Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most-anticipated video games of the year was released last week. A dystopian romp around a Blade Runner-inspired city, it had all the ingredients for a perfect storm of hype: it’s been nearly a decade in the making; its creator, Warsaw’s CD Projekt Red, was behind one of the greatest games of the last decade (The Witcher 3 – think Game of Thrones but grimier); it stars Keanu Reeves, who is as popular with gamers as he is with everybody else. Eight million people had pre-ordered and paid for the game before it came out. But since 10 December, it’s all gone horribly wrong.
On launch day, the reviews were good – great, even. Many critics praised the fictional Night City’s realism, its striking skyscraping architecture and grubby alleys; they loved the invigorating gunplay, ballsy characters and neon swagger. Some expressed reservations about the game’s rather adolescent tone and its eagerness to objectify women’s bodies – neither of which were a surprise to anyone who’d been keeping an eye on the game’s marketing.
But soon those early reviews gave way to complaints from irritated players. The game they had waited years for was faulty, the code clearly unfinished. Bizarre glitches were impeding people’s adventures in Night City, or the game was crashing so often that it was barely playable. Several scenes were reported to have caused epileptic seizures, prompting the game’s maker to tweet: “We’re working on adding a separate warning in the game, aside from the one that exists in the [end-user licence agreement]. Regarding a more permanent solution, Dev team is currently exploring that and will be implementing it as soon as possible.”
On 18 December, Sony pulled the game from sale on its digital PlayStation store and offered refunds to anyone who’d purchased it – an exceptionally rare event that I can only recall happening once before, when the game Ashes Cricket 2013 was so fantastically broken that it was removed from sale and never seen again. The current situation is a costly one for Sony and CD Projekt Red, both of which are now missing out on sales in the pre-Christmas period.
Technical bugs and glitches are a fact of life for video games, the results of an intensely complicated development process involving hundreds of artists, programmers and animators working together on a gigantic, rapidly updating program. In Cyberpunk 2077, these range from hilarious (a man standing on a street corner casually smoking a pistol instead of a cigar, a pedestrian falling to the ground and transmuting into a patio table) to offputting (characters randomly disappearing or walking through scenery) to infuriating (random crashes that interrupt your play or stop your progress, slowdown that makes a game unpleasant to look at). Cyberpunk suffers from them all, even on the advanced PCs it’s been designed for – but they’re especially bad on the less powerful Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Early reviewers missed these issues because CD Projekt only gave them access to the more stable PC version of the game before release – and under a strict non-disclosure agreement that prohibited showing any actual footage. This attempt to control the message has badly backfired, making it appear that the developer was trying to conceal the game’s problems, and infuriating players. Until it can be fixed, which will cost yet more expensive months of development time, it won’t be on sale on PlayStation again.
Cyberpunk 2077’s creators have issued a series of apologies and promises to make things right. It might seem impossible that a game this prominent, that’s been in development for this long, with such a lot of money behind it (game studio owners I’ve spoken to estimate that it cost more than £300m to make), could launch in such a state. It certainly points towards problems at CD Projekt, whose staff must surely be exhausted after months of overtime during the pandemic; the game had already been delayed twice since April to allow more time for improvement.
But in the end, no doubt feeling the pressure from its shareholders, CD Projekt released it in an unfinished state, taking the gamble that players would stick with it and that it could be fixed relatively quickly. Another delay would presumably have been even more costly, with millions already spent on TV advertising and worldwide marketing. The result is an exceptionally high-profile controversy, ill will from players and a rout on the company’s stock price.
It is an indictment of the way the games industry currently works that this kind of thing is happening more often. I’m thinking about Bethesda’s Fallout 76, a game about surviving with other players in the ruins of retro-futurist America after nuclear war, which launched in October 2018 in a notoriously appalling state. (Two years later, it’s been improved and updated into an entirely different game, quite a good one.) I also have traumatic memories of trying to review Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, when the character I’d spent a week driving around and dressing up in flash clothes suddenly vanished without trace because of technical issues. It’s now one of the most-played and most profitable games in history.
Thanks to online updates, in 2020, a video game’s launch is not its destiny. Despite these first weeks of controversy, in another three or six months, Cyberpunk 2077 will probably be fixed, and it may even end up in the black. But a fiasco like this leaves a mark on the reputation of a developer, even if it does eventually end up making good. This year, people have been even more desperate than usual for an escape from reality, and paying £50 for a game that barely works feels like an extra kick in the guts.
