Communication and the Road Ahead

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I don't know about the rest of the community on here, but communication is key to a happy player pool. Periods of buzz followed by periods of nothingness can leave people feeling disengaged and turned away from the community, thus dropping the game entirely. No, stats do not count as communication.

We know there's something in the works. We know it's big, or at least the time between major updates and "leaks" would lead us to believe so. What I want to know, and I'm sure others do, is when can we expect the next update? We're already off track from the road map released earlier this year, where do the paths connect.

If Corp Comm doesn't want to over promise and under deliver, that's fine but it's something that should be communicated. Otherwise, it's ghosting. I think it would be understandable for there to be fright in giving out information unless it's an absolute certainty considering what's happened since December.
 
Best not to 'expect' anything. Expectation is what lead to this whole fiasco in the first place.

Though one would think that if THREE PEOPLE can produce this in what essentially equates to a garage studio, then CDPR should be able to get their shit together enough to at least stay on their own intended roadmap schedule.

That looks cool! Have subscribed to their youtube and will try and remember to check back to see how it's going. Looks amazing considering there's only three people on it. If it really takes off hopefully they're able to add some more staff too.
 
That looks cool! Have subscribed to their youtube and will try and remember to check back to see how it's going. Looks amazing considering there's only three people on it. If it really takes off hopefully they're able to add some more staff too.

It does. But yet, I'm reserving my hype until more substantial news comes to light.

They're apparently in talks with potential publishers now. If they get picked up and expanded staff/dev-wise, that'll be pretty significant. Hope they hash it out. REALLY looking forward to the player pilot-able flying vehicles. And the bounty system sounds really sweet. Especially if they're procedurally generated.
 
That indy game looks great. But to return to the subject of this thread, I can understand the frustration of not knowing when the next patch or when the DLCs are going to be released. That being said, the concept of giving a date as a deadline and rushing to release the game according to it is one of the reasons CP 2077 was released last December in the state that it was. So I can understand CDPR is not providing a date. But true, more communication would be great.
 
It does. But yet, I'm reserving my hype until more substantial news comes to light.

They're apparently in talks with potential publishers now. If they get picked up and expanded staff/dev-wise, that'll be pretty significant. Hope they hash it out. REALLY looking forward to the player pilot-able flying vehicles. And the bounty system sounds really sweet. Especially if they're procedurally generated.

Awesome, and yeah I can't get hyped after this game. Not because I felt let down, I played it for over 200 hours before giving it a break, but because I looked forward to an open world cyberpunk game for almost 8 years along with all of the delays and other issues and the hype in general just becomes so draining after a while. I really liked the flying car for that game too, great way to start the clip off.

So I can understand CDPR is not providing a date. But true, more communication would be great.

Agreed totally, I'm not so interested in dates as I am what they're working on. If they could even give players a small amount of details before release so we have a clue as to what's happening that'd be great. Maybe that'll happen anyway once they're more comfortable with how things are going.
 
Best not to 'expect' anything. Expectation is what lead to this whole fiasco in the first place.

Though one would think that if THREE PEOPLE can produce this in what essentially equates to a garage studio, then CDPR should be able to get their shit together enough to at least stay on their own intended roadmap schedule.
I could see that being a fight with The 5th Element over copyright.
 
I think the lack of communication is frustrating but frankly probably for the best. The implications of everything we do know about what happened with CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 is that they had no idea how much it would take to actually get the game running up to sufficient speed, back to Playstation Store standards, and handling the massive amount of bugs as well as glitches.

Seven months so far.

I think that indicates that the level of problems was FANTASTICALLY HUGE and handling it was something they couldn't reasonably estimate beyond very broad strokes.

Again, SEVEN MONTHS.

Let's be honest, it seems this game wasn't released a few months too early. It semes like it was released a YEAR too early.
 
Let's be honest, it seems this game wasn't released a few months too early. It semes like it was released a YEAR too early.

This.

The 'average' AAA title goes through (again, on average) a 4 year development cycle for the base game. Given the original game (or at least a major chunk of it) was scrapped in 2018 when things changed direction, the timeframe certainly fits.
 
I heard from a dev that they are trying the Hello Games strategy of not talking about what they are working on untill it is done, which is a mistake if you ask me. Hello Games was a little indie studio, there were no big expectations anymore with NMS after the big failure so people basically just licked their wounds and forgot about it. CDPR is a big studio, to have radio silence from a big studio is just kinda awkward and it looks quite bad on a professional level if you ask me.

It would be more accurate to compare this problem at launch with game projects like Sea of Thieves, Stronghold: Kingdoms and even Star Citizen in a way. What they do for damage control is bringing out weekly updates, roadmaps, dev blogs etc. I feel that is the route a big studio should take.
 
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I heard from a dev that they are trying the Hello Games strategy of not talking about what they are working on untill it is done, which is a very big mistake if you ask me. Hello Games was a little indie studio, there were no big expectations anymore with NMS after the big failure so people basically just licked their wounds and forgot about it. CDPR is a big studio, to have radio silence from a big studio is just very awkward and quite unprofessional if you ask me.

I'd argue against that, since its the mixed/convoluted PR that has gotten them a lot of heat. Talking got them into this mess, perhaps its better to be quiet, work hard, and talk when they have something to actually show?

Granted, I'd like to hear what happening too, but lets see what patch 1.3 brings when it drops.
 
I'd argue against that, since its the mixed/convoluted PR that has gotten them a lot of heat. Talking got them into this mess, perhaps its better to be quiet, work hard, and talk when they have something to actually show?

Granted, I'd like to hear what happening too, but lets see what patch 1.3 brings when it drops.

I dunno, people are looking forward to these updates. Imagine if they said, "Yeah, we'll be unable to do any Free DLC for 10 months because we're too busy fixing this."
 
There are quite a few things that's gone wrong with CP2077 in terms of launch. The game was released with a lot of known issues which CDPR rushed to get fixed. But as is well known with any software development; squash one bug and two more show up, so there is a lot of whack-a-mole. That combined with sub-par performance and stability on previous generation consoles caused it to be de-listed from the PlayStation Store.
I'd wager that this caused the investors to put pressure on CDPR to put most of their effort into getting the game back up on the PlayStation store before any new content and game improvements other than bug fixes could be prioritized.

Patch developments and release cadence seemed to be going quite well up until the security breach in February (https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/information-regarding-data-security/) where the source code of CDPR games was stolen and an unknown amount of infrastructure and workstations was encrypted by ransomware. Once that happened, a lot had to change both on the development and security side of things. Having all the developers get their workstations back up and running, re-secure access to source code repositories, establish new routines for accessing and working on the games etc. likely caused a lot of pain for everyone involved, and again, I'll bet that caused most of the fixes and development to be severely halted or completely stopped for at least one month.

This hurdle should now be well passed (an update was posted on June 10th in regards to what's been done to prevent this from happening again: https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/security-breach-update/) and from what we can see in the closed QA branch releases the past weeks they are working and testing the next release for CP2077. Paweł Sasko teased a DLC update during his last stream implying that a DLC will be released this month (Clip on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/orrvda )
He is not a native English speaker, so he might have meant "Within a month", but we might get a nice surprise today or tomorrow if we are really lucky. Combine this with the social media advertisement teasing "Our biggest update yet" that was likely posted a month early, it gives further credence to there being a huge update just around the corner (https://streamable.com/f6pc6n).

With all that said, I think that the coming half-year will be a very good time for us who love CP2077. COVID is starting to get under control, the CDPR servers are secured and they are working full steam on content and updates for the game. Communication regarding future releases will likely also pick up, but we'll see if they continue as they have to manage expectations.

Current release schedule for CP2077
Day 0: Game release date: December 10th, 2020
Day 1: Hotfix 1.04: December 11th, 2020
Day 13: Hotfix 1.06: December 23rd, 2020
Day 43: Patch 1.1: January 22nd, 2021
Day 49: Hotfix 1.11: January 28th, 2021
Day 57: Hotfix 1.12: February 5th, 2021
Day 60: Data breach: February 8th, 2021
Day 109: Patch 1.2: March 29th, 2021 (Originally supposed to release in February)
Day 125: Hotfix 1.21: April 14th, 2021
Day 139: Hotfix 1.22: April 28th, 2021
Day 189: Patch 1.23: June 17th, 2021
 
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Combine this with the social media advertisement teasing "Our biggest update yet" that was likely posted a month early, it gives further credence to there being a huge update just around the corner
That advertisement was from an old Ad campaign launched on social networks prior to 1.2. This has been confirmed by CDPR. So it's basically fake news.

Unfortunately, the thing with Hellman blinking doesn't mean much. It has actually been sort of a recurring joke during Sasko streams; people keep asking him when DLCs are coming out, so he jokes around a bit about that. This doesn't mean we're not getting anything this month, but it's certainly not an official statement, just Sasko having a bit of fun with the community.
 
That advertisement was from an old Ad campaign launched on social networks prior to 1.2. This has been confirmed by CDPR. So it's basically fake news.

Unfortunately, the thing with Hellman blinking doesn't mean much. It has actually been sort of a recurring joke during Sasko streams; people keep asking him when DLCs are coming out, so he jokes around a bit about that. This doesn't mean we're not getting anything this month, but it's certainly not an official statement, just Sasko having a bit of fun with the community.

I dunno, I think it's probably very likely that we're getting DLC in August. However, we've also had a bunch of leaks that mainstream media (i.e Forbes) have reported on so the DLC is...okay.

Assuming it's accurate, the DLC is mostly going to be fairly minor stuff.

New Weapons, NG+, a couple of adventures, and poses with the possibility of changing V's look at mirrors.
 
I will disagree with the general premise here.

Communicating with the Internet Fanbase is only going to make things worse, in most cases, because the internet fan base is broken.

I would point to No Man's Sky/Hello Games as proof that pulling back from communication works better in the long run. Only communicating when something is ready/released/etc.
 
I dunno, I think it's probably very likely that we're getting DLC in August. However, we've also had a bunch of leaks that mainstream media (i.e Forbes) have reported on so the DLC is...okay.

Assuming it's accurate, the DLC is mostly going to be fairly minor stuff.

New Weapons, NG+, a couple of adventures, and poses with the possibility of changing V's look at mirrors.

I'll actually be happy to get minor stuff, as long as things start rolling out.

I DO think we're getting something in the upcoming weeks. I just don't take game journalists statements (even if they are from Forbes) and general leaks from dataminers and Redditors as pure gold.
 
They don't need to communicate directly with the internet fanbase, they could just send out a boring old press reelase with the most important information and an updated roadmap that actually contains milestones, so players who don't hang out on Reddit or the forums also get the information. People that are not part of the toxic Twitter mob alo have a right to get informed.
 
They don't need to communicate directly with the internet fanbase, they could just send out a boring old press reelase with the most important information and an updated roadmap that actually contains milestones, so players who don't hang out on Reddit or the forums also get the information. People that are not part of the toxic Twitter mob alo have a right to get informed.

There's also the alternative no one wants to consider that there is nothing to report. "We're working on this shit until we can work on the next stuff."
 
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