Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most anticipated games ever and was finally released in late 2020, on Dec 10th. Developed by CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk is an open-world, story-based action RPG game. It was first announced in May of 2012 and the first trailers for the game surfaced on the internet in Jan 2013. It took eight years of development, anticipation, wait and delays for it to finally make it to the consumer’s hands. So, the question which now arises is ‘Was the wait really worth it?’ The answer here is somewhat not delightful to certain fanboys of the title. To be a game that is loved and enjoyed widely, certain aspects needs to be fulfilled. Like the impact of the Storyline, the graphical quality of the game, minor details on the map, developer support, bugs affecting performance, overall gameplay, etc. And in this particular case, there are a lot of things to consider. As just after a week of the initial release, Sony Interactive Entertainment has decided to remove the game from their PlayStation Store until further notice.
A little backstory, Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that takes a futuristic swing and sets place in Night City, in future America. The main protagonist of this title is named ‘V’, who is a young mercenary outlaw looking to put a name out there for himself. The game is running on CDPR’s REDengine4 and the expectations of the hardware required for it to run properly were a little high beforehand. But when CDPR announced the minimum system requirement (PC) for the game to run at 1080p resolution with low graphical settings, some expectations got a new life and hope. To run the game at such target resolution and settings, it would require an Intel Core i5-3570k or FX-8310 paired with 64bit Win 7 and Win 10 OS, 8 GB Ram, 3 GB of ram, and 70 GB of storage. But it was all good until it finally released and the performance of the game, even on some mid-end PC, was not ideally good or enjoyable. And even though the game is able to run properly on higher-end PCs and current generation consoles like PS5 and Xbox series X, the scenario for the last generation consoles is very and I mean really bad. Off the bag, the game is very poorly optimised for the base PS4 and Xbox One. The game is a hot mess and to achieve a playable experience the game has to be set to a comparatively undesirable spectrum of lower settings with many features like bloom, film grain, motion blur, etc. Still, then you will be welcomed with a not so pretty looking, blurry visual experience. We all know that the last generation Xbox and PlayStation are not on the similar scale of hardware greatness of that of the newer PS5 and Xbox Series X, so there shouldn’t be any expectations to have a similar performance with the same settings. But the issue is that the game looks sub-par to terrible and often underwhelming along with problems like low fps, sudden frame drops, frequent stutters and crashes accompanied by game-breaking bugs and glitches like NPCs not loading or appearing at improper places, vehicles flying in the air while entering, etc. these altogether just inversely affects the experience and seems less appealing to us gamers. Some demanding places in the game vastly decreases the frames per second while the last-gen consoles suffer the most and could hardly manage to maintain a proper stable 30 fps mark with frame rates dropping to the low 20s with overall irritating and jaggy gameplay.
But Is this supposed to happen? What is CD Projekt Red’s turn on this catastrophic event? Well according to Adam Kiciński, Joint CEO of CDPR, on a business call admitted that they were ‘too focused’ on releasing the game as soon as possible, which was fed by the previous three release delays these year on top of the already long eight years of the development process. This being their main concern, they ignored and underestimated the obvious possibility of poor performance and couldn’t implement the time to readjust and redefine the game for the last-gen consoles. Even though they have released an early and hefty patch for the game soon after the release, it still hadn’t helped much in the case of the poor PS4 and Xbox One.
SIE strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased Cyberpunk 2077 via PlayStation Store and want a refund. Please visit the following link to initiate the refund: https://t.co/DEZlC0LmUG.
— Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) December 18, 2020
The buggy, unoptimised mess is so bad that Sony Interactive Entertainment has recently announced, on their official statement the possible removal of the game from their store until any further notice and will even offer a full refund for Cyberpunk 2077 to the customers who have purchased the game from the official Sony’s PlayStation Store and that process will begin soon on confirmation of the purchase. A few more post-release patches are to be released and will hopefully stabilise the game to offer better playability and experience. Cyberpunk currently sits on a 9/10 on IGN, 7/10 on Steam, 54% on Metacritic, and a solid 3.3 star Google rating by 13126 public reviews (as of now). You get the point, right? We will keep you updated on further news related to this matter.
