The beginning of the 2000s. A young and daring studio from Eastern Europe announces a game that will shock the whole world. Players are promised a “sandbox” in a post-apocalyptic world, where several groups constantly share influence, dozens of NPC characters compete with the main character, led by the most complex AI, and any action can have consequences after several hours of passage. An incredible attention to detail is promised – to the point that in some cases the partners will not hear the character, so you will have to exchange information with them using gestures.
There were many similar promises. And all of them in a hurry had to be abandoned six months or a year before the release – they simply did not delay. And even with the ballast dropped, the release was far from ideal: bugs and problems with the balance were corrected by more than one patch.
The name of this game is STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl.
Today, history is repeating itself in many ways. Except that the Internet community has become much more active, so Reddit, gaming forums and social networks are simply inundated with Cyberpunk 2077 parsing. In addition to criticism for bugs and the disaster with the console versions (more on that later), the community is actively making lists of promises that the developers did not keep. and diligently measures the game against its own expectations. Can Cyberpunk 2077 be called an RPG or is it a shooter with RPG elements? Are there enough options for passing and ending to talk about freedom of choice? Is the city well simulated or shall we call it empty decorations?
I must say that both the developers and the players themselves led Cyberpunk 2077 to a similar situation. There are two main ways to promote games. In the first case, the game is fully presented six months or a year before release. By this time, marketers have already prepared a clear advertising plan, and the team usually has a working version that can be shown to journalists and bloggers, who will convey to the players what the project looks like, what should be expected from it, and what will definitely not happen. This approach is used by almost all large publishers – players, of course, constantly kick them for subordination to the marketing department, but we admit that there is much less misunderstanding in such situations.
An alternative way is when the project is announced at an early stage of development. What the game will end up with is usually not even known to the developers themselves at this moment, but they usually cannot keep their mouths shut – therefore, all ideas in a row fall out in interviews and social networks. And where the developers do not say anything, the players themselves connect – and now the promise to give freedom of choice during the passage turns into the idea that the hero will be free to perform any act at all at any time.
When it comes to developers, this is quite normal: after all, the initial stage of the game is precisely the time of searching for new ideas and concepts, trying out how they will work and what result they will give. At some point, a lot of what was planned will have to be stabbed – this is a very painful process, but without it, it will simply not be possible to complete the creation of the game.
With players, everything is much more complicated. We do not understand (and should not understand!) How the games themselves and the process of their development work, so it is easy to demand things that are simply unrealistic. We want a captivating and suspenseful plot, at the same time we ask for complete freedom of choice, but we rarely realize that every option in the dialogue adds just a huge amount of work. And when there are too many of these options, the story crumbles to the level of “beyond recovery.” David Cage, one of the main masters of non-linear games, admitted that he could not add lines for more than three characters to Detroit – the fourth hero was simply breaking the story. And he had to rewrite the version for three a second time. But this is Detroit – a game that consists of about 90% of the plot.
There are many such examples. We ask for advanced AI opponents, but do not think that smart enemies simply will not leave a chance for 95% of players. We want an open world with a simulation of a bunch of cases, a lot of additional storylines (with freedom of choice, of course), but all these things require a budget to create, and it is difficult to monetize them – after all, a sandbox game for 200 hours is usually sold for the same money as and a 10-hour story-driven shooter.
Are the players to blame for their “ignorance”? In no case! After all, they are the buyers in this market. They have the right to dream, ask and demand, they have the right to make trouble when the long-awaited game does not correspond to the image that they have built. First of all, this is a message to the developers: if from the very beginning you dream of a future game together with its players, then get ready that it will hurt when you do not fulfill someone’s dreams.
But how will it all end?
Yes, it is hardly something criminal. It was not in vain that I started with a comparison with STALKER How many people remember what the developers promised in the first press releases? Unlikely. Are many angry at GSC for breaking promises? Even less. STALKER is a cult game today. We are all waiting for the second part, we hope that it will turn out to be at least as good as the original, and the bugs (of which there will be a whole car) can be fixed in a few weeks, not months.
Cyberpunk 2077 today is simply drowning in a negative news agenda: these are forum grievances for broken promises and unfulfilled dreams, and scandals with refunds, and attempts to drop the rating on Metacritic, and news about huge losses due to the fall in share prices (which, by the way, has little to do with with a real amount of money). These are the problems of the console versions, which I postponed to the very end of the text.
But there are other indicators as well. On Steam, the game continues to hold first place in both sales and online. For more than a week on PLAYER ONE, we have seen an explosive growth in search queries from those who just play Cyberpunk 2077. And not only in the prologue – there are a lot of those who have gone far in the story, who do side quests, are looking for cool equipment in the game, ways to make easy money and just good sex. And if you look at the criticism of the game, then practically no one scolds for the story and its presentation. This means that Cyberpunk 2077 copes with the task of captivating and entertaining. And, apparently, he is doing well.
A separate point, of course, is the technical problems of the game, especially with the console versions. Here I don’t want to intercede for the developers: at the start, the game turned out to be bearable on a PC and completely disgusting on consoles. The patches have already noticeably fixed the situation, but even in 1.05 on the PC version, I regularly encounter small but annoying problems.
Another thing is that there is nothing extraordinary in the situation. The games, polished to almost ideal, remained at the beginning of the 2000s, when otherwise they simply could not be released. The Internet has corrupted absolutely everyone: from developers who are sure that all problems can be corrected literally with the next patch, to Sony and Microsoft, which certified Cyberpunk 2077 just under the promise of this very next patch.
And the impression is that now Cyberpunk 2077 is fighting off bugs caught in all games of the last decade. Refunds for a purchased game at any store and at any stage is an unprecedented step. The removal of the biggest hit of the year from the PS Store is an even louder event. But let’s be honest: these decisions were not made because of some outstanding low quality of the game (we saw worse projects), but because of the noise around the project. And it’s good if we all draw some conclusions from this: developers will start to better relate to quality control, players will reduce the level of aggression in post-release discussions, and Sony and Microsoft will update their store policies, making available a refund for any game in some time after the purchase.
