Amid massive bugs, CDPR offers refunds for Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles

[Karlston]

Amid massive bugs, CDPR offers refunds for Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles

Studio promises patches in next two months will fix “most prominent problems.”

Enlarge / A Cyberpunk NPC is shown talking before his textures have fully loaded on the console version of the game.

CCPR / @MrDelabee Twitter

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Developer CD Projekt Red has issued an apology and offered a full refund to frustrated Cyberpunk 2077 players who are running into numerous issues with the console versions of the game. "We should have paid more attention to making it play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One," the company wrote in a statement posted to social media.

 

Ars Technica, like all other outlets receiving pre-release code, was only given access to a PC build of Cyberpunk 2077 before giving our opinion earlier this month. Those looking for impressions of the console versions had to wait until after the game launched publicly last Thursday.

 

At that point, those players would have encountered widespread player and critic complaints of game-breaking bugs, low-resolution graphics, and console crashes. While the PC version had its share of glitchiness, reports suggest the console versions are in much rougher shape. And while there aren't native versions of Cyberpunk 2077 on the PlayStation 5 of Xbox Series S/X yet, reports suggest the last-generation console versions of the game play somewhat better when running in backward-compatibility mode on those next-generation systems.

 

In its note, CD Projekt Red explicitly apologized for "not showing the game on base last-gen console before it premiered and, in consequence, not allowing you to make a more informed decision about your purchase." That comes just days after the developer trumpeted the fact that over 8 million players had pre-ordered the game, most long before any reviews were available, so make of that what you will.

 

CDPR has also promised to "fix bugs and crashes" through continuing updates, including "two large patches" scheduled for January and February of 2021. Between them, those two patches should "fix the most prominent problems gamers are facing on last-gen consoles" the company promised. "They won't make the game on last-gen look like it's running on a high-spec PC or next-gen console, but it will be closer to that experience than it is now."

 

In the meantime, CDPR is encouraging customers who are not "satisfied with their purchase" and not willing to wait for updates to ask for a refund, either through a digital console storefront or a brick-and-mortar retailer, or by contacting [email protected] through December 21. That policy follows reports that Sony had already begun honoring refund requests for the PS4 version of the game, echoing a similar offer when the PS4 version of Anthem failed to live up to technical expectations last year.

 

Last week, CDPR also added an epilepsy warning to Cyberpunk 2077 after an early reviewer suffered a grand mal seizure while playing the game. The developer says it is exploring "a more permanent solution" to let players limit their potential exposure to epileptic triggers in the game.

 

 

Amid massive bugs, CDPR offers refunds for Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles

[lurch234]

2 hours ago, Karlston said:

That comes just days after the developer trumpeted the fact that over 8 million players had pre-ordered the game, most long before any reviews were available, so make of that what you will.

 

That's because, like me, people trusted CDPR. I played with the 3 witchers and those games were great! No technical problems. But they dropped the ball hard on this game.

I mean this is the sort of stuff we should be getting from Ubisoft not Projekt Red! I quickly uninstalled it and reinstalled borderlands 2 remastered. Now that's a tried and true fun game!

[Alanon]

I’ll admit that I’m not part of the hype train for this game, so I haven’t been obsessing over it like many others. I haven’t been following developments or looking at trailers. I also don’t have a problem praising a bad studio for a good game, or vice versa. I only truly started looking into things when the game was released. Having waded through much of the muck and detritus, I can’t help but feel that, somehow, this game is being treated like a pariah for little good reason.

 

As always, a larger issue seems to be with pre-release, pre-order gamer mentality that nowadays seems to demand instant gratification and will accept nothing short of that. There’s no helping that attitude. As games get progressively more complex, the expectations will also continue to grow. Even if mega game development monopolies were willing to try and provide stability, it will be more and more difficult to even come close to the state of gaming releases circa 2005, when the sum total of a game’s development cycle consisted of 1-2 patches, and maybe a full-on expansion pack, if you were lucky. Bottom line is, if Cyberpunk is to be the benchmark of immersion for future releases, just wait and see how the others handle it.

 

This is partly why I don’t see how there was room for a win in this whole situation. Gamers were complaining about delays? Perfectly reasonable. Game crunch and toxic, high-expectations work environment a problem? Naturally. Price too high — of course that’s an issue. Thing is, all these are mutually exclusive. CD Projekt could've doubled its staff to work faster in a nice environment and help with polishing things, but then the game would’ve been more expensive. Had they kept up the pace just to make the deadlines, cue the Polygon articles of CD Projekt’s male-centric misogynistic culture and anti-worker stance. As the saying goes, you can have it cheap, good, or fast. Pick two.

 

All this, to say nothing of the challenges with creating a game like Cyberpunk, that actively attempts to expand the gaming landscape and implement new technologies as much as possible. Nobody wants to talk about that. The reviewer hatred for the bugs is worse than for Andromeda or Anthem, and those were cookie-cutter releases in comparison! And everybody seems to love to forget the Witcher 3’s initial state on release. Paradoxically, a lot of people who love to play games (or are at least paid to review them), don’t seem to appreciate the intrinsic value of what CD Projekt attempted to bring to the table here. At all. That’s the only possible justification for how Andromeda and Cyberpunk might somehow have the same score.

 

Did they fail? Perhaps. But they failed while trying to do something big, not something small. Even so, their failure is still a matter of degree, and should be mitigated as time goes on. Shouldn’t that count for something?