Apparently this is actually only one of a loooooooooong list of reasons. It's so buggy Bethesda would drag it back in for a once-over.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

I will say that this ("How could they release it so buggy!") doesn't take into consideration that it was likely *printed* (yes, physical media is still a thing) months ago, possibly before the first pushback of the release.

Also, due to how assets work on console data storage, if you move an asset (say from /assets/level1/ to /assets/level2) that's not a 20 byte change, it's a change of the full size of the asset. Now, due to how console storage techniques work, that if that asset is replicated anywhere (say, level1, level2, level3), instead of symlinking to a single common file, they just put it into each area, in order to decrease loading times. I cannot *wait* for spinning media to no longer be the default, as game sizes could potentially reduce DRAMATICALLY (...okay, so actually it'll probably only offset the exponential growth of asset size as we increase default resolutions)

I should note that *none* of this excuses the fact that someone looked at the boilerplate epilepsy warning on all videogames, and said "Okay, challenge accepted", but I just hate the "oh, 50G day one patch, dev team must be a group of untrained monkeys"

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

Even without the resolution issue, this is the equivalent of the 1970s logic that labor-saving office machinery would reduce the length of the white-collar work week. This was a legitimate thing people who should've known better believed and confidently predicted, completely overlooking the obvious fact that what would really happen was that if office work became 10 times more productive, employers would simply demand 10 times the output--or MORE, as the ease of the gain overwhelmed whatever vestigial sense of proportion they might already have had. Result: It's 2020 and white-collar workers have become online Victorian woollen-mill operators.

Similarly, reducing the size requirement of source files will only make software (and not just game) developers feel free to chuck ever more of them in there.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Somehow, that the most hyped game of 2020 features deliberate sections that will induce epileptic seizures as well as through-the-pants dick-flopping doesn't seem anything other than appropriate.
Because 2020.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

Doubly so if they both get patched in 2021.

--G.
I can see why they were so desperate to get the game out this year, but jeez...
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

So the graphics can cause seizures, the animation sometimes causes the character to expose himself, and it is total inversion of genre - sounds like they went for a trifecta, doesn't it?

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."

Well, bounty hunting has always been a Thing in the CP games, although it's cast more as having so few fucks to give that you'll even work with the police if they'll pay you enough, rather than believing in The System. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

... also, it's actually doubly hilarious - you _get_ those bounties and jobs because NCPD was _privatized_ a year back, and is still so deep down the hole they need to outsource their work. And occasionally the work is really really sketchy.

And, while my economic situation isn't as flat-out busted as yours apparently is, there is no way I am paying the money they're asking for, when that shit is fixed. I wouldn't pay it for any game.

So, yeah, maybe in a few years when the cheap-ass edition comes. By then, the egregious stuff will have been polished away, too.

It will be interesting to see if I agree with Jingles, too, because I too am an old fart who played the game way back in the day. Still firmly choose ShadowRun, because magic! And fantasy races! But yeah, proper rpg'ing Cyberpunk is FUN.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

I'm mildly tempted to do something very in keeping with Cyberpunk's setting and load up the installer files onto USB drives for sneakernet distribution (I did buy the game, but I got the GOG edition with manual install files sans DRM, so my wife and I essentially already paid half price for it.)

	-={(Astynax)}=- "Bootlegging software seems pretty on-brand for the game to me."

Seconded. It's odd, but despite the same basic dark and depressing setting somehow the magic element seems to make Shadowrun less soul-killing than plain Cyberpunk, even with Insect Spirits in the present and Earthdawn's Horrors in the future.

> But yeah, proper rpg'ing Cyberpunk is FUN.

As I've just mentioned in the CP2020 thread elsewhere, Peg and I just got invited to a game by a friend. And we've never done CP, but we're willing to give it a try. I'm hoping it'll be fun, as you say.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I suspect the key is not to take the setting as seriously as it takes itself. That's certainly how we did it in the campaign I was in way back at WPI. The player characters were a Trauma Team™ unit. We... might have been the worst Trauma Team™ unit. I mean, you wouldn't think so if you were the patient. We always saved the patient! But we often did it in ways that were probably not to the company's marketing department's taste. Not for nothing was our crew ID number 4077.

In the game lore, there's a long-standing, unfriendly, often violent rivalry between Trauma Team™ and their chief competitor, the lower-budget, less effective, but much-better-named REO MeatWagon. TT and MeatWagon teams are known to get into firefights when they rock up on a scene where both of them have customers in need of assistance. At one point, we pissed off the local MeatWagon crew so bad they came after us, no patients necessary. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

If you wrote those stories, I would definitely read and share them.

On the other hand, it's got me thinking about running CP2020 again...

I am however a huge fan of the cyberpunk setting (in general, not the Cyberpunk RPG setting specifically) and all the Gibson/Stephenson/Dick/Ellison/etc books and whatnot. Cyberpunk is my jam, man. What can I say, I grew up in the 80's.

I've been watching a playthrough, in a sort of "well let's go see if it's as bad as the reports say" kind of way, and my god, the developers nailed the setting and the story is so far engaging and has me genuinely curious as to what's coming next (the streamer hasn't finished it yet). I've seen a couple of visual bugs but frankly nothing on the order of, say, a Fallout game. Admittedly the streamer might be editing those out but I've been keeping an eye out for the cuts and so far every one I've spotted has looked like it's due to a load screen rather than a bug. (I did spot one amusingly bad graphical typo -- the devs misspelled "Delivery" on an art asset and never fixed it -- but hardly anything game-breaking.)

On the other hand, I have it from someone whose opinion I trust that there are problematic elements in both the game (w.r.t. LGBT representation) and the developers behind the game. Which makes me look dubiously at the idea of opening my wallet. I'm fully willing to believe I'm not clueful enough to spot them myself (I haven't so far, but the streamer I'm watching isn't gawking at everything the way I would be either, so there may be a lot I'm missing, I dunno). And while I know the seizure thing is a real concern, I'm not susceptible myself, so while I absolutely support fixing that, it's not a problem for me specifically? If that makes sense.

So I don't know. I'm torn.

--sofaspud
--

Cherami Leigh. Who, if Borderlands wasn't your jam but anime dubs are, you've heard somewhere.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "This Space For Rent."

... really, really good. I usually play female characters, so I had to go find a streamer doing that (why am I unsurprised that that felt more difficult than it needed to be?), and it just hits all the right notes.

Which is amusing because Gaige's voice kiiiiinda got on my nerves in Borderlands but then again I suspect it was supposed to, so, task succeeded, I guess?

--sofaspud
--side note: I'm more peeved than I reasonably should be at the streamer whose thumbnails all feature a customized female PC but who is actually playing a male PC

...

Awright, I didn't spend much time with the Strike Witches dub, but the fact that the same actress voices the player character in CP2077 and the English version of Yoshika Miyafuji is going to give me some epic mental images if I end up playing the game. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

-There's still some bugs in the PC version, but I'm told console is far worse. I don't know the state of console patches, but there's already been a PC patch or two. Updating my drivers got rid of the tree bug, and the notes say the braindance epilepsy thing is already handled, but I did still run into one bug where my partner passed through a door without opening it, requiring a reload. (Fortunately, there was an autosave just before, since it was at the end of a big boss fight.) In general, though, it hasn't been worse than any other PC release I've seen in the past few years.

-Whoever said they got the setting wrong is tagging Black Lace. It feels just like I expected it to, and all I can think of is when someone asked CDPR's consultant on the setting, Cyberpunk co-creator Mike Pondsmith, that very question. His answer was, shall we say, in extreme disagreement and not for print in a polite medium. Kind of like telling Rowling she got Harry Potter wrong.

-I haven't felt this immersed in a world in a long time. Not going to lie, there's already been a couple times I had to put the game down and go play something else for a while, and I've only just gotten past the prologue. (Of course, having the FFXIV patch drop the same day may have been a factor!)

-I'm holding off on judging the whole anti-establishment message. Certainly, the whole point of the setting is it's as flashy and kitschy as it is shallow and meaningless. The search for meaning and something to believe in is a theme of the game....but whether that is handled well or not is not something I can judge yet. We'll see.

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge

30-odd hours into the game and I think I'm your unicorn on this topic. It's not a bad, un-fun game, and a lot of the aesthetics are great, but there are enough rough edges and sharp bits sticking out of all layers (performance, bugs, game mechanic design choices/failures, and plotlines) that while I think it's a decent enough game and don't want to demand my money back I am also not putting this into my personal top 10 games. Which, since I was greatly looking forward to it previously, is a let down. Honestly the best quick summary I can think of for the game is 'unfinished'. So many potential systems, plotlines, features, etc. are started or hinted at and just lead to nothing that it's pretty obvious this game crashed into its deadline hard.

That said, CDPR has been known to push out fixes and updates, and some meaty no extra cost DLCs, with earlier titles so we'll see where things stand in 6 to 12 months.

I will say that I can fully see why this game is running like trash on aged consoles. My rig is older but still usually capable (i7-6700K, 32 GB RAM, Crucial SATA SSDs, GTX 1080 GPU) and I get some issues now and again, all while the game hammers my CPU and GPU. XBox One and PS4 are running older AMD CPU and GPU chips which were a bit underpowered when those consoles were released, let alone now, so it's frankly a miracle no one's console has burst into flames trying to run this thing yet.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "This Space For Rent."

Ah, video game forums and their Community Managers. Now that the old Douglas Adams joke about a civilization being wiped out because they got rid of all their Telephone Sanitizers is no longer funny, I suggest video game forum Community Managers as the replacement profession to be rounded up and shot into space as surplus to requirements.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Meanwhile the Satisfactory dude (who IS employed by the actual company) is a prime example of Doing It Right, IMO. So I guess my point is I don't want to fire ALL community managers into orbit. Just the ones that suck.

--sofaspud
--

Considering she's also the voice of Lotus, she's a bit more than "just" the community team manager.

...!
Stoke Mandeville, Esq & The Victorian Ballsmiths
"Nobody Want Verdigris-Covered Balls!"

This has been fixed, by the way, which makes that moderator's "it's supposed to be like that, you plebs" stance even funnier.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I find it far more likely that the respect for Dupont's intellectual property comes from your cybereyes' subtitling software (likely developed by a megacorp) than from anything the guy himself said.

I'm sure the reason has nothing to do with anything inside the fourth wall, I just felt like giving Dum Dum more credit than was his due.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Well, corpos respecting other corpos (or other corpos' lawyers/hit squads at least) is a nice No Prize reason. But someone with as much chrome in him as Dum Dum could probably make some sort of ultrasonic data transmission to mark things he says with the appropriate symbols. And maybe dude just has a Kevlar fetish to go with his chrome fetish.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "It's cyberpunk, anything goes, just not always very far."

CDPR has historically, as much as they have anyway, supported their games fairly well. So there's hope for fixes and some content additions, though they might not be as generous as they were with Witcher 3. Modders are also already on the job, so some issues may get the Bethesda unofficial patch treatment (folks are already working on fixing NPC and traffic wonkiness for example.) It will be interesting to see where the game is in 6 months.

That said, I don't know if they can fix some issues, mainly pacing and uneven delivery (female V voice acting is so far ahead of male V in quality it borders on embarrassing, other characters are hit and miss in terms of how well they are realized.) It's a shame the game was so over-hyped, if it had been more of a sleeper it could have had a much brighter long term outlook.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "This Space For Rent."

Last I heard, the investors were suing the studio because (in their minds, anyway) they haven't got theirs, or at least not the "theirs" they were promised, thanks to the PS4/Xbone fiasco. So perhaps "keep working on this, you goons" is in fact higher on their priority list than it would be if everything had gone swimmingly.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I heard this, too. Personally, I'm very much enjoying the game, 70-some hours in myself. Still has a few bugs, but nothing like what console players experienced.

That said, I can see why investors would be mad? But I don't see a way forward for them in court, if CDPR made a net profit. I have a feeling they're not going to get very far.

I'll certainly be happy if the devs keep polishing things, though. And add cut content!

------
Authors of our fates
Orchestrate our fall from grace
Poorest players on the stage
Our defiance drives us straight to the edge