CD Projekt Red Admits Being 'Too Focused' Getting Cyberpunk 2077 Out The Door

I took mine back to GAME yesterday. Said hey, looking to return Cyberpunk. "Oh yeah? What's wrong?" ...I was not prepared for that.

Game are not accepting refunds at the moment. E-mail has been sent to CDPR.

So they knew exactly what they were doing & released the game anyways? 🙄

I’m so glad I waited to play this game. My insane backlog finally helps me out.

So it’s was deliberately released in this poor condition. Shame they had so many preorders to make the money already.
Well their next game won’t get so many preorders and hopefully they will learn a lesson.
Gamers really need to use their heads before preordering and purchasing. It is the only way these companies will stop doing this. If you cut their money supply they will take notice and action.

I can understand why they just wanted to get the game out since it's been in development for almost a decade and the management was probably growing impatient at this point. But still, it is up to the project leaders to convince the management why they needed more time. For example, the large amount of refunds, fixed extra development costs regardless if the game is released or not, damage to their reputation and so on could've been used as arguments. Maybe they did use these arguments and it still wasn't enough, and in that case the company needs to review their management because this was not handled well at all. Instead of constantly delaying the game and putting up new release dates, they should've just delayed the game indefinitely. Not only did these actions affect the releases of other companies' games (e.g. The Medium was delayed because of Cyberpunk), but they also released a very unpolished product and subsequently damaged their reputation as well as the relationships with their customers.

You have to know the actual programmers were voicing these issues. Would have been brutal coming in 6 days a week knowing you're making a subpar experience and having your bosses ignore you. Just stinks.

They should be compensating gamers directly. What they are saying now is not good enough.
I don't think they understand how difficult it will be for people with a physical copy to get a full refund.
Or even digital on PSN, as the refund policy there is terrible.
Luckily I had no issue with my digital version on Xbox. Refunded within a couple of hours.

Makes you wonder now is the next gen version going to get delayed because clearly the focus is now going to be 100% on sorting base last-gen consoles until at least February, while also sorting the PC version at the same time, as that is full of bugs as well.

Absolute shocker from CD Project Red...

It really is a disgrace what they’ve done with this game and the treatment of fans who pre-ordered and where hyped for its release.

They’ve even tried to distance themselves from the refund comments made a few days ago (see Push Square for article).

Talk about a fall from grace with these guys.

The treatment of fans lol... If people get this upset about games then why don't they ever learn there lesson and wait for reviews of the games on the platform they are going to buy

Its reviewed poorly on base xbox one and Ps4.. The information you need only a few days after release to not buy the game.

Just reminds me of the South Park BP "we're sorry" bit.

I'm Polish so let me translate for you. What he said was "year end is approaching so we pushed out a crap product just to meet revenue forecasts. Na zdrowie!"
I don't understand why people pre order games. Unless you're getting a special edition just buy it when its been reviewed so you know if it's finished. If it's not don't buy it, this is the only way devs will only release a finished product.
I know a lot of people we're mad at them for the delays but this actually hurts their reputation a lot more than another delay. Also, STOP giving dates unless your sure it's 150% locked in, if it ain't say it's delayed and we will update you when we have a new date. All major titles recently have been released too early. I don't trust any dev, people need to see the product before paying for it or they can't complain about getting f'd over cuz it happens all the time it seems. Money talks the loudest, so speak up.

"signals" = every employee that told us the thing was not ready.

I'm not even sure why this company has such a huge reputation.

Witcher 3 was a mess when it launched, and before Cyberpunk they had exactly just 2 console games: Witcher 2 and Witcher 3.

Even most the valuation bump on the studio came after the release of the Netflix show, something that had nothing to do with them.

Witchef 3 ended being a great game outside PC after lots of patching, but this stidio does not deserve their reputation.

They should had spent less money sending influencers expensive chairs and instead paying support studios for help with the console ports.

CD Project Red has gone from being the most loved gaming company to one of the most hated..

Glad Xbox delayed halo. This is why.

"We ignored the signals" is another lie. They didn't need signals. All they needed was to spend 15 minutes with each version of the game to know that half of them looked and performed terribly. They knew the Xbox One version couldn't even perform at 720p. If management didn't know the state of the game from direct experience (amid COVID work-from-home conditions), they made no effort to know or else didn't trust the team leaders who had hands-on experience with last-gen versions of the game.

Remember that CDPR managers told investors previously that there was little crunch and then apologized to their team (not to investors) for saying that. They are in a habit of lying. I'm sure there are many good people at CDPR, but the managers are untrustworthy.

Xbox quickly processed my refund yesterday. I will buy it again in a year or so, after the Series X optimizations and general improvements. But after being disrespected in this way I'm inclined to buy it at a discount.

I preordered because I thought a smaller company like CDPR was more trustworthy than the likes of EA and Activision. I was wrong. That was my last preorder.

https://youtu.be/s1_50T5GwZ8

It does not justify but explains it

@LiterallyDoNotCare I’m in the minority in that cyberpunk wasn’t really my thing (though I loved the Keanu addition) so I never planned on getting this one. But I completely agree about Halo. I’m glad they delayed it. Get it right!

@xMightyMatt14x After playing titanfall 2, doom 2016 and doom eternal, the gunplay looked outdated. Like something that could be done on ps3/360

The biggest mistake was apologizing. Bugs and issues are not unusual at launch. They should keep quiet like other big corpo developers. It would be all gone next month after patches. But they chose to issue that statement and dug themselves in a hole. For what? Seriously really bad PR

@LiterallyDoNotCare oddly enough the part that actually excited me about the Halo Infinite reveal was the gameplay (including gunplay). It felt more like the original Halo. Halo was always a slower moving game and that style I just prefer. I played Doom Eternal and couldn’t finish it. It just wasn’t my thing. But I also never got into Call of Duty (last one I was was Call of Duty 2 on 360). Right when shooters became twitch based I kinda left the FPS genre. I’m really excited that the gameplay looks like the pace of the original and the art style got me pumped. It’s the technical stuff I think they need to make sure is right.

@xMightyMatt14x Halo Infinite gunplay looked meh to me. I actually think they went backwards from halo 5 from the look of it. Looks like halo 3, and that was cool for that time. Now games need to be more complex.

Move over Jim Ryan. Hold onto your hat, Don Matrick. Don't be so blue, Bobby Kotick. Turn that frown upside down, Larry Probst. The grand jury hasn't even indicted yet, Randy Pitchford! There's a new worst CEO of the games industry in town to take your crown!

@Krzzystuff LOL. Because the world had too high an opinion of Poles prior....CDPR is here to help!

@LiterallyDoNotCare @xMightyMatt14x Halo has always been a naturally semi-tactical shooter. Titanfall2, and the Dooms are fantastic games, but what they all have in common is that they're fast moving games. They're not necessarily complex, just significantly faster which uses a different type of approach. I adore Doom Eternal, it's so addictive in an old school way, but it does border on being a little too complicated for the speed it moves with it's "weapons triangle" thing going on. It works, but it could easily have not worked. Halo definitely is intended to be a more tactical, more deliberate approach. But I don't think one is necessarily more "complex" than the other. Just more frenetic. If Halo can be as good as Doom Eternal, but also, the opposite of Doom Eternal in terms of pacing and strategy, it could be amazing.

@NEStalgia well said!

They purposefully hid the PS4 and Xbox One versions from preview and released it in a buggy mess. CD Projekt are now just like any other big name AAA publisher, out for a quick buck before the next financial year.

@NEStalgia Compared to other fps, tf2 and doom are more complex, if not the most. Just because it's fast doesn't mean it is basic combat.

Yeah. Hopefully. I just didn't see that with the July's showcase. Seemed press l2 and r2 but watch out for your shield to beat the game. Hook seemed meh.

@LiterallyDoNotCare Yeah, it's not that the other games are simple, but Halo isn't any less complicated really. The main thing with Halo, other than pioneering the regenerative shield/health structure, is the balance of what weapons are good for what, and that you can only have 2, propelled by ammo needs (in that regard dooms "push forward combat" design is an extension of bungies Halo idea, made faster.) But what has always been unique about Halo is the adaptive ai that reacts to what you do... It's a semi cover shooter where you don't snap to hard cover like Gears, but you still have to take cover and so do the enemies. The complexity of gunplay largely revolves around the enemy ai behaviors, and planning an attack, because your shields don't take all that many shots.... If the game is going to be more sophisticated (or less sophisticated) than Halo 3 will come down to being less about introducing lots of new systems, and more about how interesting the enemy ai is and how they can work in concert together, though that's harder to show in video than to see while in control.

There was a great interview back in the Reach era with one of the bungie designers about that whole behavior based design and what its really doing in terms of guiding you, reacting to you, and providing just enough challenge...it actually does react to different players differently. In theory each player gets the same experience because the enemies give the player the right amount of push back for their play ability/style.

Assuming 343 implements that well (though, it's 343...) In terms of just playing off the environment rather than square rooms that should shake things up!

@NEStalgia We'll see. It seemed kill on sight type of ai for me.

@NEStalgia I rewatched, and all I saw was the brutes come forward to you and shoot while standing still. One did a roll to evade some bullets I guess but it seemed ineffective. The smaller regular troops just shot while walking side ways or backwards. The brutes also did this. I saw one jump because of a grenade.

Overall nothing really impressive.

@LiterallyDoNotCare hmm, that indeed would break what makes halo "Halo" if it really played so blandly, and would mean 343 really doesn't "get" Halo still. Hopefully that's not the final ai and was in place just for demo purposes. Halo lives or dies based on the gunplay.

@Kefka2589 Yeah, I can see that. Doom 2016 was pretty fast...manageable, but pretty fast. Doom Eternal cranks it up to 11, then rotates the knob 360 degrees more just to make sure.

I can safely say it is the fastest moving game I have ever played.....but.....it's soooo goood! It feels like a Quake mod rather than a retail game....and that's not entirely a bad thing, lol!

The gameplay is pure 90's arcade....feels more like an arcade SHMUP re-realized as an FPS....game's like R-Type, Darius Twin, etc are what it brings to mind more than OG Doom. Or Sonic.

I know with Doom 2016 they said their design idea was inspired by online deathmatch. The rooms were more or less arenas with deathmatch style gameplay against AIs. It felt more like a product of Doom3 aesthetics (eeww, I hate Doom3), mixed with Quake 2 deathmatch gunplay.

Doom Eternal is kind of different with it's larger, less claustrophobic settings. The end result is kind of a weird mix - it doesn't feel Doom at all, IMO. It feels like an odd hybrid of Quake 1 (arcane and ancient/incoherent courtyards) Quake 2 (the Demons at some point appear to have become the Strogg, recycling the Quake 2 story, now in a convenient new Doom package), and movement speed and gunplay, along with platform/map design remind me a lot of Quake 3 Arena.

In a way Doom Eternal is the Quake game I've wanted since 1999. It's kind of fun because I thought id in the post-Carmack/McGee/Romero era was dead, but there's so much in there that's clearly a direct descendant from ideas in all the classic Quake games (and almost none from Doom games beyond the shotgun and cacodemons. ) The speed most definitely inherits from the online play of Q3A which was way faster at its time than its predecessors. Includes the same jump pads. Even the ammo pickup sound. It's just a shame they call it Doom Eternal rather than Quake 5. Doom is claustrophobic metal hallways. Quake is craggy canyon courtyards and ramparts.

But, yeah, the speed wears me out fast, and I can't imagine it works for all, or even most tastes. It's beyond hyper. The only reason I was really prepared for it was the years I spent playing Splatoon in the S/S+ levels as a roller, then carbon roller main. Against Japanese teams. It's roughly the same pace of play except Doom gives you breathers. Those gas-mask glad Japanese splooshes, man....they never let up.

@Kefka2589 It's funny, I'm not technically an FPS fan, but having been a PC gamer from around 1997 to 2010 or so you basically had 3 genres to pick from. FPS, RTS, or sim. Everything else was a console port, and FPS was by far the bread and butter that drove the entire platform. It was weird when FPS made the jump to console. From DOOM through Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Far Cry (pre-Ubisoft) it was shooters, shooters shooters. And you bought a new PC every other year when id released a new game/engine.

Rebooting Quake is a hard one. I'd love it. A lot of people would love it. But Quake has a severe identity crisis, and I don't know how they'd reboot it.

For old timers like me, Quake 1 = Quake. It was such an overwhelmingly unique experience. Full on 3D versus Doom's sprites. A weird mishmash of dark fantasy, Lovecraftian eldritch, sci-fi military, satanic/occult (basically Doom) environments. That mishmash of unusual environments is a lot of what makes it stand out. Plus a NiN soundtrack from the height of the Grunge era. Jumping from a medieval castle to a weird metal and lava world with satanic imagery, to a military base, to dank caves and courtyards was a one time thing. And the winding multi layered levels were amazing in their day.

But that was born of a dispute. Carmack, Romero, and McGee each wanted to make the game a completely different theme, and somehow they ended up using all of them because they couldn't agree on what to make it.

Then Quake 2 comes around.....and it's a more graphically violent version of the Borg harvesting humans for processing in space. Arguably that was the first "cinematic AAA" game that tried to tell a detailed story. Completely different feel and aesthetic. Not at all related to the first game in any way.

And both of them drew more attention for deathmatch, CTF, and mods than the campaign.

Then you get Quake 3 that began the trend of games that were nothing but online arena shooters - nothing else to it (next time you flip of CoD, remember you have Q3A to thank! ) And it had no coherent visual theme at all. It's aesthetic is unique, but nothing really unified it.

Quake 4 was a Ravensoft game contracted out (before they were just a cog in the CoD machine) that acted as a sequel or retelling of Quake 2 in the Doom 3 engine.

And since then the name has lived as an etherial engine that has a bunch of fan made games, and an annual official convention.

So what is Quake, and how do you reboot it? I don't know. They don't know. I'm not sure it's even possible. A Quake 1 remake would be amazing...but would anyone care? That's probably why they just made Quake 5 and called it Doom 5. Doom Eternal feels like the real sequel to Quake 1 that never happened.

@Kefka2589 Hehe, you haven't lived until you were amazed at upgrading to a Pentium to play Doom! And then getting a Pentium II making Quake II run at more than 12fps (with the fps counter sitting in the corner console...)

And then...that revealation of your first 3dfx or if a bit later, like me, the early "Riva TNT" (nVidia) card.....Quake 2 in OpenGL....with...colored lighting! And then....Unreal. With colored lighting like the easter bunny's lab just exploded all over the map.

Oh, yeah, Painkiller. And Serious Sam, which was intended as Doom on steroids.

It's weird to think of id as this odd side company of Bethesda/MS. Back in the day they were effectively the only company that mattered, and the rest of the industry just pick up their scraps and licensed engines from them. I don't know how it ever happened that they half vanished and Epic the worse alternative became the standard. It all revolves around Doom3....but that was such a fast unraveling.

The thing that's funny/sad to me is back in the 90's id was over the top gore. I couldn't really tolerate it much but forced myself to because it was THE thing. Pentagrams and blood fountains everywhere, blood sprays, blood-mouthed monsters.....eww...

But now? It's tame. It's modest, cartoon violence at worst and not all that shocking. Compared to most of the other games out there....especially the stuff coming from Sony and Capcom....and it's like "I'd show this to 8 year olds, it's pretty mild." They used to say id's games were what would desensitize us all. Now it's the other games that desensitized us to id's games. TLOU2 is to me, grotesque, I couldn't really play it. Torture porn. A chainsaw to a half-robot-half demon red monster thing? No bigge.

@Kefka2589 How gutless!

Funny how it's opposite though. Tlou2 is unplayable to me. Whatshisname in gtav makes be very uncomfortable. Resevil? Heeeck no. Vampyre? No chance. Doom 2016? Played it in VR, no problem (but the opening scene of doom 2016 i can't look at.). Wonder what makes that difference?