It is, of course, worth noting that devs at CDPR were already crunching to meet that previous deadline. Today’s announcement doesn’t mention crunch, but I’d be surprised if staff weren’t in for another three weeks of gruelling conditions to get this thing out the door.
God I hate the industry
Yeah, it's really fucking dumb that so many games are beholden to an arbitrary release date that gets picked strategically around the holidays or at the end of business quarters to pad out a businesses quarterly earnings.
I think the ubiquity and accessibility of patching games has a lot to do with it. Like, I remember getting games back in the day and not even knowing patches were a thing. You couldn't ship a game that was a broken piece of shit and then patch it later, because patches weren't really a thing due to internet access/game clients like steam not being as widespread. So you'd get a lot more of "We'll launch when we're ready" because you knew you had to ship a finished game and couldn't rely on fleshing it out over the months following release. (or even worse, selling the fixes/expansion of the game to consumers with DLC after the fact)
I could also be speaking out of my ass, I'm no game dev.
Yeah, exactly. I have no issues with patches in and of themselves if they're used for their intended purpose. But the shift to "games as a service" over the past few years is really nefarious.
I feel like marketing whips people into a frenzy to buy the game, but it also has this useful side-effect of creating a kind of "organic" pressure for game devs to meet these impossible deadlines set by the shareholders. The mindset of "you wouldn't want to let down your fans, would you?". If fans had any awareness of video games as these incredibly labour-intensive media objects made in sweatshop conditions, they would stop being so complicit in pressuring game devs to crunch until their bodies give out and their personal lives are ruined.
It's no mistake that of all tech jobs, the video game industry is the one where there is the most support for unionising
It's fine, CDPR will release another 30 second wholesome Keanu 100 video and the Gamers(tm) will forget all about it
Yeah, I agree.
It's also peak reddit that there was this huge circlejerk about how nice and wholesome Keanu Reeves is, that resulted in a bunch of people sending death threats to a 12 year old who didn't know who he was.
up there with Will Smith
ironic given who got the Neo role offered to them first
I hear he's actually a bit of a creep. This sounds really weird, but I hear he has a marriage in a foreign country for tax purposes, dates younger women for a time, strings em along making promises to marry them, then gets tired of em and makes them break up with him by kind of giving up on the relationship. Then he finds another young woman.
tbf, Refused broke up over Shape, reformed like 15 years later and didn't make anything good after that
So not super surprising they're kinda washed up and shilling for CDPR
At this point I think they set unrealistic deadlines in order to try and get their workers to crunch even harder. Having the big statements about going gold and how there wouldn't be any delays was just putting pressure on the employees.
Once you ship off the code to start being made in disks you start working on the day 1 patch. Even after the game comes out there will be patches coming out for a few months.
ARRR ME HEARTIES, IT BE TIME ONCE AGAIN TO TAKE TO THE HIGH SEAS OF THE INTERWEBS
GREAT AND TERRIBLE BE OUR WAYS OF PILFERING IMPROPERLY PRODUCED AMUSEMENTS OF THE GAMING VARIETY (ARR)
Cant help but think there's something seriously wrong with the game at this point lol. Betting they'll delay it again in a couple of weeks.
lol. They've got another decade of missing deadlines before they get to that power level.
More than that I think, it was announced in 2012, so more than 8 years now.
Still needs about 7 more years and a few different game engines to be on the same level!
Actually only 4 to 5 more years, and one of the major reasons for the delay is to get it to work optimally on both next and current generation consoles somehow, without making one inferior to the other aside from graphics of course. It will my most likely be a good game, but there's no way cyberpunk 2077 lives up to the hype of being a life simulator of sorts
Duke Nukem forever was in development for 15 years though? 7+8 = 15. And yeah, I imagine it's a bitch developing a game at this point in time when we're transitioning between console generations. I'm sure they'll knock it out of the park. Just fucking sucks their employees are being worked to shit over a few years of crunch to make it happen. Edit I guess I was going off of the announcement date, so yeah, it was probably in pre-production at the very least before 2012 if that's when they announced it.
Wasn't Duke nukem forever only announced in the end of 1997/beginning of 1998? That's what Wikipedia says. And released in 2011. Meaning development of around 13 years? I dunno, I think cyberpunk will be good but there is no possible way for it to live up to all the hype, and cross gen games are always plagued with issues. (See battlefield 4, need for speed rivals, watch dogs 1, etc)
Ah damn, I think you're right. For some fucking reason I was thinking of the release date of Duke Nukem 3D (1996). You're right, it was closer to 13-14 instead of the 15 I said.
Still, it was much more absurd for a game to take that long to get developed back then since game development takes much longer in general now. Like, Doom got developed in a bit over a year by a team of 5 people.
It was really absurd, and in the end Duke nukem forever was basically a early 2000s PS2/og Xbox game being released on the PS3/Xbox 360 in 2011, that's why it was soo bad. But seriously some naive people expect cyberpunk to basically be a life simulator, some person on twitter was asking the devs about rev matching while changing gears in a motorbike or car, no way that level of detail is in the game. There's going to be a ton of disappointed people when it drops eventually
lol right? Like the entire genre went through at least 3 different paradigm shifts while it was in development. Half Life changed how narrative was approached entirely. Halo made FPS games really really viable on consoles (and the god damn 2 weapon limit/health recharge thing), then the cover based shooter craze. It was a relic of the past by the time it came out. What's funny is there's been a bit of a renaissance of "Classic" FPS the past few years with Dusk, Ion Maiden, Amid Evil. If it never came out and then got "revived" a few years ago while leaning into and embracing the 90s design principles it could have been a sleeper hit. Weird how that works.
And yeah, If people are expecting that kind of detail out of Cyberpunk they're going to be really really disappointed. I'm just kind of hoping for an open world game that's as detailed and interesting as The Witcher 3. I've never been one to overhype games to myself though, lol.
The only games I overhype are playstation exclusives like gran turismo, the last of us and uncharted, but they always seem to deliver.
lol. I will admit I am a sucker for From Soft and literally bought a PS4 just to play Bloodbourne. (And later Persona 5, which I still am working through)
I am the ultimate playstation fanboy, I own everything from a ps1, PS2, ps3, ps4 and psp, despite living in a third world country and living off 400 USD a month. I think the ps5 will have to wait though, it's close to 800USD in my country
Damn, yeah I'd definitely wait on that. I waited for a few years until I got my PS4 in the states since I mainly play stuff on PC anyways.
I'm calling it now, it's going to be this decades version of that game
Star citizen is not a traditional triple A game and all with the outrageous crowdfunding stuff, and it's not on consoles so the market reach is not as wide. It also "got released" in the last decade, the 2010s, which ironically is the same decade as Duke Nukem Forever, while cyberpunk is releasing in the 2020s
It's in alpha beta playtest stage 300™️. It's why I put "got released" in quotation marks
The article's emphasis on the different platforms makes it sound like maybe they're having serious technical issues on some of them?
I find it hard to imagine that they've decided the game is shit and are panicking and trying to salvage it at the last minute, simply because game studios seem to be very bad at predicting how their releases will be received. Remember the Sim City 2013 debacle? They constantly hyped it up as if it was going to be the game of the century, and the pre-release reviews were positive, then it had massive unforeseen technical issues on launch, then even after that was resolved it turned out to be fundamentally broken in almost every respect.
the marketing team and the dev team are very different beasts and don't always communicate, which is why you see marketing people "confirming" the Nov 19 release date as late as 2 days ago
This is starting to become the modern day Daikatana in terms of how many times it keeps getting delayed. I can't think of another game with such excitement and an eager fan base waiting for it since Daikatana.
And the ironic part is, Daikatana aged pretty well and really isn't that bad of a game (if you are playing it with all the patches and especially the option that lets you play without the AI side kicks). I had more fun playing it than I did Quake 2.
Yeah Cyberpunk is going to be a good game by the time the Day 100 patch rolls in, because all games are No Man's Sky now and they're completed after release. Pretty hyped about it.
Friendly reminder that arbitrary releases dates are not there for consumers. They're for the investors. I weep for the CDPR devs.
