this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I can hold out until it’s $19.99 – this is normal for me.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I bought a used PS4 copy of No Man's Sky for 5$ before the Next update came out.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Wisdom of the ancients!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

One - two years is a mere blink in the life of a patient gamer. I'm patient. I can wait.

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[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago (17 children)

Me as a patient gamer: "I dont understand the problem."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Same. I'm still a little leery. Think I'll give it another few months to settle down.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right? It's not like it's even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.

Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still...

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This may be a shocker but games on the same level of scope as Cyberpunk 2077 take years of effort to make. We simply cannot pump them out as fast as consumers and shareholders demand their release.

Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man's Sky. Ubisoft also did with both Division games.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Hello Games had a similar issue with No Man’s Sky.

Having played at release, Hello Game's issue was much less "large scope games take long to make" and much more "we explicitly lied about features that are strictly not in the game".

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It had seven years of development before it's initial broken release.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's not as long as you'd think anymore, it's why the bigger studios have massive teams working on multiple games at the same time

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This revisionism is quite tiring but I guess that the development companies are counting on it.

The problem with Cyberpunk was not "just bugs" but a 40 minutes video that tells lots of lies and was clearly stated as "fake" to drive up the hype for it.

What you see today was shown as if "ready" 4 years ago. And today we still can't see the hacking as shown in that video.

On top of that there are all the design decision that are simply terrible but no amount of patches will fix, like the looter shooter approach to loot, levels on enemies, etc etc.

Overall, it's not a matter of "realistic expectations". We were lied to and that's just it.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It would not be if most would stop buying pre-orders. However I am so far behind on my gaming library that I just use it to my advantage and wait.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

With realistic expectations, the game has always been a good experience, imo of course. I did not follow any coverage of the game until after release, so I wasn’t sure of what to expect. I’m not excusing their shortcomings, but I feel like the community leaned hard into the “bad game circlejerk” as soon as it came out. I played once at release and got the worst ending. After edgerunners, I played it through three times, the last of which on very hard and with all the endings earned.

I enjoyed it! The 2.0 update is an interesting shakeup. I’m playing through a 4th time and having a good time

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

It's just an expensive early access.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Cyberpunk is the ~~soul~~ sole reason I don’t preorder games anymore. Hype be damned.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (10 children)

No man's sky for me. Both are amazing games at current stage but with shit releases.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago

They just added driving combat, which was in the launch trailer.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For the I don't know how many times.... I was enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. It wasn't BG3 quality but it was OK.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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. 😕

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't forget to pre-order their latest DLC!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You didn't need to wait 3 years to enjoy it. That's on you.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was a very different experience for me. I had a blast playing this game when first released and didn't find any game breaking moment. This could be due to me playing on PC? So with the latest patch I loaded up my V and found noting of merit had changed. Seriously I found it to be the same game with small UI and Skill changes. I was shocked to say the least, due to the enormous patch size. I still haven't left training NC so I might find more changes but so far it's still an enjoyable game.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

You had to be one of the rare lucky ones then.

I played on PC and it was an absolute buggy, sometimes crashy, mess.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

New? Where have you been for 13 years

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

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