Laundering? They’re not even entering as investors are they, so they are not really expecting any return other that a presumably finished game at some point?
Hardly surprising and it fits the scenario: a relatively small indie dev studio with only small-mid sized games under their belt with leadership deciding to buy into one of the most expensive IP available. Now, not only do they have a publisher looming over their work but are also under serious financial pressure to perform as well as expectation of a huge fan base plus promising a AAA sized game.
The leadership simply bit off far more than they could chew and panic set in, resulting in cut corners everywhere.
End result was a predictable disaster. Could have been avoided with smarter/better leadership. Clearly they didn’t think much of their dev team.
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.
This is my experience with Cyberpunk 2077 in 2023:
this summer, i built a new PC specifically so that I could play the game with good, stable performance. With ray-tracing on, the game would curb-stomp my RTX 3080 (not a cheap card mind) with 30 fps in the inner city. Not great, kind of disappointing.
What followed was nothing but a never-ending stream of bugs. Feel free to sample from the smorgosbord;
night would shift to day in an instant
characters would t-pose on reload
characters would walk through cars like a tank and blow them up
npc driven cars would run through walls and cars and blow them up
ragdolls would flip out and fly out of bounds
citizens walk in circles through the streets
animated objects like cell phones would not disappear when put away and instead float around their bodies
npc driven cars would teleport forward when driven
lost count of how much clipping issues were present
All this after about 5 hours of game play. It was brutal until I could take no more. And the game play is just not that fun, even though most of the characters are interesting and the story is good.
The absolute most damning thing is that the game demands immersion, the world is built around the concept, but with a bug every 15 min throwing you out of the experience, it’s just too much.
Just leaves the other half of the game to be fixed. I swear I gave it another go a month ago, and it was as buggy as the first time I played it. Just with new bugs, this time around.
I would consider The Witcher 3 a masterpiece as well, far from a linear experience. And I love Fallout, so I know what a good turn based compat rpg is like. And few games have had me so on the edge of my seat as Xcom 2, so I know what an excellent turn based combat system is supposed to be.
BG3 just doesn’t live up to that. The polish fails it, and the combat is just not very fun. The role playing is excellent as long as the other things don’t get in the way, which it does.