Don’t listen to mainstream media slam Cyberpunk 2077 and don’t get a refund. This game is one of the best out there, and they want it to fail.
If you read Kotaku’s review of Cyberpunk 2077 you’ll ge the impression that it is one of the worst games ever made, but it’s far the case. Truth be told, the mainstream media wanted the game to fail, and the proof is in the pudding.
NEWS: CD PROJEKT RED cave to demands of the CCP and refuse to release Taiwanese made game on GOG.
First to address the awkward elephant in the room: sure, the game isn’t perfect. There are many glitches and the game does, on occasion, hang and crash. However, the majority of these problems seem to be plaguing OG PlayStation 4’s and Xbox Ones.
It is a miracle that the game runs at all on those consoles. This console lifecycle has been the longest lasting one ever. The old hardware is almost 10 years old, and when it launched it was still behind midrange PCs. Still, that doesn’t mean you should ask for a refund for Cyberpunk 2077.
The problem isn’t the game, it’s your hardware.
There’s a reason why both Sony and Microsoft had to re-release the consoles with updated hardware in 2016/17. The old hardware was simply struggling to run the games. And the graphics were looking dated even for PlayStation exclusives like The Last of Us Part II.
Keep in mind that The Last of Us Part II was developed to take full advantage of PlayStation 4 with a development team that already had years of experience working with the hardware. CD PROJEKT RED, on the other hand, had a much smaller team, smaller budget and were developing the game on multiple platforms including cross-gen.
The game runs just fine on the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One S, great even. Solid 30FPS and breath-taking graphics. It’s a tiny glimpse into the next generation, and it is a miracle that it runs this well on old hardware.
Mainstream wanted the game to fail.
There’s a certain political ideology that is plaguing mainstream games journalists — or just journalism in general — and it isn’t favourable to certain kind of content.
Many developers have invited these radicals into their studios and have been pressured into caving to their demands. By that I mean making the game that they want, regardless of what the fanbase asks for.
We saw this happen to The Last of Us Part II. Where — spoiler warning — they killed off the male protagonist in order to snuff the old trope of male heroes in videogames. Ellie and Joel were replaced with a butch woman and a transgender boy.
This dramatic change happened after they invited radical feminist fake “gamer girl” Anita Sarkeesian to oversee the game’s production.
Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, never caved but they did try to listen and make the game as inclusive as possible. The trans community was outraged that there was no non-binary or trans gender option in the game. So, CD PROJEKT RED, tied the gender to the characters voice allowing you to choose the body of a man and hence play a trans character.
Sadly that outraged the trans community even more. They called it a disgusting insult because a lot of trans people are very sensitive about their voices.
CD PROJEKT RED simply did this because other characters refer to you by gendered pronouns depending on which voice actor is used, and they certainly weren’t going to re-record 4000 pages of dialogue just to put a gender neutral character in the game.
But it wasn’t just that, the mainstream media hated almost everything about a game they hadn’t even played yet… and that’s because of where the developer is from.
Poland = problematic.
The mainstream media are not a big fan of Polish or Eastern European companies, and it has everything to do with politics and religion.
Poland is a very independent and free country and although there is no national religion there, the Roman-Catholic church is the biggest in Poland. Their country is very strict on things that the American left usually celebrate like abortion.
Poland, as a matter of fact, has zero tolerance laws for abortions. Up until this November abortion was completely illegal. Now abortion in Poland is legal only in cases of r*pe and inc*st, when the woman’s life or health is at risk, or if the fetus is irreparably damaged.
Polish people are also not huge on identity politics. The country is largely conservative and is one of the most successful capitalist countries in the world.
Capitalism and Catholicism are two of the most despised things by the mainstream games journalists, so it is not hard to see why they’d be a bit harsher on a developer from a country that embrace those things.
Not the first time this has happened.
Czech developer Warhorse Studio made one of the most immersive first-person roleplaying games in history. It’s called Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and it is considered to be one of the greatest games ever made by many people.
The game is based of real historic people and is set in dark Roman ages of Bohemia. The developers were shamed by the mainstream media for not being inclusive enough. They were called racist and homophobic, just like CD PROJEKT RED, for not including black and trans people in the game.
When the developer responded by saying that their goal was to make the game as historically accurate as possible, the mainstream media fired back saying that historical accuracy is problematic.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance did launch with many issues especially on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, but it ran like a dream on the Xbox One X. But Warhorse Studio fixed the many issues with several patches within a month of release.
Or the second time…
Another Slavic developer was also called racist and homophobic by the mainstream press.
Slovene developer Triternion, makers of the very popular medieval hack-and-slash game Mordau, were slammed by senior editor of Kotaku Australia, Luke Plunkett.
The Kotaku Australia editor called the developers out for not banning people from their games for using homophobic and racist slurs in the game, claiming it is evidence that the developers support those views. He also called them sexist for allegedly refusing to create female body models for the players.
The article got a bit of traction and the developers were bombarded with hateful messages from online activists and were eventually forced to apologise.
Cyberpunk 2077 is great, don’t get a refund.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I loved it so much that I bought myself an Xbox Series X in anticipation of the next-gen update. Regardless, the game looks and plays great on my Xbox One X.
Nighty City feels like its alive and the visuals add that extra layer of emersion. The characters are unforgettable and you actually care about them… and the open ended nature of the gameplay is something a lot of other developers could learn from.
If you are playing it on the OG consoles and are disappointed, or even mad, that you didn’t get the experience you expected… don’t trade in your game or ask for a refund!
Once you upgrade to console the game will play just fine. Like I said, it is your hardware that is the issue not the game. Also, CD PROJEKT RED have promised all early adopter last-gen buyers of Cyberpunk 2077 a free next-gen update.
If you hold on to your last-gen copy of Cyberpunk 2077 you are essentially saving yourself close to AUD$30. Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 games are selling for AUD$110 at major Australian retailers, and Sony have announced that all next-gen games will be an extra USD$10.
The hate for Cyberpunk 2077 is not deserved but the attack on the game was well predicted and you should definitely not ask for a refund.