Disappointed gamers have been offered refunds and an apology after the year’s biggest game was released in a barely-finished state for owners of current-generation consoles including the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
CD Projekt Red, the developers of science-fiction epic Cyberpunk 2077, apologised for the state of the game in an open letter to players on Monday morning, and addressed accusations that they had misled customers by limiting pre-launch coverage to the version of the game built for powerful (and expensive) gaming PCs.
“We would like to start by apologising to you for not showing the game on base last-gen consoles,” the company’s executive team wrote in the open letter. “We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
“We will fix bugs and crashes, and improve the overall experience,” they added, promising an intense schedule of updates over the next two months, following a day-one patch and a hotfix which have already been released. A second hotfix will arrive in the next week, CDPR said, and then two major patches will be published in January and February. “Together, these should fix the most prominent problems gamers are facing on last-gen consoles”, the company added.
Many of the problems the game is facing seem to relate to the comparative lack of power the seven-year-old consoles have when placed alongside the high-end gaming PCs Cyberpunk 2077 was released for. The game regularly struggles to load in visual detail of people and places encountered in its supposedly lush, vibrant setting of “Night City” on the US west coast, leaving players staring at a blurry mess for up to 20 seconds while textures are loaded.
Elsewhere, the game has come under fire for a litany of bugs and errors. One flaw sees player characters wandering around with a visible penis poking through the fabric of their clothing.
Another, more serious problem, was encountered when an in-game VR headset was apparently modelled on a real medical device used to deliberately trigger epileptic seizures – and which did indeed cause a seizure in at least one reviewer. CDPR has apologised, and already pushed an update to alter how the headset looks.
These issues came despite a series of critical reports detailing “crunch” at the developer, an unfortunately typical working pattern in blockbuster game development where working hours increase as deadlines draw near, often culminating in seven-day weeks of 12-or-more-hour days for many staff. Cyberpunk 2077 also received three last-minute launch delays, pushing release from March to October, then November, then December.
Despite the problems, however, CDPR had much to celebrate about the launch. After eight years in development, the company announced on Friday that its revenue from digital pre-order sales alone had exceeded all of its production costs, as well as all marketing and promotional costs for the game this year. The company received 8 million pre-orders around the world, CDPR announced, three-quarters of which were for digital platforms, where its revenue share is higher than for physical sales.
The company also owns and operates its own digital distribution platform, GOG.com, boosting its take further for PC sales there.
