I generally tend to stay away from all sorts of news and discussion around games I want to play in order to go into them as free from other people’s impressions and opinions as possible. That’s easier to do with some games than others and of course it helps to not be overly interested in most of the AAA industry.
Then there’s Cyberpunk 2077.
I have of course had no option other than to hear about the troubles the game has ran into, primarily on consoles but I’m sure there’s many entirely legitimate complaints to be had from the PC audience as well. Today Sid Alpha released a video with his take on it and I figured this was the best possible opportunity to get most of the actual information with the least amount of noise and potential spoilage.
We’ve discussed No man’s sky at length before and I held Hello games in very low esteam, not because they released a bad game but because they lied, made promises they knew they couldn’t deliver and obfuscated the truth. I find it very unlikely I will ever play No man’s sky, not because it couldn’t possible have turned into a good game by now but because there’s plenty of good games to play that does not come from a developer who intentionally deceives their customers.
CDPR is a company which produced 3 of my top 5 favourite games of all time. The problems probably wouldn’t even have mattered to me personaly as I would have played the game on PC, a new one at that. As usual I really wasn’t riding the hype train but I was still really looking forward to the release of this game. However if you discard your principles just because they’re inconvenient to you, you never had any to begin with. I had faith in them as a bastion of both ethical and artistic integrity so now that I understand that CD Project Red are guilty of the same intent to deceive I can not condone and much less support them.
So while it hurts me greatly to have to come to this conclusion I will probably never buy Cyberpunk 2077.
This of course does not mean I will write them off forever, the same way I wont make excuses for them due to past excellence. I will judge their future behavior accordingly and we will have to see how they handle the situation in years and projects to come.
Still not the fault of 2020 though.