Opinion: Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles is inexcusable

I can hear the comments now. “You should’ve played it on PC!” “All games have bugs!” “They were rushed by fans!” Truth is, there is no excuse for Cyberpunk 2077. The way this game’s release was handled, specifically on consoles, is downright insulting. If you are enjoying the game, more power to you. I love that for you and I hope it continues to only get even better for you over time as it’s updated and gets free DLC.

The problem is, not everyone is having a good time with it. It’s not just that the game didn’t live up to some unmeetable expectations by fans. Cyberpunk 2077 is busted in a way I’ve never seen in my time covering games. We’ve seen some truly awful launches this generation. Assassin’s Creed Unity, Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Batman: Arkham Knight on PC, Fallout 76, the list goes on. We’re no strangers to games that were pushed out the door too soon.

Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a case of a game that was just a bit undercooked. This was like having raw meat put in a microwave for a few minutes and serving it. I have no doubt that the teams working on this game really did care about it. But it simply isn’t ready and isn’t just something you can quickly fix by the looks of it.

The biggest defense I’ve seen is that players should’ve seen this coming. Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development for so long, that it’s expected to run horribly on 7 year old hardware. Outside of the obvious examples of huge, beautiful games on Xbox One and PS4, this makes no sense. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 but it wasn’t in active development that entire time. It wasn’t until after The Witcher 3’s final expansion was released in 2016 that CD Projekt Red got to work on pre-production for the game.

According to Room 8 Studio, an outsourcing and porting studio who has worked on over 350 games like Black Ops 4, Control, What Remains of Edith Finch, and even CD Projekt Red’s Gwent game, here’s the definition of pre-production.

“Pre-production is an initial planning phase of a game development project, which focuses on creating core concepts and writing initial design documents, that describe the future game.

“Game creation starts way before its production stage and this pre-production stage influences the overall success and team spirit a lot. Pre-production generally consumes a portion of the amount of time you plan to spend actually developing a game. For example, 2-year project pre-production could take about 1-3 months for a mobile title, but this estimate may vary greatly depending on the genre. What’s important, adding a pre-production phase cuts the overall production time since it streamlines all processes.”

So, really, Cyberpunk 2077 was in proper development for about 3 – 4 years. That’s not too abnormal for a game of its caliber. It’s less than some other giant games like Red Dead Redemption 2 which took 5 years. It’s not like the technology has ballooned over nearly a decade, leading to a wildly disproportionate difference in PC and console versions of games. PC was always going to be the best place to play the game. It doesn’t give CD Projekt Red an excuse to launch a game that runs at 720p and can go down to 15 -20 FPS depending on where you play.

The game was also marketed HEAVILY on consoles, with Xbox doing a lot heavy lifting. They had two massive showings at Xbox’s E3 conference in 2018 and 2019, making it seem like this is a game that would be great on consoles and in-particular, Xbox. Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to release in April 2020, long before we had release dates or prices for the new consoles.

It was delayed to September, also before the release of the new consoles. Then to November, a week after the launch of the consoles. This was a game that planned to release on last-gen consoles many months before next-gen released. They knew full well this was something millions of people would play it on. In fact, 41% of their 8 million pre-orders were for consoles. That’s 3.28 million people they knew were planning to play on consoles on day one. They knew they had a lot of people to please.

They didn’t just quietly ignore this either. CD Projekt joint-CEO Adam Kaciński came out and said Cyberpunk 2077 runs “surprisingly good, I would say, for such a huge world.” They even went as far as to call it great, “So, we believe that the game is performing great on every platform.” While I’m primarily playing the game on Xbox Series X, where it is much more stable though still buggy and a bit ugly, I’ve also played it on Xbox One X. I can say it’s not “great “and is borderline unplayable.

This isn’t a game that just has some bugs, either. We’re all accustomed to bugs and as a reviewer, I try to be understanding of that. Cyberpunk 2077 is at another level. Cars will randomly explode or launch themselves in the air. Cars will faze out of existence while moving, leaving floating NPCs. You can fall through the map. I almost died from a chair. I even had an encounter where enemies attacked me in a place where they shouldn’t have spawned. My character was stripped of his weapons due to the mission I was playing and left to be shot to death like Scarface.

The best moves would’ve been to delay the last-gen versions or cancel them as a whole. There’s the argument of upsetting shareholders, which is understandable but at the same time, if you’re openly encouraging refunds because you’re game is so broken, is that a much better look?

CD Projekt Red lied to millions of people, knowing full well Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t going to be pretty. They may have apologized but it was only after they had achieved some record breaking sales. They actively hid the console version of the game from both consumers and reviewers, hoping the goodwill they earned over the years would carry them home. It worked. They sold 8 million copies at launch which also netted them the biggest PC launch of all-time. But that launch will always have a massive asterisk attached to it.