game’s open world, or the laundry list of promised features that aren’t in the final release, but the basic mechanics of shooting, stealth and even movement just didn’t feel good. It also ran at a consistently choppy framerate regardless of what I did with the graphics settings, which is usually a sign of a badly optimized PC game in need of some patches.
So I noped out and uninstalled. In six months or a year I might try again, but in its current state Cyberpunk 2077 just doesn’t seem very good. In the meantime, we’re left to ponder CD Projekt Red’s spectacular fall from grace.
Nothing that’s happening here is actually new. In fact, it can be seen as a culmination of trends that have been ongoing for quite some time now. Over the last ten years, broken game releases and overhyped projects coming out the door half baked have both become a feature of the big-budget video game landscape, so common that until now they had pretty much stopped generating much emotion beyond a weary sigh.
But how did we get to this stage? It used to be rare--all but unheard of--for a game to release in an actively broken state, so why does it happen so often now?
There’s a few reasons. The first is that games have gotten much more complicated and more expensive, but the labour practices around making them are still rooted in the days of hobbyist programmers coding games from their bedrooms. “Crunch”, an industry term for a period where developers work flat-out to get the game finished, is becoming increasing common at all stages of development. Notably, CDPR got themselves in hot water several times over the last few years for enforcing crunch conditions on their staff, in one case after management explicitly promised, in reaction to an earlier controversy over crunch, that it wouldn’t.
The weirdos who defend big corporations on twitter and reddit will tell you that crunch is a necessary evil, that big, impressive games like The Last Of Us or Red Dead Redemption 2 can’t be made any other way and that developers who can’t handle the heat should just get out of the kitchen. Cyberpunk 2077 proves that there’s diminishing returns on wringing productivity out of employees.
Things might have been different if the developers at CDPR had had more time, and this is where the company’s decision to go public comes into play. That massively inflated financial status came from an influx of cash from investors, and apparently those investors were starting to get a little antsy about the time it was taking for Cyberpunk to wrap up development. I said earlier that CDPR had achieved the same level of value as big players like Ubisoft, but unlike Ubisoft they only release a big game every few years. No one knows for sure, but I can imagine that provided a powerful incentive for CDPR to get the game out the door regardless of whether or not it was ready.
I’d like to say that this is a watershed moment that will force a reckoning among the entire industry and a broad-scale rethink of business and labour practices. And maybe it will be, if those investor lawsuits turn out to be a big deal. But the game also sold 13 million copies, many of them before it was even out via pre-orders, and so it’s entirely possible that big publishers will take one key lesson from all of this: that you can break your staff and grift your customers and investors and get away with it.