Surprisingly,Cyberpunk 2077got pretty good reviews, scoring an 86 on Metacritic for PC. This is in spite of its buggy launch that was so bad itgot pulled from the PlayStation store, but those positive reviews are likely due to console copies being delayed to critics. The majority of issues were found in last-gen versions of the game, which were reviewed after release, scoring as low as three to four out of ten.
It was when gamers got their hands on these copies of Cyberpunk 2077 that backlash began, but CDPR’s vice president of PR and communication believes the negativity can be attributed to a trend.
RELATED:FIFA Owes Its Players Compensation
“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive,“Michał Platkow-Gilewski told GamesIndustry.biz. “Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn’t know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff. That took us a lot of time, but I don’t believe we were ever broken. We were always like: Let’s do this.”
Wherever you land on Cyberpunk 2077 now, its launch was a mess. Reviewers who got early access played on high-end PCs on a version that was significantly less buggy. Those on last-gen, however, met walls of game-breaking bugs and visual issues. There were evenreports of scenes giving people seizures,which CDPR responded to by saying, “We’re working on adding a separate warning in the game, aside from the one that exists in the [end-user license agreement].”
Sony pulled the game from storefronts eight days after launch, offering refunds to anyone who had already purchased it. Typically PlayStation doesn’t even let you refund games if you so much as hit the download button. Bugs caused genitals to clip through pants,dildos to spawn disproportionately,models to disappear, leaving behind nothing but clothes, cars to fall out of the sky, tiny trees to cover the map (even indoors), cars to crash into everything, the game to crash itself constantly, and more. There’s a reason it’s so notorious that it has become the go-to example of disastrous launches.
However, Platkow-Gilewski wants to win back gamers' trust, and is “personally not happy with how things turned out.” He hopes that the new expansion, which is also overhauling the base game, will make up for that launch three years after the fact, making Cyberpunk 2077 live up to nearly a decade of promises.
