Guess I'll chime in now. (Gaming)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Tuesday, December 15, 2020, 15:50 (1228 days ago) @ EffortlessFury

jfc CDPR

On Cyberpunk 2077 refunds:

CDPR makes it clear that they do not have a special agreement with Sony or Microsoft (some people assumed there was one because of that statement on Monday) pic.twitter.com/7afb4mPk1L

— Nibel (@Nibellion) December 15, 2020

First of all, I want to say how glad I am to hear that the makers, artists and programmers alike, will not be affected by upper managements choices. That is a such solid move. Far far too rare. Second of all, a large subset of bugs was to be expected. Anyone who thought this game was gong to be a polished shine is either new to video games or so hyped as to abandon reason. Just look at Skyrim, Fallout 4, or Witcher 3 in their earliest stages of launch. These huge roaming game worlds are always a sea of critters at launch. The size simply demands it. There simply aren't enough hours in a day for QA. It's this reason alone why I didn't bother to get this game at launch. Shoot! Look at all the bugs listed at the end of the recent TWABs for Destiny: Beyond Light right now! It's quite a list.

That said I've been mildly surprised at the severity of issues seen by some. I also see where the mistakes may have been made by CDPR. Where at some point, the folks in charge of keeping the ship upright in upper management went... "oh shit, we screwed up". Possibly. I don't know for sure, but... here is a hypothesis of sorts.

TL;DR; Blame 2020.

When they started working on the game, which has to be at least farther than the 10th of January 2013 on a preliminary standard, The Xbox One/PS4 had yet to come out. Xbox One LAUNCHED on November 22, 2013. PS4, November 15, 2013. And so that's where things got started in aim.

And for a time... it was good. (Except when they got their stuff stolen in 2017.)

But somewhere along the line a deadline was made in error. Or worse, a deadline WASN'T made, and was an even greater error. And such was done multiple times. That line being - what are we going to support? Why were they still doing R&D 5 years after the initial announcement trailer?

There is this little thing called "feature creep". These "feature creep" sirens can vary easily wreck your ship upon the rocky coast of a publishing deadline. Oh there are so many cool features we could add! If I had to guess one of the sirens names, it would be " Real-Time Ray Tracing". This real-time variant of tech only hit the main stream channels publicly about two years ago or so after decades of progressive research. We only just got the first wave of dedicated hardware to pull of such calculations this year (as last year was only software based hackery as I recall). There is probably much more than that (such as stream processing, global illumination, and procedural generation), but for the sake of simplicity I'm blaming RTRT here.

Look at this. In 2019 they were working on polishing the game, which at that time was due to launch in April of 2020.

It was all very impressive, although unlike last year’s demo the fact that this is a game nearly a year away from completion was more obvious – with enemies that seemed to get stuck behind in-game objects and somewhat unconvincing-looking gunplay.

Ironically, that probably means this was a more representative demo than last year’s, and the fact that Sasko made no attempt to hide the demo’s rough edges was encouraging. In fact, he implied that the game was almost content complete and that the next 10 months would be used primarily to refine and polish what’s already there.

If they had launched in April 2020, would things have been better? I don't know. Probably not, it's not like Covid-19 did any favors with the time table. But I don't think them launching at the same time as the X/S, the PS5 and the latest and greatest NVIDIA/AMD Video Cards (all of which are being sold at a kings ransom by scalpers... the fucks,) did any favors either. They probably knew about the proposed launch dates before the public did, and so... there is where the distraction really came in with force. The shareholders really love that shiny shit!

Delay (April to September), "LOL no Crunch?", A September to November Delay, "LOL Sleep?", "LOL SUDDEN UNSCHEDULED DELAY!" (November to December).

Let me translate that for you; Oh shit OH Shit OH SHIT!

They were making for something new that is now old. They are also supporting PC, which has multiple generations of tech that leapfrogs Xbox One and PS4. What a GAP! And, I guess they wanted the selling points, and that is being able to show off the Raytraced Lighting and NVIDIA scaling trickery. OH! 4k Raytrace 60 FPS!!! KWOOL!

And so Xbox One and PS4 got kicked to the curb. Even though they put all this time into it... it's not the new hotness anymore. And as a result of their being distracted, all that work is squandered. Even though it can be all fixed after the fact (just look at No Mans Sky) the initial reviews are forever.

2020 really was too exciting for basically everyone.