Each rescheduled release date engendered more concern and pushback, in part because it called for more patience than many Cyberpunk fans were willing to dredge up.Īnd the company’s claims eventually proved untrue: Despite stating in 2019 that it would not require developers to work overtime to finish the game, CD Projekt Red entered a months-long crunch period, a labor issue that has gained more attention in gaming circles in recent years. The game, announced as an April 2020 release, was delayed several times due to the Covid-19 pandemic and, crucially, quality problems. The hype is real, so the sweat and tears need to be real, too :)” That now feels like ominous foreshadowing. “On the contrary - it gives us a lot of extra motivation. “We do realize you’ve been impatiently waiting for a very long time, and we wouldn’t like anyone to feel that we’re taking this for granted,” the developer wrote after the game’s E3 2018 presentation. And the game would only come out when it was “ready.” Anything added to the game after launch would be available for free. CD Projekt Red would not lock any game content behind a paywall, it said. The developer gained positive attention for insisting that its game would not include some of the most common, most maligned features of other big adventure games at the time. CD Projekt Red taunted fans with a glimpse of the game in 2018, five years after that initial teaser appeared.Īt the game’s 2018 showing, held at the industry trade show Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), journalists pumped it up based on early, closed-door impressions. Thus began a lengthy period of pre-release hype. And with work on The Witcher 3 winding down, the developer was committed to seeing Cyberpunk 2077 through. Its popularity helped increase hype for Cyberpunk 2077, already a game that many fans of the original property were champing at the bit for. (This is where Keanu Reeves, as your begrudging sidekick, comes in his involvement was revealed in 2019 to resounding cheers.)Īlthough no release date was in sight at the time of its 2013 teaser, excitement only grew after The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in 2015 to overwhelming praise. You, the player, get to be a particularly badass cyber-enhanced human, fighting against psychological and physical threats to your survival. It would be an expansive world, developers teased, aesthetically akin to the dystopian environs of Mad Max: Fury Road and Akira.Ĭyberpunk 2077 is the story of a California city set in an alternate timeline, where a handful of megalomaniac corporations own the streets, everyone modifies their body with illegal tech, and much of the state is still reeling from a major nuclear attack years prior. It was a tantalizing announcement: The game would draw on a popular tabletop RPG released in the late 1980s, Cyberpunk, and a teaser released in 2013 showed that the developer had translated that world into an appealingly gritty cybernetic environment. Developer CD Projekt Red - Europe’s most successful video game company - first announced that it was working on the project in 2012. The story of Cyberpunk 2077’s botched release and ongoing controversy is one that illuminates several problems within the world of video games. To many observers in and outside of the gaming world, Cyberpunk 2077 has proven to be a stunning failure: a video game with such promise and ballyhoo that it did not, and perhaps could never, live up to. Initially positive reviews have added caveats as more time with the game reveals more loose threads. An already toxic fanbase has bounced from harassing reviewers who offered tepid praise to roasting the company for the game’s many problems. Cyberpunk 2077 has, since its release, been roundly criticized across the gaming community by consumers, game designers, and industry insiders alike. The game’s heaps of trailers and previews and marketing materials seemed to promise a slinky, sexy, neon-tinged world of futuristic action - catnip for many gamers craving escapism.īut these surefire bets were not so surefire after all. Cyberpunk 2077 stars Keanu Reeves in a major role that bears his likeness as an on-the-run rocker-turned-military-veteran-turned-cybernetic terrorist. It’s the first big console game from Polish studio CD Projekt Red since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, a massively successful game that won numerous awards and end-of-year accolades after its 2015 launch. Inspired by a cult-favorite tabletop role-playing game, Cyberpunk 2077 seemed tailor-made for success. That seemed to be the case with Cyberpunk 2077, a video game released on consoles and PC on December 10 after many years of buildup. And yet the often astronomically high expectations that consumers set still persist, and sometimes even appear warranted. It’s rare that anything lives up to its hype.
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