Instead of being just another voice that can't do anything but complain about the game's state it's better to focus on what they're actually doing on making it better. The patch list is impressive. It really is.
The devs know how bad it is. It's not their fault the game was as bad as it is. That's on leadership. I'm not gonna crap on the work the developers did because of something that was outside of their control.
They're working on making the game better.
Many a AAA publisher would've thrown the game into the garbage already. There's big DLC coming, next-gen version is on the way, and this major patch lays the groundwork for more feature filled patches down the road.
I think it's quite questionable if major AAA studios would ever do anything like CP 2077 for at least two major reasons that are related. They don't need to, their business model work and they don't need to take risks like this, which gives them possibility to hire people who aren't perhaps in position to negotiate much about anything and using contractors. I don't see writing being in any better position and everything is on certain production schedules, monetization features and like that. Turn over rate may be high, but that's crunch for. This is to illustrate benefits of control over company structure, over several studios allows to control entire
cost structure. There are projects that fail, but that's acceptable risk.
CDP has very think portfolio and publishing another grind shooter in plastic corridors would look like quite a big risk in that position as it could just not generate any interest and sink in the sea of clones. So CDPR say mo-cap work done here, it's pioneer work and people with this kind of skills, they can go everywhere. Writing the same thing, it transcends the video game standards result is a video game, but most importantly, relevant work in the cyberpunk genre, that happens to be a video game.
And I'm not in this blame the managers thing at all, because without people with guts to greenlit all the clever things this game has, it of course wouldn't be the same.
COVID didn't impact production of just patches, it hampered production from early 2020 and CDPR has no crunch policy, that is very important to note here, they have options there, they found people who were willing to do that pioneering work. But for me there's no question about COVID's role in production and release state of game.
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