One of the most hyped games of the past decade, only to be corrupted by the lack of care put into the final steps. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most controversial games of 2020, following the theme of the entire year.
It was created by the team that made Witcher 3 and based on a board game from the 1980s. During E3 2019, a gaming convention widely attended for its announcements of new releases, the team had a special presentation. The game had the attention of millions of people because of its promised graphic quality, as presented by the trailer. To make it even more shocking, the final few seconds showed the character played by Canadian Actor Keanu Reeves, who surprised the audience by making a guest appearance during the showing.
It kept the “hype” until the very end. With over 8 million pre-orders before the game’s release on December 10, 2020, it had people playing the second it was available. One of the customers was North Harford junior, Jonathan Roth. He followed the game, pre-ordered it, and played it as soon as it was available. However, he shares the opinion of most others that did the same. “It just overall wasn’t very fun to play, it had a lot of issues, was poorly optimized, and the story didn’t make up for it either,” he explains, having played most of the game before giving up. On every system it was on, it had issues, some worse than others. The PC version worked but only with a “beefy computer” says Roth, and the PS4 and Xbox One editions were completely unplayable. On console, the graphics were comparable to those of a Nintendo GameCube, with no details and extremely buggy.
The controversy has gone so far in fact that the company, CD PROJEKT RED, is being sued for falsely advertising the game. Allegedly, in their trailers they showed “PS4 gameplay”, but the footage shown was actually from the PC version of the game. They’re being sued by investors who bought stocks, not knowing it would not be very well received.
However, Roth goes on to say that maybe if the bugs were all fixed, like cars randomly flying into the air, characters disappearing, or missions freezing, then maybe it would be fun. It was a game that promised 30 hours of unique story and graphics, but for most, it was just a disappointment. It’s gained a lot of YouTube popularity, however, since the bugs are seen as extreme.