In 2015, CD Projekt Red won the Game Award for Best Developer of the Year. During the same ceremony, the developer also received the award for Game of the Year, it going to the monumentally successful,groundbreakingThe Witcher 3. In 2022, CD Projekt Red is now talked about in more measured tones, with fans still cautiously optimistic about the future of the studio, but a good portion of them feeling worried about how it might handle its next large-scale project. Such a drop in consumer trust and goodwill can be blamed on just one video game:Cyberpunk 2077.
First announced a decade ago, all the way back in 2012,Cyberpunk 2077immediately caught the attention of a very passionate, subgroup of fans, most of whom had playedthe tabletop RPGthe game was being based on. With the immense success ofThe Witcher 3, it seemed as though the sprawlingCyberpunklicense was in good hands, but come its eventual December 2020,Cyberpunk 2077wasn’t quite what fans were expecting, or what they were told they were going to get. So, one year and a half later, it’s time to see ifCyberpunk 2077has managed to redeem itself.
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Cyberpunk 2077 Has Come a Long Way
Upon launch,Cyberpunk 2077was a broken messon consoles. While the experience was relatively fine on PC, both the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game would suffer from constant framerate issues, screen-tearing, visual glitches, and a whole host of other technical bugs, some of which made the game quite literally unplayable, with some objectives not activating or completing.
Over the last year and a half, CD Projekt Red has worked hard to fixCyberpunk 2077, and for the most part, the game now plays how it always should have. On top of a plethora of bug fixes, these free updates added a range of visual and technical improvements, which did help to make the game finally feel like the big, beautiful title fans were promised before launch. The sheer number of technical fixes that CD Projekt Red pumped intoCyberpunk 2077cannot be understated.
On top of the patches, CD Projekt Red also brought somebrand new gameplay content toCyberpunk 2077via free updates. In February 2022, new weapons, vehicles, and apartments were added to the game, alongside the long-awaited next-gen versions of the game, which did perform surprisingly well.
Has Cyberpunk 2077 Done Enough?
For those who bought into the immense hype surroundingCyberpunk 2077before launch, release day delivered a bit of a harsh sting, and that wound isn’t easily closed. With such a high-profile marketing campaign, andyears of CD Projekt Red promising the moon, the launch day letdown was only made exponentially worse, and the vast majority of early adopters still haven’t really forgiven CD Projekt Red.
For the general consumer, it’s likely that they jumped in on or around launch day as well, and as such were stung in the process just as hard. But whereas fans of the developer are willing to stick it out and wait for the game to finally be finished, the general gamer isn’t, and all they’ll remember about the game was that it was a drastic failure. So, no matter how many updatesCyberpunk 2077receives, or how manypaid DLCCyberpunkexpansionsare released in the future, the game will simply never be able to reach the heights that it was destined to, and will remain unredeemed in the eyes of many.
Cyberpunk 2077is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
