How did we get here?
I can hold out until it’s $19.99 – this is normal for me.
I bought it for less than that from a pawn shop during the peak hate. I remember the pawn guy being like “that ones got real bad reviews” and I said “I’ll try any game for $14”.
I tucked it away for a year or so and then loved it.One - two years is a mere blink in the life of a patient gamer. I’m patient. I can wait.
One of the few games I don’t regret buying before release was Baldur’s Gate 3 but that’s an anomaly. Most games I’m happy to wait a year or more when it’s in better shape.
It’s funny that you mention Baldur’s Gate 3 because the game is blatantly unfinished. Act 1&2 are pretty much 9-10/10 but Act 3 is like a 6/10 at best. I’m surprised it gets a pass where Cyberpunk didn’t because in my experience they are equally as buggy. Because of my beefy PC and the scope of the games I think Cyberpunk may have even had less bugs than I’ve had in BG3. And I played it on release.
In BG3 I have quests breaking, characters not showing up where they should, continuity issues, obvious cut content, etc. I just gave up halfway through Act 3 and started a new playthrough instead because I adore the first half of the game and it makes the latter half that much more disappointing by contrast.
I agree completely. I’m even very forgiving when it comes to bugs and performance - especially when it’s a studio I trust will address them - but the huge swaths of obviously cut content combined with the way the story wraps up really gets to me and left me massively disappointed. I too still love the game for the gameplay and Act 1 and 2, but it really didn’t stick the landing in my opinion.
Even just things like the reactivity of your companions stands out; in Act 1 you could barely sneeze without everyone at camp chiming in with a comment about what just happened while in Act 3 you’ll do massively impactful things in both main story and companion quests and be greeted by the standard “Well met” or “hello soldier” at camp.
And that’s not getting into whatever scraps of the stated 17k different endings actually ended up not getting cut or the sorry state or the epilogues. Not even all companions get one!
You get “Larianed” a lot in BG3 just like you did in DOS2, plenty of inconsistencies, annoying pathing and quirks that make you wonder if they even played their own game before releasing it. But to put it in the same vein as cyberpunk 2077 is kind of disgusting. CDPR completely lied about the product, it barely ran on most PCs and didn’t even function on consoles.
BG3 while far from perfect, is much more of a game than cp2077 will probably ever be and Larian are firing out patches left and right at the moment while CDPR are still forbidding reviewers to even use their own game footage.
Baldurs Gate 3 will go down as one of the greats. Cyberpunk 2077 will be forgotton about.
I am talking strictly on the basis of bugs/incompleteness not the overall quality/scope of the games. But also “it barely ran on PCs” neither did Act 3. I have a 7950X and I still drop down to 40fps in some places even after the patches. People with say a 3600X were barely scraping 30. If we’re talking about the trend of games being unfinished or buggy on launch then BG3 deserves to be called out for the same.
On just bugs I still disagree that it’s anywhere near cp2077, but yeah there is a trend of games being buggy on launch and that defo has to be called out, especially when it’s bugs that most people come across that are not even niche or very specific. Performance in act 3 still has a long way to go yeah, luckily it’s not a fast paced game or a… shooter, so it’s not the end of the world, but not very pleasant either.
I’m surprised I don’t hear more people talk about this, maybe because they seemed to strategically handle bugs and content more thoroughly in the early game so that a lot of players would gush about that and be more forgiving by the time they got to act 3, along with everyone who didn’t even make it that far and only praised it online instead.
Starfield gets dragged through the mud for both deserved and undeserved reasons, almost universally without nuance, and BG3 gets blanket praise and acclaim, almost universally without nuance, and then I see this comment thread where there are apparently some serious issues grouped within a specific portion of the game and I’m not sure if that’s better or not.
Part of it is the game just being so huge. Most people aren’t even going to hit Act 3 until 50-60 hours in which is already much longer than most other games. So you’ve already formed your opinion of the game by the time you hit the less polished part.
And to be fair, those first 50-60 hours are pretty great. (Minus some gripes with things like pathing and inventory management) If the game just straight up ended with Act 2 I would be completely satisfied. I didn’t even mention this because I wanted to focus on the bugs but even narrative, pacing, and quest design in Act 3 is just so rough compared to the other two. It almost feels like a different game or a different developer. The quality drop is that drastic IMO.
I am worried that other studios might look at this and realize they can just front-load the best content and all the polish in the first section and neglect the rest to fix later. It sets a bad precedent.
I agree. I have had major show-stopping bugs with main story quests in Act 3 and more crashes on the PS5 than I have experienced in any game by a huge margin. I love the game but it has been buggier than CP2077 for me as well.
Cyberpunk for me was not as buggy as for my friends. I find that a lot of the games I play on release aren’t as buggy for whatever reason. It could be my AMD setup. It could be that I’m on Linux and use Proton or sheer goddamn luck. Callisto Protocol was fine for me but I’ve seen so many videos of the game running terribly and some crazy bugs.
The biggest problem with Cyberpunk was the performance. It ran horribly. The bugs were just the icing. My issues with Cyberpunk was that it felt hollow and lifeless. I loved everything about it but it just didn’t feel like it had a soul.
My PC wasn’t as beefy as it is now when Cyberpunk released so I felt that pain. I’m still on Act 1 on BG3 (because I insist on exploring everywhere) but I see that it has a huge amount of polish put into it. It makes sense that the earlier parts got more attention because that’s what the majority of the players will experience. At the rate I’m going, Act 3 will be in great shape.
Even with BG3, act 3 of the game is in much better shape than it launched with.
And their history of making “definitive” editions is looming a year or two down the road.
Oddly, as is their gameplay style of act 3 being the buggiest and least directed along with artificial difficulty of grouping the party in a tight clump via cutscene before the hard fights.
Still an utterly fantastic game despite those minor gripes.
Me as a patient gamer: “I dont understand the problem.”
Same. I’m still a little leery. Think I’ll give it another few months to settle down.
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
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I mean it WAS actually a broken mess from what I saw.
Im saying I always buy games on a deep sale well after it has been released so Im not particularly impacted.
Yeah, my point was it wasn’t a broken mess (except on last Gen consoles), but the gaming community blew its flaws out of proportion.
The game you’re playing as a patient gamer is close to the original with some polish.
It was such a mess that Sony removed it from the PlayStation store and gave out refunds.
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Yes, I explicitly acknowledged that the last Gen console criticism was warranted.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn’t - it’s GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
Cyberpunk is the soul reason I don’t preorder games anymore. Hype be damned.
No man’s sky for me. Both are amazing games at current stage but with shit releases.
if you where hyped for NMS release it still isn’t the game you where sold and never will be.
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If I remember correctly, it got hyped as the procedural generation not following the usual formulaic approach, where ‘new’ species are created by just propping tusk C onto body shape F etc…
Same for cyberpunk
It’s a great time waster, but as far as interesting and engaging gameplay? I’m pretty sure minesweeper still has it beat in that department.
You are 100% correct.
soul reason
*sole
Ha, yes. Thanks for the correction.
The Australia tax is why I don’t buy games at all, much less pre-pay for the ones I might want.
They just added driving combat, which was in the launch trailer.
Increasing complexity, tighter deadlines, demand for highwr profit margins, decrease in education quality. Theres a lot of reasons and not all of them are necessarily bad. Its good that we can simulate what we can. I think the profit motive is just starting to show its ruinous powers as shareholders demand more and more.
Unfortunately, it’s also here again with 2.0 so far. I started playing the game in 1.3, so this is the most buggy I’ve ever seen it. Vertex explosions, jumpy character animations, skills not working correctly, incorrect sound effects being played.
This is indeed the new normal, and I shouldn’t expect Phantom Liberty to run smoothly next week either. If took months after the recent big Witcher 3 update for it to play okay on mid-spec systems.
I think I was happier when I still catching up on games from a couple generations ago. Now that I’ve done that, I keep running into this stuff. 😕
Don’t forget to pre-order their latest DLC!
After they lied that their first major DLC will be free. I’m happy to wait till Phantom Liberty is 50% off or more. Not going to forget it’s launch. Review embargoes. Last gen performance. B roll footage forced into reviews to hide all the bugs.
You’re not buying a triple A game anymore. You’re buying the idea of the game they want to sell you, and hoping they deliver.
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that’s not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn’t be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur’s Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It’s straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
A year for the mod kit? Wow
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it’s less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don’t think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
It’s weird - when I played at launch, I had precisely one bug that impacted my gameplay. Other than that, the game ran pretty smooth and was a joy to play.
Now mind you, I was playing on a PC with a Xeon, 64GB of RAM, and an RTX 2080ti. Nothing ram badly on that system three years ago. Nowadays the older CPU, slower RAM and admittedly older GPU without all the newest bells and whistles (DLSS Framegen I’m looking at you) can’t quite measure up to the latest titles.
Cyberpunk, at launch, was great. For me. Specifically for me. I loved it and still do. But this article hits a point for me that I’ve been struggling to find reason to write about without feeling like I’m ignoring people who primarily play on consoles or can’t afford a nice PC. Regardless…
Man it fuckin’ sucks how you can spend a huge amount of money on a new GPU and then four months later a new one comes out that blows it out of the water. New hardware is so much better and - because all the game devs are using that hardware to design their games both on and for - systems like mine that are still fairly new can’t run the latest games at high settings anymore.
It used to be that if you ponied up the money for a high-end rig, you could expect decent performance for years to come. But I guess blowing a grand on a GPU these days just means you’ll be doing it again in a year or something, instead of the decade or so before.
I’m not saying my PC is bad. Most of what I play runs excellently. But when I spend a grand on just a GPU I expect that GPU to run the newest games at high settings for a long time. Jedi Survivor, Starfield, both run like crap on my system. Never mind the 2TB NVMe drive everything’s installed on.
But I’m just bitching to bitch. Ignore me.
I had a similar “it’s great I don’t get what people are talking about” experience, only I was running it on lesser hardware than yours: 4GB GTX 970, 12-core i7-5820k, 32GB ram. I ran into a handful of bugs that were funny but not really disruptive (e.g. some dude’s corpse floating behind a car as I was on the highway) and otherwise had a blast.
Nonetheless, it didn’t really feel finished, y’know? That part wore on me, and I think is what undermined my enjoyment the most. It really was released too early.
Ran it on a 980ti, i7 4770k, 32GB ram at release. It certainly struggled at parts, but overall decent experience. And that was a pretty outdated rig at that point.
People just threw a tantrum. There were fewer serious bugs than Skyrim, which got all around glowing reviews. People have claimed the hype was why their expectations were so high, but as someone who wasn’t even planning on playing it for a couple years until it was gifted to me, it was a decent game that had some areas of obvious improvement. Definitely a worthy first attempt at a GTA kind of game, and its a damn shame the gaming community chose it to be the meme pinata for the year.
The only way the industry will learn is to simply not buy any if the shitty games. Plenty of other games out there that are worth it.
That’s not a new thing though.
I first learned the wisdom of waiting until after the bulk of the bug-squashing was done before expecting to play a reasonably stable game with Oblivion, 17 years ago.
Granted that Cyberpunk 2077 was a particularly egregious example of the problem, but still…
Hard to disagree with the article, it seems it’s safer to wait at least a few weeks or months to play a new game because there are often things to be fixed after launch. Many games have multiple ambitious and complex systems that need to be tuned post launch. Combine this with high expectations/hype that marketing teams foster and you have a recipe for regret and disappointment on day 1 experiences
This is the new narrative for Cyberpunk 2077. I’m guessing cdprojekt greased some palms ahead of the new DLC release.
But make no mistake, and don’t fall for it; cyberpunk is still a wholly buggy and unfinished game with extremely janky mechanics that will never be patched out.
If and only if you can overlook such issues, and I know from personal experience some can, should you consider paying for the new DLC.
