I think it is just a new modern game so therefore hyperbole demands it much be either the best thing ever or trash. A lot of people said RDR2 was “dated” design as well. I think they both have strengths, same with Cyberpunk. I think only BG3 is a step forward for RPG storytelling, Cyberpunk, Starfield, Red Dead all have issues, but they allow the player to get immersived in their worlds and at the end of the day that’s all that matters.
Oh man this discourse has been absolutely typical Gamer garbage on the various subreddits. Every day a new thread with thousands of posts not reading the article but rushing in to say the same thing. It’s weird because they are very different games and it also feels like Im taking crazy pills because while I have not played cyberpunk(Im waiting for it go get super cheap on sale before I bother with it) I remember the launch being an absolute shitshow and the general consensus on the story being “meh”.
Suddenly starfireld comes out and now Cyberpunk is heralded as the greatest at everything. Like you dont have to pick a team you can just like what you like. I get bethesda sold out to microsoft and is now under scrutiny, and I get that the same vocal posters let themselves get wrapped up in hype, but this is excessive.
Yeah I don’t get it. Cyberpunk is getting serious rose-tinted glasses. I hear PL has greatly enhanced it but it just dropped and CDPR has been fixing the game for what? 3 years? That was a rough initial 18mo in particular.
Part of me almost wonders if it’s been elevated because it’s frequently featured on those benchmark videos that have gotten so popular lately. Heavy use of ray tracing, frequently updated to get new features, very tweakable, and thousands of videos using Cyberpunk as the standard for hardware to be measured by just puts a bug in your head.
Look make no mistake, the game visual is a feast. But that’s not enough to make up for all the other shortcomings. At least not for me. After the initial heist mission, which was unbelievable by the way, I just got so bored. 
That being said, I’ve heard enough praise for phantom liberty that I am considering jumping back in. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to pay for DLC though after what was delivered initially.

CP was shit and unplayable on consoles at release and more-or-less buggy depending on hardware but fully playable on PC. It did not live up to the grandiose marketing promises but it is a wonderful game for what it is. Interesting world, varied quests/gigs/jobs with interesting decisions to make, super fun weapons, and now a fun skill build mechanics.
Phantom Liberty is peak Cyberpunk, but the game itself is great - at release and now even more. Does not excuse the pathetic release though and deceiving marketing. At least they did something with it.
It seems weird that you are judging Cyberpunk without ever having played it. Saying that the general consensus is “meh” is not accurate at all. The game had bugs and it had some technical and gameplay issues that made its much more mature brethren seem better or more well thought through. That’s true.
There’s a huge BUT here though. The storytelling and main questlike through Cyberpunk, at launch, was pretty freaking spectacular. I say this as someone who readily acknowledges the issues with the game at launch. Yes, they have addressed most of those issues, and the game feels better now, but the same story from launch-day is still there and is a rather compelling and great experience. I’m on my second playthrough of it now with the PL expansion and so far it’s been so much better.
And this is all to say nothing of the truly jaw-dropping level design and aesthetics, AT launch, that the game is still sporting. I remember saying when I first played this at launch that I really hope they release some more expansions for this game because the environment is so richly detailed, it feels like I’m running around in a dystopian nightmare.
Like I said I’m basing my assessment on both games by the response the community gave and reviews Ive read and seen. I tend to do the patient gamer thing and wait for big steam sales before buying a game(unless its something I really want and sometimes I know indy games are already cheap and grab it at a lesser sale). Cyberpunk had a similarly criticized launch with the multiple daily 1001 posts on reddit and much like starfield has people who defend it you had people defending cyberpunk as well.
But from the outside looking in it was literally the same. You had the people who let themselves get spunup by the hypemachine absolutely let down when the game didnt live up to the hype.
You had the people who were chastising the bugs and “dated mechanics” how the game “didnt feel alive” and the “driving physics suck”
You had the hardcore CRPG fans for whom the only true RPG is: Baldurs gate 2, Morowind, Fallout 2, and special mentions to fallout new vegas. They’d come in and criticize lack of options and choice and blablabla.
You had the youtubers clowning on the game like Dunky showcasing a bug-fest.
And among people who actually reviewed the game the community consensus I saw was polarizing. Some did love it but a lot of people expressed it not living up to potential.
Again I cant say for sure(maybe next winter sale will be my time to shine) but it’s feels like this outrage cycle was targeting cyberpunk for a while and then one day it just stopped. And now that its time for the community to throw their poo at something again cyberpunk is the hero of the story.
So sorry for the rambling but in short my post is less a personal judgment of cyberpunk and more a “the community hated this game and had little good to say about it, and now it’s their precious baby and starfield is the bad one”. I know its not happening here but I figure rather than spitting into the wind on reddit I’d complain about this weird online discourse here.
I think the reason you saw the response you saw is that a lot of the players who bought Cyberpunk on the PC early on were too busy PLAYING the game to talk about it online. If you were a console user though you had little choice though, the console versions of Cyberpunk were awful at launch and deserved much of the scorn they received, I am not certain on stats, but I’m positive that most of the game-breaking bugs were on the console. Yes, I noticed some bugs on my first playthrough on the PC, but it wasn’t as dramatic as what I saw people posting regarding console Cyberpunk.
Beat the game within the first week of release (on PC). There were no serious gamebreaking bugs, and you are correct, the story is essentially unchanged between release and now. The story was always great.
The criticism of Red Dead had little to do with the impressive systems that they built for the world and a whole lot to do with how they took that freedom away from you in missions. There was very much a way they could have kept the linear story that plays out the same way every time without cutting to a hard fail state for using your brain. That's the part that felt dated, especially contrasted against the actual cool, innovative stuff that exists in the same video game.
i feel red dead is amazing to look at but playing it is so boring id rather watch paint dry. the last time i played red dead was to just do the drunk saloon mission again, which is also where i stopped playing the first time
I remember getting Donkey Kong on release for the Super Nintendo and it was more expensive than most games are right now, 66 usd. Name one thing that has the same price in 2023 that it did I 1994. It’s insane.
My dad still reminds me that when he bought me Dr. Mario for NES on release, it was $90USD. I remember seeing many a game at Toys R Us with price tags of up to $120.
But I can name plenty of games in 2023 that cost more $66. Shittons of console titles are $70 now!
Apparently you’re illiterate because I was asking how that makes them cheaper. None of those things matter in the slightest and would only cost marginally more to produce.
$70 is still more than $66, regardless of that unnecessary shit.
You’re arguing that media used to play (i.e. a FUCKING SSD in 2023) costs marginally more? Find me an SSD that could fit Sea of Thieves for less than 25 USD (and isn’t trash). If you’re a shill, delete your account.
How is this part of the discussion? What did a SNES cost? This doesn’t matter. Consoles and hardware always costs money. We are talking about the games here. Or do you want to take in to account what a decent TV cost in 1994 as well? And the second gamepad? We can’t compare life as a whole. Saleries. Living cost. Everything matters, yes. But then we can just end the discussion right here and right now because we will never arrive at anything but ifs and buts.
We aren’t talking about the “console” used to run the motherfucking game, or some peripheral. A game for SNES comes with it’s own fucking storage – the bloody cartridge – while a modern digital game doesn’t. If you can’t get two neurons to fire at the same time, then the discussion really is over.
Digital games and physical games are the same price on the Nintendo Switch. They were the same on the Wii U, the Wii as well. Nintendo never stopped selling physical games. It’s the same on PlayStation as well with the same price. At least it was on my Ps4. The larger piece of plastic didn’t cost more in the 90s compared to the smaller piece of plastic in 2023. The manual/handbook also didn’t cost anything noteworthy to produce back then. I really don’t know where you are pulling these costs from.
Holy fuck, imagine being so completely alienated from the process of creating technology that you believe pressing disks costs the same as soldering circuits.
OIC… You’re just an absolute dingus who has no fucking clue what they are on about. Cartridges were only slightly more to produce than a CD, and Nintendo still makes their games on cartridges (fancier ones than the SNES, too) that cost the same as the digital release. The only time this wasn’t true was during the 64 era, when an earthquake shut down the manufacturers of the carts and fucked up production. Do you work for Capcom? I feel like you’d fit in.
I buy physical copies of ps4 games for under $10 pretty regularly. You can find some absurd sales if you know where to look and how to keep an eye out.
Rare spent 18 months developing Donkey Kong Country from an initial concept to a finished game, and according to product manager Dan Owsen, 20 people worked on it in total. It cost an estimated US$1 million to produce, and Rare said that it had the most man hours ever invested in a video game at the time, 22 years. The team worked 12–16-hours every day of the week.
The Donkey Kong you bought in 1994 had to pay not only for development, but also for the package, for the circuits (think a 1TB SSD in 2023), for distribution, etc. Do you see modern companies having to pay for any of that?
You seem to miss the point it was almost 30 years ago and they spend 18 months developing with a team of 20 people. Read those numbers again. Damn, the electrical bills alone to create Starfield most probably surpasses the entire development cost of a handful of SNES games combined. Yes, old games had manuals and came in physical form but those components where cheap at the time.
I’m not saying game SHOULD cost more. I’m just claiming games haven’t become a lot more expensive.
As much as I don’t want to see game prices increase, I’ve been shocked to see that they haven’t kept up with inflation at all. Especially since the cost of developing games has skyrocketed.
I love the rage over this. You’ve all clearly never met most of the people playing this game. They already spend hundreds on DLC, it’s the majority of the game.
Yeah, I know a Sims player and Sims 4 is literally the only game she plays. The way you or me would buy a new game, she buys a DLC. It's like it is its own gaming ecosystem for most of its players.
But it’ll be worse now. It won’t be the same as 4, but free. It’ll be a glorified store with constant popups begging for money
It says a lot that it’s “running alongside” the previous game. You must not have a lot of faith in your game if you’re expecting your sequel to not replace the previous game.
This is gonna be true of every studio embracer owns. They just don’t have any cash to keep the business running. Every studio is gonna get shut down or, if possible, sold.
I would too, but I get the feeling WotC might not allow that. They are hard core pushing their digital tabletop replacement with D&D beyond. A custom baulders for a flat fee would seriously eat in to their subscription model profits.
Which I'm all for! I'd definitely play custom BG campgains but I have no interest in paying $10 bucks a month for a Skype game or whatever.
There have been digital tabletop tools that allow you to play any game for so long, that are free, I don’t see how they would ever really get anyone on board with a subscription service to do the same thing.
I use a couple myself with my group. They have some premium features like access to tilesets; but they also allow importing an image to use so it’s not like I feel compelled to subscribe.
Those free versions only exist because of the OGL, which WotC wanted to rein in. In part because of their own VTT being in development. This was also before WotC changed how they sold their books, now they are slanted to being part of a Beyond membership. While 3rd party seller still have a supply of books, the WotC main website is now only selling physical books as a bundle with a digital one for an up charge. Wizards is changing and is very much transitioning to prioritize their digital goods.
I am pretty sure gale is still bugged. You can gain approval from him several times in a single conversation and he isn’t even present for it. Everyone else has to be in your party in order to gain approval but gale apparently sees all.
It’s almost a funny character trait that he is a horny dude. In one conversation you talk about him needing friends and if you say that you can be his friend he immediately hits on you. Buddy, if you didn’t hit on everyone all the time then maybe you had more friends.
Elianora never made a “Skyrim Clutter mod”, but she did make dozens of immaculate player homes that have extremely well thought out clutter within them.
This isn’t a huge surprise either, as she worked with Bethesda in making some of the CC content.
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