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CDPR CEO Blames 'In-Game Streaming' For Cyberpunk's Console Problems (arstechnica.com) 114

CD Projekt Red is still trying to contain the damage from widespread reports of major technical problems in the versions of Cyberpunk 2077 released for the PS4 and Xbox One last month. From a report: To that end, studio co-founder and CEO Marcin Iwinski today tweeted a video message seeking to explain the internal situation leading up to the problematic launch. "Despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet," Iwinski said in the message. "I, and the entire leadership team, are deeply sorry for this, and this video is me publicly owning up to that." The core of the problem, Iwinski said, was the "in-game streaming system" that Cyberpunk 2077 used to "feed" content and game mechanics to the engine without frequent breaks for loading. That system had to be "constantly improved" for last-gen consoles during development, Iwinski said, in order to keep up with the "epic" look of the PC version (which saw its graphics and other assets scaled down to work on more limited, older console hardware).

"Things did not look super difficult at first, [but] I think that time has proven we underestimated the task," Iwinski said. "Because the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of old-gen consoles is what it is, it constantly challenged us." winski was less direct about why these problems with the console versions weren't discovered and either fixed or delayed before launch. "Every change and improvement needed to be tested, and as it turned out, our testing did not show a big part of the issues you experienced while playing the game," Iwinski said. He added that communication problems caused by the team working from home amid COVID-related restrictions meant some issues got lost over video calls or emails. "We saw significant improvements each and every day leading up to release [and] really thought we'd deliver in the day zero [version on consoles]," he said.

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CDPR CEO Blames 'In-Game Streaming' For Cyberpunk's Console Problems

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  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:01PM (#60964380)

    It's a hard pill to swallow, but I think Cyberpunk 2077 should use drop support for all last gen consoles. It's just making things for all the platforms worse, trying to make the game fit into the constraints of older consoles. I say this as someone who wants to play the game, and does not have any of the newer consoles yet.

    It would cost a lot of money, but in the near term even it would make Cyberpunk 2077 a much better game if they could take all those resources trying to fix last gen consoles, and put them into other game engine bugs.

    It's more than a little ironic that a game about the future, has been drug down trying to support the past.

    • The only way to "fix" it is to break the game by deleting half its objects or by making the game look even worse. I don't think end users are going to accept either of those so yeah, I suggest they drop it permanently. They knew the bandwidth of a mechanical hard drive and/or optical drive!
    • It might make the game better overall, but the reality is they are a business, in it for the profit, making the best quality game is secondary to that. Abandoning half their player base to appease the other half is not a good long term way of making money or engendering trust. Having said that the PC version has plenty of problems to, so while not as bad as the console version it is hardly a picture of health either.
      • It might make the game better overall, but the reality is they are a business, in it for the profit,Z

        Profits long-term are based on goodwill earned or lost now.

        Everyone for some reason choses to tie the notion of profits to short term actions, but profit is a nebulous term not so easily tied to single vectors.

        Doing the right thing now would mean the next game they release could expect larger volumes of pre-orders than if they leave things floundering for months.

  • The problem that was stated the product was rushed to finish, to the day before release.
    Normally when coding a large product, I don't go bang it is done!. I coding to a point where I go, well I can't think of anything else I need to code... I guess I am done. Then it goes to QA where they find out what I did miss.
    Having a tight deadline, on a project, that means they are just knocking off items to fix on a list. Often not fully thinking about all the extra things that can happen.

    • Re:Rush to finish. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FunkSoulBrother ( 140893 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:25PM (#60964492)

      In my experience QA is usually also being pressured to approve the project, and its usually kicked out the door without their (honest) approval at some deadline juncture.

      Then QA are scapegoated when it breaks in the field.

      • This also seems to be the reverse problem with Duke Nukem Forever. Where the game took so long to develop that it was out of date (In terms of game play especially) that taking all that time to make sure everything was perfect, failed to meet the objectives.

        • But that wasn't a QA thing. They'd just randomly decide to change the game engine midway through development and start over becase of... reasons.

      • Isn't that what the CEO did anyhow? Made a public "apology" that just threw QA under the bus and claimed that there was no way they could have known what these bugs were.

        Yet also made sure nobody could review it or even see the game early. Hmm.

        • I've watched a few videos about this apology vs. some other information that came to light in the last few weeks. I don't remember all the details, but some that stuck were:

          a) The game was announced in 2013, but development only began in 2016. Meanwhile, resources were being used elsewhere, so that for 3 years there was a lot of hype but nothing behind it;

          b) 2 years (2020 release) isn't enough time to make a game of that complexity. Developers were talking about it being ready for release in 2022;

          c) The tal

          • I think there is some merit to their 'in-game streaming system' claims for some of the visual glitches. But, when you have representatives stating this is a 'living city' and you'll see people that live their lives through the day/night cycle then the reality is that most of these are just characters on a short walk cycle you do feel a bit jibbed. The idea that your story will take place in a world that is a simulated city is great, but that takes a lot of time and work to make happen.

            There are a bunch of j

      • If you are a QA person and you buckle to pressure to change your review/approvals then you suck as a QA person, this is a constant for all QA people, very few projects are perfect or on time and QA is ALWAYS under pressure to buckle. As a QA person it is your responsibility to not buckle.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, it seems they even dropped significant parts of the story. On the plus side, they pissed off enough people that hopefully they will not pull such crap again...

      • I am surprised with someone with a such a low Slashdot ID would say that.

        They made money, probably more money releasing it on time, then they would have made taking an extra month to fix the issues, and releasing a better game.

        For Video Games in 2021 there is a big area of brokenness that can happen before it really hits profits. Especially as it is common to update the game later on.

        • I believe they sold somewhere around 8 million units, pre-orders I believe. 60*8M = 480M dollars. If they would have held out another month or two, they would still have made a ton of money AND had a better gaming experience.
          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I believe they sold somewhere around 8 million units, pre-orders I believe. 60*8M = 480M dollars. If they would have held out another month or two, they would still have made a ton of money AND had a better gaming experience.

            With a good, finished game, they would probably have sold even more, albeit spread over a larger time. But I expect they would have had to shift at least for another half year. Still, it would have been worth it, especially longer-term.

            • Yeah, the Witcher 3 reportedly sold quite a bit through a long time. It even got quite a push when the Netflix series was released. I think they underestimated the amount of time needed to do what they wanted to do and then someone of the higher-ups decided it wouldn't be delayed any more.
              • by gweihir ( 88907 )

                Pretty much. Apparently the CDPR "leadership" is now blaming QA for their bad decision making. How I hate people where it is never their fault, no matter how badly they screw up.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Oh yes, they made money. But they lost Sony and they lost a _lot_ of reputation. Sure, by the demented short-term-profit mind-set, they did exactly what they should have done, but that is it. Basically they traded a few more sales to the clueless against pissing off a lot of fans and marking themselves as unreliable to publishers. That is not sustainable. They will probably lose their best designers and coders after this disaster as well. That is not sustainable either.

          Also, what is that about my low ID? Yo

        • They made money

          And they are at risk of losing 10% of their revenue to the Polish regulator. They've lost $4bn USD in market cap in the past 3 months. Hopefully they'll have some zloty left to pay their lawyers because they are on the receiving end of multiple class action lawsuits. To say nothing of their previously solid reputation they pissed against the wall.

          If you think this was a win for them simply because it made money you're woefully misinformed.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            I fully agree on that. It will take a long time to repair that damage. If they can do it at all.

    • Re:Rush to finish. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @07:45PM (#60966152)

      Nah the problem is much deeper than that. You can see there were some very deep prioritisation issues in CDPR. It's hard to say a game that has been in development for 7 years can have been "rushed" as being their main problem.

      There's some insane intention to detail that some people have worked on which would all point to mis-prioritisation of work. A street busker playing one of the songs from the game sound track displays accurate fingering. A convoluted set of steps can lead you to adopting a cat in your apartment. Someone spent time modelling different sized cocks for the main character. In your interaction with Brick there are 6 possible different outcomes each with custom animations and dialogue. Each weapon has multiple different reload animations you wouldn't even notice if I didn't just say it. Enemies have a whole set of secondary animations for how to continue attacking you if they lose a limb. The car dashboards are more interactive and look better than those in many racing games.

      Someone sat down and made all this. This detail. Someone dedicated time to this while core game mechanics (such as why food shows up on the minimap) or whole quests (ever wonder why you start as a corpo with a mission only to never get to play that mission and instead just get punched in the face) were cut. Hell the effort that went into just 2 of Brick's possible outcomes could have gone into many hours of playtesting unearthing a whole trove of bugs.

      The game wasn't rushed. It was mismanaged.

  • Nice to hear an honest admission. Pity he thinks our culture uses apologies for anything but hate ammo. Sometimes I ponder writing an essay on the matter. Be kind of depressing, but there are interesting flavors of apology weaponisation to talk about.

    • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:33PM (#60964748)

      Yeah... it was still bullshit.
      The in-game asset streaming might be one of the issues which plagues last-gen consoles. Fine. But how about the rest?
      - All NPCs are zombies.
      - You can't interact with most NPCs in any meaningful way.
      - All cars follow preset paths and that's it. You stand in front of one, it's going to sit there forever, with all other cars queuing up behind it, the end.
      - Police spawns out of thin air, usually behind you, even in closed quarters with one entry, sometimes they spawn inside walls.
      - There is no police chasing, you move a certain distance and they suddenly lose interest.
      - NPCs have two reactions to gunfighting and such: cower or run.
      - NPC dialogues (from one NPC to the other) are stupid. Female NPC consoles male NPC crying on a bench: "It's hot today". I'm sure that made him feel better.
      - Let me know when you see a NPC on a motorcycle in free roam.
      - Crafting system is cumbersome, crafting/dismantling recipes are placeholders. Just buy a bunch of soda cans and voila.

      Those are just off the top of my head, and they have nothing to do with graphical engine bugs and issues. They are all (or should have been, rather) an integral part of the game's design / mechanics, and none of them are there.

    • His apology was anything but an apology. He never said he was sorry for selling an unusable product - he never said it shouldn't have been released. He explained why the bugs occurred, but never even explained why they didn't show up in any reasonable amount of QA. Instead, he said he knowingly shipped a shit product but expected a last minute hotpatch to fix it.

      It also was a lot of BS about how great the game is: "so much greatness old hardware cannot keep up" type bullshit. And glossing over the nume

      • I don't think I have ever seen an apology so well crafted it can't be turned into hate ammo. Your response is the perennial favorite, but even if he'd ticked the boxes you state here, you'd just have gone one spot down the list.

        "X happened because N"
        "The bastard didn't actually apologize."

        "I am sorry for what happened."
        "The bastard didn't even say what they were sorry about."

        "I am sorry for X."
        "The bastard didn't even talk about Y or Z."

        "I am sorry for X, Y, and Z."
        "The bastard didn't even say what they'd d

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Apologies aren't about feelings, what the fuck are you talking about? They're about expressing that what happened was wrong and they'd like to avoid doing it again. Often, this has to be accompanied by analysis of what went wrong and how to fix it.

          Unless you're going to fix your behavior, I do not care about understanding why you did it in the first place.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • No, claiming what you did is right or wrong is a statement about intention and future action. I don't care about your acknowledgement of objective moral truth - I care that you want not to repeat actions. It's not emotional, it's predictive. For instance, based on the shit you're spewing now, I would know not to associate with you socially.

              If you wack my hand with a hammer when I'm holding a nail, whether I ever hold a nail for you again is likely to be determined by whether you laugh at me or apologize

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      While I appreciate an apology, I think they are apologizing entirely for the wrong things.

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Interesting maybe but the TL:DR will be never apologize.

    • Nice to hear an honest admission.

      I assume that is a joke.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:11PM (#60964422)
    it's just as unplayable. This is more or less what happens when you try to port a next gen title to last gen. Worse the PS4 & XBone are really, really underpowered. They're old AMD Jaguar cores. Those were always kinda crap, and its a miracle what programmers have managed to do with them.

    Honestly if there weren't so many supply problems I don't think it'd have mattered, any more than it did when SoM shipped on PS3 in an unplayable state.
    • by flink ( 18449 )

      it's just as unplayable. This is more or less what happens when you try to port a next gen title to last gen.

      This isn't a backport though, or at least shouldn't have been. This game's been in development for 7 years. There's no way they had specs for next gen consoles when they started or even when they were significantly into development. The next gen stuff should have been a sprinkling of enhancements layered on top of a PS4/XBOne game, not a backport. This smells like they couldn't get satisfactory performance with the level of graphical fidelity they hyped, so they pivoted to positioning it as a "next gen"

      • that's the problem. The PS4/XBone CPUs were a couple years old when it launched with basically RX470 levels of performance on the GPU front. On a modern PC a GTX 1060 6gb is pretty standard stuff (about 20-30% faster than what's in a PS4) with much higher levels of performance not uncommon. And the CPU there's no comparison. A modern i5 or i7 (by "modern" I mean like a 4670 or a 7500) runs rings around both console.

        My guess is they targeted "next gen" consoles years ago (expecting a 4-5 year life cycle
      • by teg ( 97890 )

        it's just as unplayable. This is more or less what happens when you try to port a next gen title to last gen.

        This isn't a backport though, or at least shouldn't have been. This game's been in development for 7 years. There's no way they had specs for next gen consoles when they started or even when they were significantly into development. The next gen stuff should have been a sprinkling of enhancements layered on top of a PS4/XBOne game, not a backport. This smells like they couldn't get satisfactory performance with the level of graphical fidelity they hyped, so they pivoted to positioning it as a "next gen" game to paper over deficiencies in performance on the originally targeted platforms. The fact that they didn't let reviewers see the console version until after the game was released is very telling.

        They probably developed on PC, and then tried to make it run on consoles... Traditionally, CDPR has been a "PC first" company.

        That said, even if they focused more on next gen and the PS4 Pro/XBox One X (the mid life updates of the last generation), they obviously knew how it performed on the oldest consoles as well. Testing gives information - it does not fix things - and the reaction blew it. Instead of delaying while trying to fix - or just dropping the original PS4 / Xbox One from the compatibility li

    • This is more or less what happens when you try to port a next gen title to last gen.

      But it's not just a performance/streaming thing, yes it's annoying when textures pop in like that but that's not the real issue with the game. It's even on the PC version where you have things like NPCs stuck in a t-pose (funnily enough there's an NPC named T-Bug) or the short walk loop of Night City "citizens" versus the promise of a bustling city simulation of inhabitants going about their days. Just the general lack of depth of any of it compared to what was originally promised.

      Even if they fixed all the

      • But it's not just a performance/streaming thing, yes it's annoying when textures pop in like that but that's not the real issue with the game.

        LOL textures? What was actually happening on consoles was whole buildings were missing, whole highways just disappeared from under you, you enter rooms and wonder if you're watching the second matrix film when you're suddenly in a void.

        The rest of your post is a legitimate criticism from your legitimate desire. Personally I found it a great game, but I am a fan of well written semi on rail story telling and don't feel the need to compare it to GTA as much as say Fallout. In that regard I think the idea of d

        • LOL textures? What was actually happening on consoles was whole buildings were missing, whole highways just disappeared from under you, you enter rooms and wonder if you're watching the second matrix film when you're suddenly in a void.

          Ok, I haven't actually played on the last gen consoles or really looked into aside from seeing the texture pop issues.

          The rest of your post is a legitimate criticism from your legitimate desire.

          I agree, I like the concept of a semi-on-rails "interactive movie" kind of game especially one with cinematics and a story like Cyberpunk but I guess it was because it was supposed to be an "open world" game which is why I compared it to GTA where you can play the story and you can go off and explore the world. The problem is whenever you explored that world the world was a bit of a mess. Wi

          • Yeah there's some absolutely hilarious gaffs. Check out this part of an example video: https://youtu.be/omyoJ7onNrg?t... [youtu.be] It was pretty damn abysmal on consoles.

            I honestly look forward to playing this game again in maybe 3-4 months. We'll see how much better it is. Here's hoping the promised DLC adds back some cut content.

            • Totally agree, I hope it's a "no man's sky" and we get an awesome game in the next few months of patches.
  • by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:12PM (#60964430)

    It must be not easy at all to push all those things in those cores that literally have worse IPC than the ARM stuff in the nintendo switch.

    • IPC is not the limiting factor here. You can do wonders dialling graphics down, what you can't deal with is assumptions made on the underlying I/O that readies resources to be processed. I mention this in the PS5 announcement months ago, we can expect to see more of this in the future. The PS5 demonstration of no load times and realtime streaming of data from storage to the GPU is something that a game designer needs to either adopt early in the design stage (and drop support for hardware incapable of it),

      • by Z80a ( 971949 )

        The CPU is being hammered hard on the PS4/Xbox one versions of the game.
        Any scene with too much NPCs being processed, onscreen or not throw the frame rate down hard.

        • And that is something manageable / optimisable. NPC's are procedural and their density is actually adjustable in the PC versions of the game. Trying to stream the world from storage on the other hand is an unfixable shitshow. What are they going to do, release a world with loading screens, or add fog so you can only see 100m in front of you?

  • Let's take a ride in the spaceship past the moon and stars
    All over the universe drop by the dagobah
    Upon my intersteller knee we can bounce with glee... huh huh huh
    From star to star don't matter how far we are
    E.T.! The lizard creature and me
    Neil Diamond's little E.T.! I love you E.T.!
    E.T.! I love you, E.T....

  • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:19PM (#60964462)
    CDPR's response to just about any negative coverage has been to say it's just the console releases, everything else is fine, and the console releases being bugged weren't their fault and they couldn't see the bugs in testing. No. The console releases were certainly far worse, but the PC release was not of an acceptable quality at release either, nor was it even after the first round of patches. It's still not. They made promises going back years that never made it into the game, they lied about the state of the game right up to and even after its release, and their management has still failed to just come out and admit they fucked up, blaming everyone and everything but themselves for their failures.

    Crowbcat [youtube.com] has a good no commentary video that illustrates the absolute shitshow this game was. There are probably more in-depth videos on the topic, but I appreciated how this particular video primarily just used CDPR's own marketing versus actual footage of the game to damn them.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's a pretty lame excuse anyway. For example the PS5 has a very fast SSD designed for streaming game assets.

      It isn't a new challenge either, games were doing this decades ago. Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast streamed the level off disc, and there are probably earlier examples.

      • by iampiti ( 1059688 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:53PM (#60964620)
        They didn't complain about the PS5 storage system. They were referring to that of the PS4. Anyway, that might the main reason it performs so badly on the old gen of consoles but they decided to release it on them so it's on CD Project to make sure it works reasonably well there.
      • It's a pretty lame excuse anyway. For example the PS5 has a very fast SSD designed for streaming game assets.

        The PS4 version of the game works perfectly fine on the PS5, at least as good as the PC version does. Same with the Xbox Series X.

        It isn't a new challenge either

        You've not played the game or you wouldn't be comparing the streaming being done in Cyberpunk 2077 to the streaming done in any other multiplatform game so far. I say multiplatform since the PS5 has a couple of titles which outdo it.

    • I even read that CDPR's said "The cat ate my source code" as another excuse for such buggy product.
    • Absolutely true. It's not just the console version. There are also severe problems in the PC version. For me, using a Razer, it's unplayable. It won't even recognize normal keys. Basic stuff just does not work. Very disappointing.

    • They made promises going back years that never made it into the game...

      So basically, this game is the new No Man's Sky?

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        They made promises going back years that never made it into the game...

        So basically, this game is the new No Man's Sky?

        Maybe. No Man's Sky apparently turned out reasonably well in the end. Three or four years later. I doubt that will be happening with Cyberpunk 2077. I am so glad I refunded this lemon immediately.

      • When No Man's Sky launched it worked. It was missing most of the promised features but the game actually worked. They had a working base to build on and kept incrementally improving the game. That is really different than something launching this broken.

    • by Calydor ( 739835 )

      My copy of the game on Steam crashes at least 10% of the time while displaying the CD Projekt Red bird in the first five seconds of the intro movie. Apparently the distortion that happens isn't just recorded but is an actual render, and ... well, it makes my graphics driver crash and restart, killing the game.

      That is just not acceptable behavior.

    • If you were correct then Steam's reviews of the game wouldn't be mostly positive. Truth is that this launch is a repeat of Skyrim. Worked well on most systems, but on the PS3 it should have been delayed or canceled. I've played for about 60 hours with my wife watching. We both agree that there have been very few game-breaking bugs. Almost Zero. There was one where the autosave clipped me through the floor when it loaded. A minor bug with a quest that wasn't designed for me to stealth kill everyone. Had to l
    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @03:13PM (#60965032)
      but the PC reviews I'm seeing it looks like a pretty normal big budget RPG release. In line with what Bethesda regularly does. I mean, dear lord Fallout 4 was crap at release. And anyone who's played vanilla Morrowind should know how buggered a game can be.

      These games are often played for years and years after release. Under those conditions I can't get mad at a buggy release. Heck, the game is supposedly Ok on PS5/XBone2. It's the PS4/XBone1 that are a complete shit show.
      • In line with what Bethesda regularly does

        Yes. In line with Bethesda. This isn't Bethesda. This is CDPR. The industry expected more precisely because they have a history of not being Bethesda. You say "Fallout 4", but you didn't say "The Witcher 3", and there's a reason you didn't say "The Witcher 3" because it was the kind of polished game we expected CDPR to deliver... not perfect, but polished to a very enjoyable shine.

    • I've had the game crash maybe half a dozen times now with close to 200 hours on it. And I'm not using a very fancy PC. Most of the PC is 5+ years old with a GTX 960, and a NVMe SSD that I added last year. I've had to reload a save to fix a broken quest once or twice. I managed to find a way to fall through the world once while exploring an area that was clearly not intended for play. I'm not surprised content is missing that was supposed to be in it, but that has been part of game development for as long as

    • Yes and no. 2 days after release with the 1.04 patch the PC version of the game was essentially playable and enjoyable (though 2 side quests remained unplayable due to bugs). It was still a buggy mess, but the focus is on the console version because the PC game just had bugs. The consoles remained unplayable for a long long time. Even now there are still constant crashes in the PS4 version while the PC version is plays quite well despite bugs and glitches.

      Also I suggest the youtube channel "Direct compariso

    • Crowbcat [youtube.com] has a good no commentary video that illustrates the absolute shitshow this game was.

      Most of the horrible bugs in that footage is from the PS4 version not the PC version which kind of goes against the point you were making. The PC did not have content loading issues at any point which made the game look as horrid as it does in the video.

      Sorry for the double post. Watched the video after I replied.

  • by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:27PM (#60964502)

    Jim Sterling covered this yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    I thought the same thing as Jim when I heard it - why the hell is Iwinski throwing the QA team under the bus? No matter how you slice it, CDPR looks bad...

    Iwinski is right, their QA team really didn't catch this beforehand: So, CDPR has sacked all their good QA people, or simply hasn't hired enough? CDPR looks bad by having terrible QA.

    Iwinski is wrong, their QA team did catch it beforehand and the C-Level didn't listen: So, why does CDPR have a QA team at all if you're just going to hand-wave it away? CDPR looks bad because C-Level acts like they can wish bugs away. Also, Iwinski is wrong.

    Iwinski is wrong, their QA team did catch it beforehand, C-Level did listen, but decided to release anyway and patch it later: So then, who came up with the three week delay? Certainly no one in QA if the title is still problematic two months and two massive patches later. CDPR looks bad because C-Level didn't give a reasonable timeline and release an actually-finished product. Also, Iwinski is wrong.

    From the minute I heard there was a three week delay as close to launch as it was, I knew that the game wasn't going to be worth owning for the first three months. It's got potential, and I look forward to playing it, but when more and more games seem to be released with the mindset of "release the beta, patch if it sells well enough to pay for the extra development", it came as no surprise that the RTM release of the game was in its current shape.

    • They obviously knew it wasn't ready. The deadline they didn't want to lose for anything in the world was obviously Christmas, that's why I guess it was launched when it was.
    • Additionally: They look bad because they hired a C-level that acts like that. And let him act that way too.
      That is a coprorat culture bug, that is much harder to fix with a fake apology

    • So, CDPR has sacked all their good QA people

      Either that or they were busy coding animations for accurate guitar fingering by a busker, or creating a hidden easter egg that nets you your very own pet cat.

      It's not a QA issue as much as it is a complete management / prioritisation issue. There's an insane level of detail and care that went into building this world. The game may be more enjoyable if those resources were instead directed somewhat towards QA or actually finishing main quest story lines.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      QA is always blamed. :(

  • That is not enough QA
    Which is right after being poorly designed and right before needing a shitton of updates
    • The root of the problem is: Due dates.

      It's not a chair that you had made already, and where you know how long every step will take.
      It is not an assembly line product. (Yet, I guess.)
      It is creative work!
      Have you ever heard of a painter having a due date? Or an independent musician?
      Art can be instant. It can also take long. Or not finish at all because it was a bad idea. It's not like you can crank a cog and an idea will pop out.

      The date is *always* arbitrary. Usually only based on "when the money runs out".

      A

  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @12:44PM (#60964578)

    "We saw significant improvements each and every day leading up to release [and] really thought we'd deliver in the day zero [version on consoles],"

    ...yet we sold it to you suckers anyway, knowing full well it didn't live up to expectation.

    "Owning up" indeed...

  • meant some issues got lost over video calls or emails.

    You mean to tell me this company didn't have a central repository of bugs/issues which needed fixed or at least looked into? That no one on these calls thought to write down these bugs/issues and work on them or have others look into them? You mean they didn't follow basic procedures for tracking bugs and issues?

    Were they following Microsoft's lead and releasing something into the wild and letting the paying customers do the debugging?
    • by Depili ( 749436 )
      For many parts it actually was the customers fixing their mess, since as the gog version has no DRM it is possible to edit the executables. This has been used to bring support for input assistance programs for people that aren't right handed wasd-players, upped the core utilization count on amd processors and allowing full key remapping in the game to name few of the biggest improvements.
  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Tuesday January 19, 2021 @01:27PM (#60964732)

    closing the well after little Timmy has fallen in and drowned.

    • Well yes of course you close the well. That's a good thing, it's an essential thing. Can you imagine if someone came and drank the water with a corpse floating in it.

  • Consoles suck. PCMR!!1

    • Actually only console from 2013 suck. If you played the PS4 release on the PS5 you actually ended up with the same experience as a PC. ... except you played the game with a controller like some kind of monster instead of a mouse and keyboard the way the lord intended.

  • The game is littered with issues on all platforms. Cars that drive around half in the ground. Every NPC in view doing T poses for no reason at all. 2D trees just randomly appearing everywhere. NPCs who get stuck getting around the environment forcing you to restart the mission. These are not generational issues. It's signs of a shoddy product. GTA, RDR2, Skyrim, all far better done products. They were simply out of their league with what they thought they could do.

    • I played through the game on PC, and I'll never forget the final scene. No spoliers in case anyone cares.

      V was walking to his destination in a somber, what should have been emotional finale to the game. But for some reason, his jaw was fully open. I'm talking snake-that-unhinged-for-a-snack kind of open. And that's how he walked until he turned around and it snapped back into place.

      It was perhaps the most fitting end to a buggy as hell experience. I learned the most important lesson of all:

    • Nah not out of their league, just rushed. What you're describing are a few minor and actually easily fixable bugs. They were just pushed 3 months too early.

      But calling the consoles "littered with issues" just shows you haven't played it on console. Imaging you're driving on a highway that suddenly isn't there, but the supports for it are, or the building you walk into is missing, or you enter a room to find you're outside 100m above the ground floating. That's the kind of shit the consoles were doing. The

  • Put game assets on a cloud and stream them as needed, in addition to the disk. Then you have a steady bandwidth draw from the disk supplemented by all the bandwidth available to the NIC.
  • Because the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of old-gen consoles is what it is, it constantly challenged us.

    Developers probably used local gigabit networks and pristine systems / conditions, etc... rather than setups more common to the average end-user. Like the days of dial-up when people would send email with photos at original scale and it would take forever to download, but the sender wasn't aware 'cause everything was fine at home over their 100Mbit (or even 10Mbit) network ...

    • The streaming part is referring to streaming data from hard disk, not from LAN or WAN, to update the game world seamlessly, instead of using loading screens. On old consoles that hard disk is usually an old spinning HDD instead of an SSD, and the CPU power is puny compared to modern CPUs.

  • I don't even own the game, but does this mean that they're now offering no-questions-asked refunds?

    • They have been for 3 weeks already. They even got Sony to offer refunds despite Sony's lack of a refund policy.

  • The creditors weren't knocking at their doors, and I can't imagine that the top people were unaware of how much was wrong with what they were going to call "done". Gamers are no strangers to maddening delays, and laughably incorrect schedules for releases. Yes, it would have been a blow to egos to call for another long delay, and that would have been a tacit admission of having been spinning a yarn to the world about the state of the game prior to the admission. So what? Customers rage cancelling their or
  • The only thing stupidder and worse than CDPR is GDPR.

    And don't take that as a compliment.

  • He added that communication problems caused by the team working from home amid COVID-related restrictions meant some issues got lost over video calls or emails.

    Have you never heard of issue and project tracking software? All of the communication should have been logged as tickets and prioritized.

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