One of the most anticipated video games of recent times was finally released after eight years since it is first announcement on December 10, 2020. “Cyberpunk 2077” hit digital shelves across the world to be met with overwhelmingly negative reviews and an overall terrible launch.  

When speaking to investors on the performance of the game on last-generation console joint-CEO Adam Kaciński said of the launch,  “[It went] surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world.” 

This is certainly an intentionally misleading statement, as many users were unable to get the game to launch at all on a PS4 or XBOX One consoles. Trying to start the game would cause a whole system crash often, or it would just not boot up at all. The game really only performs acceptably on rather high end gaming PCs and next generation consoles like the PS5 and the XBOX Series X. If one could manage to get it to boot up properly, they would be greeted by a game that is covered with a spider web of bugs and glitches. Cars would flip over for no apparent reason, folks in wheelchairs would get up and run and cars would randomly explode.

As a whole, the game seems entirely rushed to release, many believe this intended to help eke out as many holiday sales as possible.

As a result of the pandemic, the entire development team working on Cyberpunk has been working from home since March 2020. 

“Working remotely with a team of people can be very hard, especially with something as tedious as writing code, lots of misinterpretation can go on and it can be hard to understand what someone else was trying to do with what they wrote,” said junior Daphne K, who is programs in her free time.

Another hunch I had about the game was that the AI used for things like the pedestrian interactions, policing system and traffic was intentionally poor. That is to say, it was a placeholder and meant to be fixed later on. 

“Oh I use placeholders all the time. I’ll just leave something really simple in place so I can fix something else in the project and run it to see how it performs, ”said Daphne K.

CD Projekt Red’s latest offering is continuing to receive more and more updates that will hopefully smooth out the game experience sometime in the future.🔳