Q: Didn’t you test old-gen consoles to keep tabs on the experience?
A: We did. As it turned out, our testing did not show many of the crashes you experienced while playing the game. As we got closer to launch, we saw significant improvements each and every day, and we really believed we’d deliver in the final day zero update.
Sorry, CDPR. I will never believe the bolded bit. There is no way you played the pre or launch version on the last-gen consoles and didn’t run into a ton of bugs right out of the gate.
In theory, I could understand in-house devs and testers sticking closely to a critical path and only fixing things that were noticed on that path… But that would still be unconscionable for an open-world game.
If they were talking about PC it’d be slightly more believable, but with consoles they’re using the same hardware everyone else is using, so yeah, I’m not buying it either. I rarely say this about a dev, but they certainly do seem to be lying in this case.
There’s a new roadmap out today which is less specific than any we’ve seen previously. It basically says “see you sometime next year”. So don’t hold out any hope of patches or content until the next gen version is released. I think it’s fair to infer they are going for a re-release / director’s apology edition.
I watched the “What I Liked” video, and I think I am going to get a PS4 copy now. It’s everywhere half price already, I think the greater bugs should be fixed. From the videos, I get the impression that there are really great side quests in it, where you go down a deep rabbit hole. I like that.
I think I should watch the didn’t like video, next.
Oh, at least on the PC it’s definitely worth half-price for sure. Lots of fun to be had if your expectations are modest. Even on the PS4 you should get your money’s worth.
The game is so full of bugs you can’t possibly hope for it to be fixed to a satisfactory degree. You should be prepared for it. A lot of the game is about glitching software and AI so he goes at length to explain how the game is broken can be explained as an artistic choice. That’s a half-hour joke basically.
Basically whole combat design is poor. Early on he discovered a tactic that allowed him to beat every encounter in a very boring and predictable manner. He didn’t even put any points in character progression to make it work. I’ve used completely different tactic but I can confirm that combat balance is not there at all. You can put all the skillpoints into a specific playstyle and it would still be less effective than some obvious tricks.
Oh, no doubt, the game has serious flaws. Like, OMG WTF were they thinking type of flaws. That being said, I found it possible to if not ignore then at least set aside a lot of the crap and just run around Night City loosely following missions and stuff and having a lot of fun. I played for something like 167 hours and certainly got my money’s worth. But yes, the game itself is, shall we say, not a sterling example of the game developer’s art.
