Reflections on the legacy of “Cyberpunk”. What did Cyberpunk 2077 bring to the gaming industry?
A legend born in Poland
At the end of 2020, the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 game from the world-famous Polish studio CD Projekt Red was released. Now that more than a year has passed, we can safely say that the launch of Cyberpunk has turned out to be legendary.
We all know what the Poles did in the end. A huge number of problems. Bugs could be found on almost every corner of Night City. And it’s good if it was all just a harmless visual bug, and not one that breaks the game, forcing you to roll back saves, wasting your precious time. The console versions were terrible. The frame rate on the base PS4 and Xbox One barely reached 25. The screen resolution, according to some reports, fell below 720p. The most annoying problem was the crashes. The game crashed every couple of hours. But the biggest sin was the behavior of the developers. Or, to be more precise, the manuals of CD Projekt Red itself. They blatantly lied and even got into a confrontation with Sony itself and their investors.
Mistakes to learn from
But now, “Cyberpunk” has finally died down. Yes, so loud that the echoes of this thunder can be heard to this day. And it would seem that such a major precedent should have a strong impact on the industry. It must show what can be done and what can’t. And he showed. Simply not exactly what it ought to have been.
Nevertheless, for all its problems, Cyberpunk did what it was supposed to – collected a large box office. More than ten million copies sold, huge profits (although much more were planned) showed one simple truth to other large companies – from now on it is not at all necessary to release a finished and high-quality product. No. It is enough to release a raw and unfinished project.
You should not be afraid of anything, because even the mountains of negativity on the network will not only not reduce sales, but will also raise a powerful hype around the company, increasing the citation index literally to the sky. Yes, there have been problematic releases before, remember at least the same “Warcraft 3 Reforged”, but for some reason, it was after “Cyberpunk” that the number of such shortcomings begins to increase rapidly.
Rather hurt
Offhand, I can recall three such projects at once: the meme “football”, the ill-conceived “Battlefield 2042”, as well as the remaster of the Grand Theft Auto trilogy that broke through the bottom. If you can laugh and forget about the first one, because it’s free to play, then the rest of the projects cause bewilderment and disgust. Especially when you look at their prices. And always in response, we get the same thing: “Sorry, we didn’t know” or “Wait, we will fix everything.” All these statements cause only laughter and lead us to the obvious thought – the big-budget AAA segment is sick. And what will happen next is hard to imagine. Although, no. It’s not difficult at all.
Sad results
Unfortunately, games are now a business. And business for games, like air for a person, is both necessary and harmful. As a result, year after year, major studios are more and more perverted over their heritage, managing to turn even negative into profit. First, there were loot boxes, then season and battle pass. Monetization of single projects. And even this NFT nonsense. However, all this pales in comparison to the fact that more and more games are released as unfinished pieces of code, exposing their creators as either hopelessly stupid or infinitely arrogant. And it seems to me that it has long been clear to everyone that the second option is much more realistic.
