Gaming

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Is ‘Unplayable’ On PS4 And Xbox One, And Gamers Are Crying Themselves To Sleep

The creators are now offering refunds for players who feel misled by preview footage.

by Jared Richards  15 December 2020
Cyberpunk 2077 is broken, and gamers are not happy

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After being long anticipated by gamers, Cyberpunk 2077 has finally arrived and it’s living up to the eight-year hype — unless, of course, you’re playing on a Playstation 4 or Xbox One, where the game is glitchy as hell and paling in comparison to preview images and videos.

And while its creators are working on patches to make things better, they’re also offering refunds and their deepest apologies for misrepresenting the capabilities on the now last-gen consoles.

Since its announcement in 2012, Cyberpunk 2077 has been incredibly hyped (including by Junkee). The action RPG, based off the Cyberpunk boardgames, was anticipated for its aesthetic — inspired by Blade Runner, Ghost In The Shell and other sci-fi classics — open-world, immense customisability options (including character’s genitals) and voice-acting by Keanu Reeves. It’s been billed as a mature work of art. Plus, the game was created by Polish developers CD Projekt, AKA the team behind the acclaimed The Witcher series. In short, it’s a big deal.

There’s just one problem: When it was released last week after many, many delays and a few controversies, it wasn’t exactly the game people had waited eight years for.

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While PC players are having fewer problems, those who bought the PS4 or Xbox One versions were underwhelmed by the graphics, load issues, and underpopulated open world, which not only lacked the finesse of the trailers and preview footage, but had some pretty major bugs.

While IGN gave the PC version a 9/10, they called the PS4 and Xbox One version a completely different game, rating it a 4/10 and saying it’s simply “not [in] an acceptable state” for release.

“[Here] it is a different game entirely,” writes reviewer Destin Legarie. “It fails to hit even the lowest bar of technical quality one should expect even when playing on lower-end hardware. It performs so poorly that it makes combat, driving, and what is otherwise a master craft of storytelling legitimately difficult to look at.”

“It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve felt nauseated after playing because of the terrible frame rate. It really is that bad, and it’s very suspicious that CD Projekt Red refused to provide console review copies ahead of launch.”

Footage on social media showed some huge issues beyond clipping and graphic issues. Bugs and crashes have been pretty common, and people were massively pissed off that what was touted as The Best Game Ever is, at times, borderline unplayable. For a few players, their character’s penis even clipped through clothing, which, look, is probably too funny of a glitch to really get mad about.

In response, CD Projekt has issued a statement promising patches that will fix issues with the game in January and February, but apologised for not showing the game’s PS4 or Xbox One versions before they were on sale, and “not allowing you to make a more informed decision about your purchase”.

The patches will “fix the most prominent problems”, but will not make these versions “look like it’s running on a high-spec PC or next-gen console, but it will be closer to that experience than it is now”.

They are also offering refunds for the game before December 21, though those who have the PS4 and Xbox One versions will be able to download the game on next-gen consoles the PS5 and Xbox S-Series when those versions are released in February.

Elon Musk, whose partner Grimes made music for the game, has responded to the statement by posting a screenshot of the Cyberpunk sub-Reddit, where someone says they took a week off work to play the game, but cannot stop crying.

Before Cyberpunk‘s release, there were reports that the developers were working overtime to complete the game, despite repeatedly promising that they would not require workers to do so. It’s almost as if the immense pressure to release the game caused the team to both push their team to the limits and still release an incomplete product.

Meanwhile, the game already made back its development and marketing budget by day one of release, having sold eight-million copies on pre-sales alone.