DF posted a pretty great tweaking video which should get at least 15fps more at 4k from max settings without meaningful loss of visual quality.
Contact Shadows: On
Improved Facial Lighting Geometry: On
Local Shadow Mesh Quality: High
Local Shadow Quality High
Cascaded Shadows Range: High
Cascaded Shadows Resolution: Medium
Distant Shadows Resolution: High
Volumetric Fog Resolution: 1080p Ultra, 1440p High, 4K Medium
Volumetric Cloud Quality: Medium
Max Dynamic Decals: Ultra
Screen Space Reflections Quality: Low but High if you find the amount of grain distracting.
Subsurface Scattering Quality: High
Ambient Occlusion: Low (there is barely a difference)
Colour Precision: Medium
Mirror Quality: 1080p High. 1440p High, 4K Medium
Level of Detail: High
The one I mentioned was pretty massive… you could get in a state where you never got the recipe to make warp fuel. Then you couldn’t warp… which kind of breaks everything.
Personally, I also ran into a number of issues with quests breaking when you left a system.
Then, when they made some of the biggest follow up patches that added new features, I ran into bugs where the quest lines designed to give you recipes for core gameplay elements broke, so I just got stuck and could never proceed.
This happened to me, personally, probably 4-5 times where some quest line broke and I couldn’t continue. I especially had this happen when some of the new big patches came out, where I then played them for a while, and was like, “Hey, this is cool, they added a bunch of new stuff…” but then at some point the quest introducing the new stuff broke, and I just put the game down again.
I had a couple progression blockers like that in NMS, it was a real mess. Like you I went back after one of the big patches and ran into more issues. Not surprising for there to be issues after a major update but as someone who hadn’t really had a chance to dig into the game it basically sucked all the motivation to play it out of me.
I went through Cyberpunk with one T-pose and maybe a couple glitched sidequest steps where a reload fixed it. I died one time getting out of my car. On an ultrawide monitor, there were occasions where part of my UI would be cut off but just hitting Start on my gamepad to bring up the menu would fix it. Other than that, no issues and I finished the game. I guess I just got lucky.
I played on PS4 Pro, almost complete media black prior to and after launch so I didn’t know about the drama and scandal with the bugs etc until I was almost done. It was a little rough but played well enough.
I absolutely Loved most of it. A triumph. Some of it hit me in the feels with how well some of the quests and dialogs went. It spoke to me and was right up my alley.
At the end, i had nothing left to do but finish the main story. It was last Wednesday morning, I had 4 possible endings. I was feeling melancholy and did with the suicide ending, fully intending to complete the other endings. It fucked me up. Then Wednesday day happened, and we all know how that went down. I didn’t feel like playing anymore and deleted the game.
I look forward to playing it fully again once enough time passes, cd project puts a lot more work into it, and I get a ps5 or gaming rig. Until, it was quite the experience.
The inevitable behind-the-scenes Schreier feature is out:
Nice!
It performed so poorly that Sony Corp. removed the game from the PlayStation Store and offered refunds, an unprecedented move, while Microsoft Corp. slapped on a label warning customers that they “may experience performance issues on Xbox One until the game is updated.”
I see people keep referencing this like Sony and MS pulled it from the store because it was so buggy, but I don’t remember it happening it like that. I think Sony and MS would never have done that if CDPR first hadn’t have come out and said you will get a refund if you ask for it. Apparently they didn’t clear this with Sony and MS, which of course went on the offensive after the announcement to have to avoid paying for a bunch of charge backs and return hassles.
Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game.
Not as rare as it seems, unfortunately.
In March, as the pandemic began ravaging the globe and forcing people to stay inside, CD Projekt staff had to complete the game from their homes. Without access to the office’s console development kits, most developers would play builds of the game on their home computers, so it wasn’t clear to everyone how Cyberpunk might run on PS4 and Xbox One. External tests, however, showed clear performance issues.
Good stuff.
I can see arguing the top statement and maybe the bottom but the most the staff saying it’s not ready… when it was clearly not ready. Why argue that? I mean the game was released prematurely, not at all ready for last gen even. I am sure more than a few people said something about that.
It is difficult to match that refute with the video that claims leadership is taking responsibility.
Some of the points in that response–like the ones about language, or the non-linearity of development, make sense, but it dodges the main issues pretty handily. There is no way you can say with a straight face that the stuff people were shown that is not in the final game was cut as part of the normal creative process, or that it didn’t fit with some grand vision.
What’s bizarre is this sort of thing goes on just for internal purposes too. I remember weeks being cut out of actual dev time (and a sorta mini-crunch to boot) to throw together some near-total bullshit ‘vertical slice’ for HQ that bore zero resemblance to the actual state of the game. At least it got the suits to talk about something other than their secretaries’ arses for an hour, I guess.
It was a E3 demo, from a game that at that moment didn’t even have a release date, at this point I consider them always fake. So I knew it.
What I didn’t know was if the shown features real status was 0%, 20%, 50%, etc.
RPS with a rare reasonable take.
Yeah, that “fake” claim irked me too. The demo ran in-engine, with game assets, and was played in realtime by real person when demoed. And had big “work in progress” sticker. Some of its aspects were of course scripted and not implemented system-wise (wallrunning most obviously, which CDP then decided not to bother with for the full game) but that does not mean the demo is “fake”. At least not how I understand the word.
And people complaining that time was spent making that demo that could have been put into the game - sometimes it is useful for developers themselves to have a fairly polished slice of the game finished to better see the vision of the intended result. I know Warhorse guys, when asked if making their KCD backer alphas was a waste of time, usually answered “no, because it was useful for us too, even if it took extra time”.
There’s a difference between a vertical slice demo running in-engine with game assets that represents a selection of gameplay, and one that’s more “faked” (for want of a better word) and aspirational. I think the demo for Cyberpunk 2077 falls clearly in the latter. A lot of studios have done it, so it’s not like CDPR did something egregiously bad, but they did set up a lot of expectations with that demo that they were unable to deliver.
Exactly. A demo like that is fine, as long as you are clear to people that it’s aspirational, that you are making no guarantees, and most importantly if as you move through the project you adjust your marketing to reflect the realistic progress of the game.
Of course, that would require you to change your plans in a measured and intentional way, adjusting your design to fit the new parameters and keeping things coherent and cohesive. Hacking off stuff in a desperate bid to make it work on low-spec platforms, punting systems that you can’t get up to speed in time, and then hastily patching over the resulting gaping holes with last minute wallpaper isn’t going to cut it.
Ha ha, people believed stuff they saw at an E3!
-Tom