"Not trying to downplay crunch."
Followed immediately by downplaying crunch.
The amount of time you choose to work at your job is not relevant.
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[Jason Schreier] Inside Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Rollout (Update: Head of CDPR Responds)
- Thread starter IDontBeatGames
- Start date
"Not trying to downplay crunch."
Followed immediately by downplaying crunch.
The amount of time you choose to work at your job is not relevant.
Good article there if you're not already aware of what went on behind the scenes. None of it surprising of course. Its interesting reading that at one point it was initially going to be a third person game. A lot of shit decision making went on obviously. I do reckon its valid to compare it to No Mans Sky and like that game give it 2 more years of patches and it'll actually be a great game.
A lot of people are saying CDPR should be more like Rockstar but Rockstar only got to where they are by managing to get through huge production difficulties of their own. Red Dead Redemption was a bug ridden mess when it was released back in 2010 and the production of that was apparently a total nightmare with staff working 14 + hour days. To this day it still has never had a PC release because the code is a total mess.
A lot of people are saying CDPR should be more like Rockstar but Rockstar only got to where they are by managing to get through huge production difficulties of their own. Red Dead Redemption was a bug ridden mess when it was released back in 2010 and the production of that was apparently a total nightmare with staff working 14 + hour days. To this day it still has never had a PC release because the code is a total mess.
I was surprised by how similar that demo was to what I experienced, was expecting way more missing features, but I'm disappointed the more in depth hacking/bot control didn't make it in. Those really feel like big holes in the final game. Netrunning pretty much only gets you money in the final game. And quickhacks are pretty limited. Feels like Fallout 4's disappointing dialogue and speech skills all over again (and wasting a bunch of skill points on it before I realized this was the case).
I wonder if, after they get the bugs/performance fixed, any of the stuff they cut will be put back in. Subways, wall running, expanded hacking, flying cars.
Yup. I'm aware of the herculean task that was ARR😄 I still wonder what other games did Square Enix had to cancel to free up manpower.
CDPR, unlike Square Enix, does not have many smaller products like XIII-2, LR and Eidos to sell while they spend a few years to rebuild the entire game.
I think one mistake they have is thinking they can be like Rockstar.
But I'm not suffering? I got into this line of work and understood the requirements of the job. Perhaps some of these people are in the wrong industry. Plenty of careers require more than 38 hours a week commitment.
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It's distressing to see how common this is becoming with big developers. Lots of people quoting "Bioware magic", including Jason in his article, but it's also exactly what Bethesda was saying during 76's development according to the NoClip documentary (released prior to the game's launch) - they were joking about the state of the game, and how newer staff were asking veterans "...is the game supposed to be in this state at this stage of development..?" and the vets answering "Don't worry about it. It always comes together in the end!"
I'm glad all of these companies are getting bitten in the ass for their hubris, but it also makes me weirdly excited to see their next big projects. Starfield, Dragon Age 4, The Witcher "4", all will be made by hugely talented and well funded dev teams who have their backs against the wall and KNOW they need to throw the kitchen sink at these projects to win their reputation back.
It's also extra scummy that they are lying about not knowing how badly the game ran. They fucking knew & instead of taking responsibility for it, they are throwing employees under the bus for not doing anything wrong. Fuck this company! They are the absolute worst! Fake e3 demos are one thing, glitches are nother. But those two things on top of lying about it is what does it for me. They refuse to take responsibility like adults! Like I can't think of any company that acted like this. like talk about setting the bar to the lowest circle of hell.
"Just a few". Yeah, no. I'm an engine programmer, that's not how it works. Sure, writing a new engine is a different case, but they didn't have a new engine, they kept upgrading their existing one.
Well one answer is certainly Versus XIII. Lightning Returns also had a significantly reduced development team compared to XIII-2.
It's one of the biggest stories in gaming over the past decade.
Don't want to read about it? Don't click the thread.
You're a farmer. You literally have to work longer days at specific times of the year or the job can't be done. I get that, I'm an ecologist, so I have a similar workload - insane hours, literally 7 days a week all summer, surveying wildlife when it's active because over winter it hibernates.
It's very different with game dev. Crunch isn't necessary. You can do your hours any time of the year. In this case the project leads even promised staff crunch wouldn't ever be needed. Crunch means project management has fucked up and now expects staff to overwork themselves non contractually, despite the very well documented health and family issues that creates. It's not a "requirement of the job", it's a betrayal of employee care.
Point is that devolpers still keep showing fake vertical slices and inengine cgi trailers well before they have anything actually substantial developed. Or they'll put pc footage/ screens hots on console cases/pages.
Something should be done to stop it. Imagine an industry where you have unfundable preorders AND you can literally show anything you want in marketing with little repercussions.
I'm still completely fucking baffled as to how so many people think that this is even a mystery. Like just consider three simple concepts:
a) People value different things in games from you.
b) People have different standards from you.
c) People had a different experience than you.
Maybe some people just wanted to play this game and experience a nice story. Maybe the story this game told was good enough for them. Maybe they didn't actually experience a greater than normal amount of bugs (I personally didn't experience a single crash, the performance was generally fine and my PC hasn't been upgraded since 2016 and even then wasn't the fastest).
There is no fucking conspiracy here. It should come as no surprise that a hundred plus reviewers playing a game before its official release are only going to portray a fraction of the experiences millions of people are going to have playing the game on release day. It is impossible for them to foresee every experience people might have with the game, and it is not their job to do so. If you want we could go back to the days where scores were put together by some algorithm, where you gave the graphics, the gameplay, the sound, the replayability, the story of the game different scores and it would spit out a finished overall score. But that is obviously fucking stupid and does not do any game justice in any way. That is not an objective review of a game. You can't objectively review a game. It is not a fucking appliance that you can only use in one way and it either does that job well or not. There are no objective markers as to what would constitute a good game.
Do I think this game rated too highly? Yes. I personally think it is one of the worst games I've ever played, but for completely different reasons you mentioned. I do not believe this game would be any better if any of the things you mentioned were "fixed". But there are tons of games that I do not consider to be good at all, that get fantastic reviews across the board.
The actual solution to this "problem" isn't to review games more "objectively". It is to look at them as a whole, as a piece of art and critically analyze them as you would do with music, movies and literature. And to do that you first need to describe your viewpoint and then as to what end you want to analyze the text. And that end needs to be more specific than "is a game good or not on a scale between 0 and 100). And then you have to realize that every reading and every experience of a text can only ever be fragmentary and incomplete.
Like sure, the reviews of these games are shallow, but 99.999% of all video game criticism is shallow, most of the things you read on here including.
It WAS one of the biggest stories, last month. But we already know what happened with this game. We played it and heard from their upper management already
I expected an article on 343 or Dying Light 2. Something along those lines based on Jason's original tweet
Which is a way of saying: "they used a pre-existing engine that was changed/update/patched/fixed based on the game needs".
I'm not sure why you seem to disagree.
It is still one of the biggest stories in gaming.
Entering a thread to announce you don't care about the topic is silly.
Let me put it this way: Do you want to work 50-60 hours a week, or would you prefer to have a more ordinary 40h week?
I don't mean to offend, but this attitude is quite privileged - it reeks of that conservative mindset akin to "Why should college be free, when I had to pay xxxx for it as well," i.e. just because your situation/history was hard, doesn't mean that we can't do better in the future.
Also: some people can't just choose their job like that. I'm in tech, too, and my boss gets reprimanded when I work more than 10h a day. I know, because this once happened on accident. Sure, you shouldn't pursuit consulting if you can't put in more than 35h/week, but that doesn't mean that consulting could do better either.
I remember the press absolutely raving about that demo and when it was released for everyone I was just like "...is that it?"
Yes the more exposure of bad practices (or the truth) this shit company gets the better.
It's like people didn't learn their lesson with The Witcher 2. CDPR did the exact same thing with that game. They made a demo to show off "the actual game" and then actually started to really work on the game after that was shown to the public. In regards to that event, they mostly managed to pull it off.
When those reports, as well as the other reports of the working conditions of CDPR were posted years ago, the majority here, still high on TW3 just swept all of that under the rug and chalked it up to "a few disgruntled employees". Look at the 180 now.
This is a bad take.
This is a big story for the industry, and having details corroborated helps to really nail down what happened in the trenches. You are taking messages from upper management as thorough enough? Management is precisely who orchestrated this disaster. Speaking as someone in the industry, this kind of investigative material is highly valuable.
Great work as usual, Jason!
Also let's not forget Witcher 3 had at least one of those fake/target/"in-engine" trailers as well.
I didn't forget. I just thought with that they never claimed that any of that was actual in game footage without having the "work in progress" disclaimer. I thought that was more of a case of them not saying as much as they should have, while showing off an incredible looking game that ended up being "optimized" heavily by release.
Staying silent is somewhat better than not taking responsibility & lying for a fuck up.
???
I didn't? I don't follow the OT, nor do I read all news. I know the game turned out shit, but I didn't quite know why. You can't expect everyone to follow all news.
Management getting high not on coke only but also on their own game. Yeah, sure, because just add some Witcher magic and a game will miraculously turn great.
Hope they get sued to the ground and have to rebuilt everything up for the better.
Hope they get sued to the ground and have to rebuilt everything up for the better.
I mean, that's par for the course for the industry. Games never look/run this good when they're this far out from release. Same deal with the Hellblade 2 trailer, it's all fake and made specifically for that trailer.
That isn't exactly a terrible thing, many studios can competently put out a AAA title in four years of full development. Keywords there are full development, meaning main mechanics and storyline elements had been appropriately fleshed out in design discussions that then move into actually developing. That isn't dissuading from the fact they royally fucked up, clearly biting too much off the plate with how many systems they had to support that has hurt their overall design goal. Realistically you lock down your platforms and know you can target them with ease when moving into full development, however that was clearly not the case as there was some assumption that next-gen would be coming within the development timeframe.
CDPR have really fucked this up, because at least with Witcher 3 it actually was a damn good game from the start despite bugs and some graphical changes. Cyberpunk clearly has an identity problem, alongside horrendous performance issues on targeted platforms that can not run the software and should have been dropped. I mean I attempted to play it on PC and functionally can't because it doesn't support native ultrawide screen (3440x1440), causing squished 16:9 resolutions for menus or inventory use. How the fuck does that happen?
I mean, I'm not disagreeing with you but the majority of people who saw the CDPR "apology" video still liked it, they still trust the company and are praising the studio heads that they took the blame for the state of the game and took the hate away from the developers and saying that "EA or Bethesda would never apologize for their games and take the blame", so even a fake apology can work for the majority of people.. most of them don't even know about the development history of the game
Congratulations, you are explored by your employer. Stop trying to glorify long working hours.