Cyberpunk 2077 has gone from the most hyped-up game of 2020 to one of the year's biggest blunders. Gamers had high hopes for the title, and much of this came from developer CD Projekt Red, which had been building up a mountain of promises regarding Cyberpunk since its initial announcement in 2012. The company had built up trust with its audience thanks to the successful and beloved The Witcher 3, as well as several delays that were supposedly to ensure the game's quality at launch, Cyberpunk 2077's release has been a disaster of epic proportions.
CD Projekt made a lot of promises about the game which did not come to fruition -- to the point that many fans are asking for their money back. And while the game's technical performance on older hardware is the most blatant of broken promises, some are less obvious.
For eight years, CD Projekt told fans Cyberpunk would stay true to the pen and paper RPG model that it was inspired by. However, the game itself is more of an open-world action-adventure game with RPG elements than strictly an RPG. That's forgivable in itself, but the game it barely meets expectations for the action-adventure genre too. Early on, the company claimed Cyberpunk would offer a variety of playable classes with specialized abilities based on its source material, but release day brought with it only three backgrounds, which culminate to gameplay so similar they're all but indistinguishable from each other after a certain point.
Of course, with a development cycle as long as Cyberpunk 2077's, things were bound to change from the initial reveal. But the promises made early on aren't the only ones which have been broken. CD Projekt has been building up expectations, previewing intriguing scenes and customizations that never came to pass. In 2018, the company released a 48 minute walkthrough of the game's progress, offering a behind-the-scenes look to whet fan's appetite for the future. It featured crowds of people moving through Night City, touting it to be "the most believable city in any open-world game to date."
It went to promise real-time AI that would grant over a thousand NPCs a variety of roles and actions that, complete with a day/night cycle, was designed to change up their routines. But as fans began playing, they quickly discovered this wasn't true. The majority of the NPCs may as well be inanimate -- especially those not specifically involved in quests -- providing the same token responses on repeat and completing the same actions over and over again.
Shifting from an RPG to an open-world action game was a disappointment for fans of the TTRPG, but the disappointment didn't stop there. Thousands of players have complained that, upon completing the story and side-quests, there's absolutely nothing worth doing in the game. For an experience that promised to be massive and immersive, this is a major drawback. Players paying for a full price game, especially an open-world title, expect to get their money's worth, but instead, there's little to hold their attention.
Then, there are the gameplay and AI issues that hinder the experience. A game like Cyberpunk 2077 runs on crime, and CD Projekt promised realistic interactions with the police. One would fully expect officers to come running if a crime was committed out in the open with witnesses, or even in a remote alleyway. Sadly, there is nothing realistic about a bunch of cops spawning unexpectedly around the player with guns firing -- especially if no one even witnessed the crime.
Hacking was also said to play a more significant role than it actually does. In a 2018 demo, the player character was shown hacking into a gang member's skull to access a detailed building map, but hacking is far more simplified in the final version of the game. Basic hacks, like security systems, computers and bank terminals are as far as it goes, and for a game set in a futuristic cyberpunk world with tons of people walking around with hackable body parts, that's a huge disappointment.
Finally, and most importantly, the game was promised to run smoothly on all platforms it released on. However, the game is barely playable on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, especially on base units. This is all the more confounding when you remember the game was originally slated to launch prior to release of the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 and has been in development since before the outgoing console generation even began. With reports of pixelated scenes and characters so distorted they're barely recognizable, it's no small wonder Sony and Microsoft have been offering fans their money back. The game looked incredible in all those sneak peeks, but it just didn't live up to expectation on last-gen hardware.
CD Projekt Red delayed Cyberpunk 2077's launch because it wasn't ready yet, pushing it back three times before finally committing to December 10 as the official release date -- a date that it clearly wasn't ready for either. Ironically, the game takes place in a world dominated by megacorporations fueled on greed, which begs the question: Did the company release an incomplete game simply to cash in on the holiday rush? Fans want more than just patches -- they understandably want answers. A game that was in development for nearly a decade made so many promises shouldn't feel as painfully rushed as this does. The number of promises broken by CD Projekt Red truly is a mountain, and as it comes crumbling down, one can't help but wonder what this will do to the credibility of this once-trusted developer in the long-run.