1.2 patch quality: one simple but curious comparison via google search

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Disclaimer to all the ladies and gentlemen in CDPR: the following, i hope, will be one substantial reason to significantly increase quality assurance for any future patches and DLCs released by the team. But, in the same time, i also post this for all the paying customers of your company who are here. This may help them make better informed decisions about whether to use patch 1.2 now and in near future or not, as well as other kinds of better informed decisions - which, i am sure, would also benefit CDPR in the long run.

Here's the thing.

I went to google and entered this query, with ""s:

"Cyberpunk" "1.2" "broken"

Google says: "About 1,170,000 results".

Then, i entered this one other query, with ""s:

"No Man's Sky" "foundation" "broken"

Google says to this one: "About 404,000 results".

Note, "Foundation" was the 1st major patch to No Man's Sky, released November 2016 - 3 months after game's initial release. And at the time, there was global and massive hate campaign against No Man's Sky, which was much greater degree and amount of disapproval and hate against developers than what we have now regarding CP2077.

Also, please note internets had over 4 years to write all kinds of stuff about Foundation update of NMS - while about patch 1.2 here, merely some days. With more time, the 1st number will no doubt increase much further.

Obviously, scales and features involved are massively different, and no cathegorical conclusions can be made based on this simple comparison alone. Still, the numbers are worrying to say the least. It's likely the situation will not improve unless quality and quality assurance for further updates would be much higher.
 
Maybe the number of player and the expectations of these could explain these results (in part) ?
Playerbase - yes, several times difference. However, not expectations. Back in 2016, hype for NMS was global, massive and extreme. Hate campaign after the release - same. Youtube was full of hate vids, etc. Been there, both in the hype and playing from day 1, also participated alot in the community, know it all "from inside".

One other important difference - is that NMS never was technically as broken (which is, i recon, the reason why NMS was not removed from PS store after its launch). Instead, NMS was massively misunderstood title. Its developers released the game which was hard to "dig". Hard to "fathom". Too smart a game, with fair share of bugs at launch (though nothing as large as CP) - but it was exactly that potential which carried NMS onwards and after some big free DLCs into universally acclaimed and popular title, which it stays to this day. Multiple industry awards, too - starting right from its release. This is where CP loses, so far; NMS was a masterpiece in terms of both gameplay and visuals which was released too rough, but CP is a masterpiece in terms of visuals and story only (not in terms of gameplay, so far, overall) which was released both too rough and too broken.

It's lots more work to "fix" CP than it was to "fix" NMS, imho.

On the other hand, CP has tons and tons of great visual and audio "custom made" content which ain't going away. This helps massively, but all this static content can only last so long before everyone and their uncle experience most of it a few times and grows bored of it.

I.e., for CP, there is limited window of time to recover. There won't be a second chance if 1st chance to do it is wasted. I'd say, this year will decide what kind of story this game will end up be - success or disaster.
 
One other important difference - is that NMS never was technically as broken (which is, i recon, the reason why NMS was not removed from PS store after its launch).
I think that technical issues were the last reason for CP being removed from PS store. Personally I believe that refund policy announced by CDPR, which forced Sony to accept it, was absolute a NO GO for this company. So they decided use "technical reasons" as excuse for giving a "lesson" to CDPR. At the same time it also served as warning to any other developer to avoid CDPR dealing (aka try to dictate Sony something in theirs known refund policy) or will face the same threatment (title removal from Sony store). It definitelly will be interesting to see if CP will be allowed to return when there will be conversion to PS5 later this year, or if there will be continued current situation and CP simply will be discontinued on sony hardware.
 
I think that technical issues were the last reason for CP being removed from PS store. Personally I believe that refund policy announced by CDPR, which forced Sony to accept it, was absolute a NO GO for this company. So they decided use "technical reasons" as excuse for giving a "lesson" to CDPR. At the same time it also served as warning to any other developer to avoid CDPR dealing (aka try to dictate Sony something in theirs known refund policy) or will face the same threatment (title removal from Sony store). It definitelly will be interesting to see if CP will be allowed to return when there will be conversion to PS5 later this year, or if there will be continued current situation and CP simply will be discontinued on sony hardware.
Interesting take, I also wondered about what CDPR have to do get back into the store because effectively they have made Sony lose "face" by forcing the refunding issue.

I also noticed that there was Japan specific censorship issue in the patch notes. The Japanese take censorship very seriously so I had wondered if there was a legal issue that hasn't been disclosed?

I went to google and entered this query, with ""s:

"Cyberpunk" "1.2" "broken"

Google says: "About 1,170,000 results".

Then, i entered this one other query, with ""s:

"No Man's Sky" "foundation" "broken"

Google says to this one: "About 404,000 results".

Could some of this be explained by the growth of copycat content and articles by this I mean that increasingly revenue driven "relevant" content and views are generated by posting an article or video about a "relevant" situation hence the YouTube bandwagon. Five years ago long term meta data still drove searches and I don't think there was quite a much copycat journalism.
 
Who knows, possible, i guess. It's those and many other things which affect, thus 1st post states we should not make any firm conclusions based on those numbers alone, yes.

I don't think Japan censorship played any role at all. All parties involved were aware what kind of product CP2077 was promised to be. I mean, let's not assume censorship in Japan is being run by complete troglodytes, right? ;)

One more thing. As the 1st post predicted, 1st number is growing - now it's "About 1,180,000 results". ~10k pages in ~5 days. And while it happens, i am quite glad to see it ain't as fast as i thought it may end up be.
 
Cyberpunk bashing certainly seems to be popular at the moment!

I wasn't fully invested in the NMS hype, so I can't really comment, but some gaming friends still to this day refer to it as No man's Lie. (redeemed or not).

But cp2077 has to be one of the most memed and joked about games of all time. Reddit YouTube Facebook, forums, everywhere. I mean yeah, the support is still there and lots of people love it, but the disappointment, the trolling and hate seem to be on a totally next level.

Yes, I'm sure dedicated gamers can reference others off the top of their heads - including NMS - but I'm even finding people who don't even play video games are discussing and laughing over the videos and memes. It's just crazy.

So yeah, I can't help but agree somewhat with the above comment about the journalism bandwagon, not to mention the social media bandwagon, the YouTube reddit and twitter bandwagons etc

Maybe it was that no man's sky just didn't receive as much hate as it might have felt like at the time?

OR maybe Google just found all that stuff was repeated over and over and over, just like the posts on these forums?

Its like the proverbial broken record.
 
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