This one is tired needs to be retired.
The Hitler Bunker video is still EPIC.
While this isn’t my type game, what’s with all the bad press about performance is it really that bad or are the console kids having a tantrum?
The old generation console versions are...really really bad. I don't have any personal experience with them, just a couple of video clips and while I'm not sure which are real or just parodied, some of the obviously real ones are pretty bad. (like, in one of the linked videos, it's obvious that the GTA: Vice City map and overhead view was loaded into the clips as a joke, and was funny, but some of the images, I think, are actually real ~PS2-era city background images from Cyberpunk.)
The Ray Tracing still only "works" on nVIdia hardware (meaning, AMD GPUS in the new consoles and on PCs don't have the feature enabled in the game, yet), so it arrives on all consoles, with missing features
as standard. It sounds very likely that this may remain locked-out for AMD until the end of next year, and certainly not within 6 months. Even so, it's hard to say how it will perform on AMD's first-gen take on ray tracing. At least, in a game designed for nVidia hardware.
I personally haven't experienced any game-breaking bugs (I don't think there really are that many of those, but there are a lot of obtrusive model-clipping (like, when you get stuck in some other character's model frame, for some reason), random menu opening/sticking in the middle of action (not really menu, but the scanner feature, which you can open at any time--it's hold-on only using tab, but it can stick in "on" state and go into slow-mo, frozen mode)...so, there are definitely things that have happened to cause me to re-load quick saves
regularly.
I'm not defending these problems....I think I'm just very tolerant of a certain amount of garbage, haha. I also habitually save constantly--multiple quick-saves (and this games stacks up to 4 or 5 successive quick, saves, which is quite great, really, 3 autosaves, and then of course however many manual saves you make). I typically, in any game really but especially in new releases like this that you know will be problematic, I typically like to keep multiple manual saves, periodically up to date in a series of saves that aren't too far off in game time from each other, between major events. This is just habit, and, also being a classic save-scummer, I would just be saving and reloading all the time,
anyway.
Now, that isn't something that I would consider tolerable if I were recommending this to someone, write it off in an honest review environment--that stuff is actually just bad from a consumer perspective. Also without having any experience with the SSDs in the new consoles, I wonder if the load times are so much vastly better that reloading doesn't bother them as much--that has been such a long-standing issue with consoles. So, when you consider this situation on the PS4XBONE, with load times in games from this last year approaching 2 minutes per save load ....yeah, you can't play this game. You'd literally spend more time on load screens than playing the actual content. So without actually having read specific issues about those versions, I assume that this is what kills it for them. It is literally unplayable for a pure quantitative sense. Imagine how frustrating that would be?
...and 2 weeks ago, you had the head of development telling the press "It plays surprisingly good [on the last gen consoles]" when asked about it. CDPR didn't ship any console versions to the limited reviewers that they released it to about a week ago.
and yeah....they allowed such a tiny review pool, about a week prior to release, and didn't even allow them to show footage of the games that were given to them for review, until after release day. At least to their credit, a lot of their video reviewers explained these conditions pretty clearly and, imo anyway, pretty convincingly made the viewers aware that what they played "was in a very bad shape," and did mention the massive day 1 patch.
But yeah, there is a lot about the release situation that's going to hurt CDPR, tremendously. apparently there is also some sort of "revolt" going on between the dev team and the head office. ...and you get the feeling that this is REALLY bad situation for these guys, because it is such a small studio. Something like this isn't going to hurt Bethesda (now MS--but even before...though, well, we did have FO76 and, not all that long after, MS purchase, lol) or Ubisoft. It seems to me there is a real likelihood within the next couple of weeks, however they handle this, that it could be the end of the studio within 2 years, probably....and in a situation like that, some very lackluster releases to fix, update, content (DLC) for CyberPunk.
I also saw in a review that this game actually hasn't been in active development since 2012. Apparently, the actual development period began in 2015, late 2015, after several years of what was basically "open discussion, theory-crafting," without really considering if it would be their next big project.
Anyway, despite all that...it's actually still a great game for this genre, lol. The combat isn't great once you sorta reach the end of its learning curve....but it's a lot better than what we've had in the Witcher Games--the guns are mostly OK but nothing really "uniquely fun." It's not an "impactful shooter" if that makes sense. swordplay is kinda meh--but I've always thought this about FP mele mechanics--I can't stand that.
The story, though, the characters and side quests are really quite excellent. The main quest branches (acts just like Witcher--you have the main story, that is alternatively told across a couple of branches at one time--think The Bloody Baron is just one branchline in the early main quest for Witcher), so far, aren't quite as compelling as in the Witcher, but the side quests--like you start unlocking when you meet major characters and just start learning about them--those are
excellent. They are expansive, individually loooong, unique in task, mood, character, one to the next, and well, well, well worth most of your time. I think it changes the game A LOT because they are pretty easy to ignore and assume they are your standard fetch quest sort of thing, but they aren't. The "task" type quests--collect these items, assassinate this person, steal this thing, etc, are pretty good but also that same familiar type of "clutter content" that is expected in these games.
This game has mood. It is gorgeous in every design aesthetic that matters--visual, soundscape, soundtrack, scene-crafting. (assuming you can push it on your hardware! ....I'm quite happy with my Vega 64 @ 3440x1440, 47-50 FPS at mostly high, some medium and a few ultra, settings. The reflections are so good without RT on, that some of the early setting reviews made, and showed, a pretty good argument that the hit is so terrible for no significant visual gain that it's better to run without it for now)
So, there are some really superb things going on in this game, right now, but it just isn't consistent enough, and plenty of not-working garbage (mob dump of NPC blobs that are basically just clutter) that overshadows what this game is. The car stuff....seems pointless to me. I feel like they tossed this stuff in this year, because it's just random phone calls as your street cred levels up, that you can now "go buy this car, chief!" That's literally all it is, and they are there own quests. It's stupid.
and the phones calls. people are constantly calling your. whenever they want. You can't ignore them.