The problem with first impressions is that you only get one of them, and the problem with time is that with a bad first impression, most players will leave the game long before it is fixed. So if they spend too much time the game will have such a low player base that they do not consider it necessary to fix the game. Then they take a loss as a loss and move on to the next project, and Cyberpunk 2077 goes down in the history books as the game that destroyed CDPR good will and reputation with the gamers.
Time is important. Would not spend too much if I were them.
It's fine to speculate about things like this as an outsider, but I can tell you from inside the industry that the engine is the foundation of everything. This is a new engine and is responsible for automating a lot of things that the artists, level designers and so on need to be able to take for granted in order to do their jobs. Any large, complex engine needs time to go through iterations and revisions of the implementations of its various subsystems.
While this is true, I wanted to point out that that many of the glitches seem to have a common cause. It is more like one big difficult problem, instead of lots of small ones that you could just fix and tick off a list.
And while I don't know it for sure, most quest related bugs can usually be found in their scripts instead of the engine. Although thats probably arguing about semantics.
The development team simply needed more time on this engine to both polish what we've currently got, and to finish implementing various subsystems that we all can clearly see were cut so the game could be released to appease shareholders.
I definitely agree that they needed more time for polish. Broken perks and mods are a testament to that.
But I dunno about "cut" subsystems, and especially that diatribe about shareholders.
The game struggles to keep up on low end hardware already. You can't add stuff onto that without limit. Things like better crowd or driver AI are imho unrealiatic, not really doable without throwing the base ps4 under the bus.
That is the feeling you have, that there has been a lack of security in development. CDPR has said that they will not let Cyberpunk 2077 drift, I think it is worth a review and show us in 1 or 2 years an evolved, more complex game. I think it will be his way to regain confidence.
If it is true what is said that the developers worked on the game almost at the same time that the engine was modified and developed, this development has been a real roller coaster.
It seems amazing to me that in just 3 years they have achieved this, imagine if they had really been 8 years of development.
About that it is difficult for players to play this game again if they have finished it, I do not agree if you fill the city with life and also introduce expansions with new stories, also the fact that they give us an improved version will make many people want to return to live the experience without bugs. We are hardly going to find many games of this quality in a few years, that is the time frame that CDPR has.
As for the hardware is responsible for generating bugs, I think it is rather that the lack of optimization of the engine makes it waste the hardware resources, because I have a high-end pc and the fps and bugs drops have been constant. I7 6700K 32 Gb DDR4 3200 PC4-25600, Gigabyte 3070 RTX and Samsung 850 Evo SSD Series 500GB SATA3 and I think the engine and optimization waste the resources they have at their disposal.
Yes, they need time to fix it, because rushing out patches because if another unrealistic deadline worked out so well in the past.
If I look at patch 1.1, it is clear that they need a lot of time to fix the problems without creating the double amount of new ones.
However, they released the game and the buyer has the right to get a function product.
At this point, they should transform cyberpunk into a live service game (scummy move) and keep on working to iron out problems.
Since the sequel is out if the question at the moment, they should use this game to deliver fresh content on a regular basis. Just like other games do it.
The alternative would be to burry this game next to E.T.
I have a high-end pc and the fps and bugs drops have been constant. I7 6700K 32 Gb DDR4 3200 PC4-25600, Gigabyte 3070 RTX and Samsung 850 Evo SSD Series 500GB SATA3
While not bad, that is not really high-end anymore.
A PS5 is already better than that: twice as many cores, ~ 4.5 times the memory bandwith and a ~10 times faster SSD.
And while your graka is very good, it sits in a pcie 3.0 slot, so your system can't even use its full potential.
I really don't want to fault your rig for the games problems, all I'm saying is that this game stresses the io subsystems like no other before it.
That is more a result of how the world is designed, and less a matter of the engine squandering resources or being buggy.
You could argue the artists and level designers were the ones who wasted resources here. But is it really a waste if it looks so damn impressive?
That said, the engine is ultimately responsible for prioritising assets on weaker hardware, so I agree with your conclusion: They just need more time to address that.
While not bad, that is not really high-end anymore.
A PS5 is already better than that: twice as many cores, ~ 4.5 times the memory bandwith and a ~10 times faster SSD.
And while your graka is very good, it sits in a pcie 3.0 slot, so your system can't even use its full potential.
I really don't want to fault your rig for the games problems, all I'm saying is that this game stresses the io subsystems like no other before it.
That is more a result of how the world is designed, and less a matter of the engine squandering resources or being buggy.
You could argue the artists and level designers were the ones who wasted resources here. But is it really a waste if it looks so damn impressive?
That said, the engine is ultimately responsible for prioritising assets on weaker hardware, so I agree with your conclusion: They just need more time to address that.
I know there is hardware with more power, but I think mine is enough to move everything to the maximum ... I think.
Where I saw more clearly the optimization problem that this game has, is when you meet with the monk and relax with a neurodance that is a falling waterfall.
It is something very simple, a still image with falling water ... well the fps dropped to 10 !!!! when normal is 40 fps.
The same when there is a cinematic, the fps drop brutally !!!
I see few optimists who say that the foundations of the game are solid, and that it will get better with updates. But the foundations are the engine. And it needed much more tweaking time to support a story-driven vertically rich open-world adventure first-person looter shooter role-playing game on current technology. It will always be this sinking ship with duct tape all over it if they don't revamp it significantly because whatever they add later won't eliminate the core issues.
The foundation is pretty solid IMO, and it no doubt will start to get better with updates. My game already went from crashing every few hours to not at all with 1.1 so that's an improvement (though I know others' experiences have been different).
If the game is made near-perfect and features added back in, at this point will anybody even care? Concurrent users have dropped from one million to 60,000. There are only 6% of the people playing the game that were around on launch day. The game is already on sale, while older games like FarCry 5 are still full price.
The temptation is going to be for CDPR to stop talking about CP2077 and just quietly release updates to patch it to a barely acceptable state, then move on to the next game in the franchise, or just drop the CP franchise altogether and start something else.
I know there is hardware with more power, but I think mine is enough to move everything to the maximum ... I think.
Where I saw more clearly the optimization problem that this game has, is when you meet with the monk and relax with a neurodance that is a falling waterfall.
It is something very simple, a still image with falling water ... well the fps dropped to 10 !!!! when normal is 40 fps.
The same when there is a cinematic, the fps drop brutally !!!
No, that rig will not "move everything to the maximum". I have an i7-9700k, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM and SSD, and I can't run it maxxed out. I do have RTX running in "psycho" mode, but I also have DLSS turned to balanced and some other settings thet hurt FPS like screen space reflections turned down. I average about 80fps in lighter areas and 65fps in the densest areas. I'd run with RTX off but the game has a "grainy" look to me with it off (yes, film grain is turned off).
This game is tough on hardware, for sure. I don't think there is a rig out there that will run at 60fps with everything maxxed and DLSS off. WIthout DLSS I'd be at medium settings or RTX off for sure.
The foundation is pretty solid IMO, and it no doubt will start to get better with updates. My game already went from crashing every few hours to not at all with 1.1 so that's an improvement (though I know others' experiences have been different).
If the game is made near-perfect and features added back in, at this point will anybody even care? Concurrent users have dropped from one million to 60,000. There are only 6% of the people playing the game that were around on launch day. The game is already on sale, while older games like FarCry 5 are still full price.
The temptation is going to be for CDPR to stop talking about CP2077 and just quietly release updates to patch it to a barely acceptable state, then move on to the next game in the franchise, or just drop the CP franchise altogether and start something else.
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No, that rig will not "move everything to the maximum". I have an i7-9700k, RTX 3080, 32GB RAM and SSD, and I can't run it maxxed out. I do have RTX running in "psycho" mode, but I also have DLSS turned to balanced and some other settings thet hurt FPS like screen space reflections turned down. I average about 80fps in lighter areas and 65fps in the densest areas. I'd run with RTX off but the game has a "grainy" look to me with it off (yes, film grain is turned off).
This game is tough on hardware, for sure. I don't think there is a rig out there that will run at 60fps with everything maxxed and DLSS off. WIthout DLSS I'd be at medium settings or RTX off for sure.
Well, I don't know, but I play with everything to the maximum except this:
film grain: off
Field of View: 90
Reflection quality in screen space: Ultra
Ray Tracing Lighting: Ultra
DLSS: automatic
Vertical sync: Off
My resolution is 3840x2160 4k
Npc density is high
And in the city by day even running by car is 40 fps
The fact that an image of a waterfall falls in the monk's neurodance at 10 fps or in the cinematics has jerks or lack of speed in loading textures also has to do with optimization.
They will surely work on that in the coming months.
Also the policy has to be to limit the game for old consoles but eat all the resources of the PC hardware efficiently.
I'm just saying, Red Engine developing since TW2. It's not a new engine that only scoped CP77. Devs had a lot of experince on that. I think they just hurried for final release. Any kinda open-world game development should takes more than 4 years. I still trust CDPR that they fix game till end of this year.
CDPR made the Red engine and I Know yes they need time to fix it. But they were the ones that released it even after saying it will release when it was ready. I was waiting for another delay and did care cause I thought it will be ready when it's ready...
Don't get me wrong I don't blame the Devs they can only do what they are told and with what time restraints are but on them.
But CDPR management knew these problems and knew it wasn't finished and still put it out.
Just saying ya they messed up but just give them a pass is what is wrong with the industry. Suits will always push the consumer and see what they can get away with. I'm not saying that's what CDPR did, but its not looking good.
1.1 Was the patch on which every other patch would build on. In a lot of people experience it broke even more with a downgrade in graphics. They should have scrapped PS4 and Xbox One and just released in 2022 for next gen platforms. But the suits wanted that holiday money. And they got it. Now those with half way good experience are telling everyone who still can't play just give them time.
We have to hold these suits accountable for these kind of actions or they will just do it again and again.
TL/DR I do have faith in the devs at CDPR and know they can produce amazing things. But we can not let the suits get away with these kind of practices. Red engine is an in house engine...
the patch to cuild up on could mean a fewa things. they could have redone some lines of code and improved others. now that can in its self cause things to break. we may see major improvements after this with bug and performance. i do agree that there is some issue with the new engine maybe only now have they got the worst issue sorted. we will only know soon
I have finished the game, it has been a great experience for me, as well as for many players. Great story, great city, great characters and great game. I want much more please !!!
You need a lot of content and more options and we've all said them already.
But there is something that I perceive since I play and that seeing that each patch improves but also breaks, I am coming to the conclusion that perhaps the big problem that Cyberpunk 2077 has is that its engine has errors and generates errors in execution, because I had bugs during the 135 hours (in PC with I7, 32 Gb, 512 ssd y 3070 rtx) that I have played, all the players have had errors and also the errors in each player have been similar but not the same depending on their hardware.
What if the problem with Red Engine is that it has no stability, has limitations and bad optimization? Because patch 1.1 has fixed bugs but has caused others. That leads me to think this opinion is not strange.
There are physics errors, there are errors in how the engine interprets actions, here is something deeper than what we see with the naked eye ...
Maybe developers can't do more with the tools that the engine provides
It also seems that the deficiencies and limitations in some aspects of the RED ENGINE engine are also the cause of having removed some features from the game and having such poor AI
CDPR has a great job ahead of it and I think it's not just correcting the game here and there ...
This is because of CDPR's poor decision to develop the engine right alongside the game itself. This is akin to engineering and subsequently building your car while you're driving it─which makes no sense from a developer/programmer standpoint, and only makes sense from the viewpoint of someone who didn't like how long they were told it would take if they developed the engine first, and then the game─someone who's sole focus is profits, often-times, even if it's to the detriment of the product and the company: an executive.
The major issue with developing an engine and game this way, is that once you build out a portion of the engine, and then build a portion of the game that utilizes the bit of the engine you've already built, you're now locked into the engine being what it is, and you can't go back and easily make changes because the portion of the game you just made relies on that portion of the engine remaining as it is. So you start seeing bugs and issues arise, and you have A LOT of trouble fixing them because you're interlocking iterations of engine and game as you progress, making it more difficult to repair either when a problem is made apparent.
It sounds absurd, and I'd think it nearly impossible, if it weren't for the fact that these companies do it over and over again, somehow expecting a better result every time. Yet, instead of learning from their mistakes, they double-down and do even worse the next time around. Didn't you hear? Now, instead of developing just one game poorly, CDPR announced, under the guise of improving their company after the disastrous release of Cyberpunk 2077, that they're going to start working on multiple games at once, as if that will somehow make the end result better.. Yeah.. this will end well.
Surely the engine just needs to implement it's interface, What goes on behind the interface is down to the engine alone and wont affect anything else as long as it does that. You'd put stubs into the unfinished parts. Exactly what the interface is will be decided before any code is written so design and analysis could run concurrently for both. If new functionality is required they would just extend the interface, not rewrite
Games are a combination of both the base engine (if there is one) and the code used to utilize that "core" code the way devs want for the game. Bugs, when they occur, are not directly caused by the "engine part" or the "game part" but rather how the two parts are interacting with one another. Most often, especially when it's one's own engine (as opposed to sourced engines, which can often come with limitations on what a studio can or cannot access or change), it's perfectly possible to fix any bug by editing the way the core works or reworking the way a gameplay function makes a call to that part of the "core code".
I think people sometimes confuse the way this works because using a sourced engine is extremely common nowadays, with untold titles using some version of the Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Unity, etc. In that regard -- yes -- it's entirely possible that a dev may want to do something that the base engine they're building on is simply not capable of. They can try to extend its functionality by writing their own code to add in what's desired, but there's no guarantee that it will work, or it may only work on certain hardware/drivers and be buggy on others.
CDPR doesn't really have to worry about this. They own the engine. For all intents and purposes, the game is one, giant block of code. In general, however, it's normally easier to change "surface-level" things to fix issues, rather than delving into the "guts" of a program. That can easily backfire, as the deeper into the code you go, the more likely it is that any change will alter the way many things "above" it work -- not just the buggy bits.
I would assume there is still a dividing line between the engine and the game, as presumably CDPR would want to make the engine reusable on future projects. There are probably abstractions to increase reusability and speed up implementation of game-level assets, which would if nothing else form a de facto separation between the game logic and the underlying engine.
Engine-level logic is going to be inherently more complex and error-prone. It's like if a mechanical clock isn't showing the right time. Maybe the numbers are in the wrong place (game level) or maybe the internal mechanism is faulty (engine-level). One problem is going to be more difficult to diagnose and resolve than the other.
The code controlling things like physics and AI is going to be more difficult to modify directly than the game components relying upon it. And then there will be even more low-level components operating closer to the hardware, like memory management or the rendering pipeline, which will have problems more specific to the environment where they are running, and thus be harder to debug.
So while CDPR has the dubious advantage of maintaining their own engine, certain classes of bugs are still going to be more difficult to even identify, let alone fix.
Not strictly true. In addition to integration bugs, there can and will be bugs with the individual units, whether the engine or the game logic. The interaction between components can of course complicate these kinds of issues and cause their effects to propagate to other parts of the application.
I'm going to give a answer from someone who doesn't know anything about how work a video game :
I think it's good that CDPR has their own engine. It will probably perform less than an Unreal for example, but at least they depend on no one. They do what they want
I would assume there is still a dividing line between the engine and the game, as presumably CDPR would want to make the engine reusable on future projects. There are probably abstractions to increase reusability and speed up implementation of game-level assets, which would if nothing else form a de facto separation between the game logic and the underlying engine.
Engine-level logic is going to be inherently more complex and error-prone. It's like if a mechanical clock isn't showing the right time. Maybe the numbers are in the wrong place (game level) or maybe the internal mechanism is faulty (engine-level). One problem is going to be more difficult to diagnose and resolve than the other.
The code controlling things like physics and AI is going to be more difficult to modify directly than the game components relying upon it. And then there will be even more low-level components operating closer to the hardware, like memory management or the rendering pipeline, which will have problems more specific to the environment where they are running, and thus be harder to debug.
So while CDPR has the dubious advantage of maintaining their own engine, certain classes of bugs are still going to be more difficult to even identify, let alone fix.
Not strictly true. In addition to integration bugs, there can and will be bugs with the individual units, whether the engine or the game logic. The interaction between components can of course complicate these kinds of issues and cause their effects to propagate to other parts of the application.
I can't speak for certain, and I'm not a coder. I've just worked here and there with various studios over time and know a number of people that are developers. The only "code" work I've ever personally done is some light scripting while modding for Warcraft 2 and Morrowind.
I'm just saying that CDPR doesn't need to worry separately about an engine issue. It may still be a challenge to figure out where such a bug may lie or come up with a solution, but they're not going to face some separate, "engine-level" obstacle.
I'm going to give a answer from someone who doesn't know anything about how work a video game :
I think it's good that CDPR has their own engine. It will probably perform less than an Unreal for example, but at least they depend on no one. They do what they want
Yup! And that's a door that swings both ways. No need seek outside assistance or be told that they're not allowed to access that portion of the engine...and nothing stopping them from coding themselves into a corner, either. Of course, that would be the same for any studio out there that builds a title from scratch. (It's just that CDPR actively reaches for the stars! There were bound to be some hiccuburps sooner or later.)
I'd like to hear your thoughts on the bugs you've experienced beyond the rush to get the game out. Errors are not repeated in the same way in the same situation. We can debate on that or the moderator will close the discussion
You make an interesting point that could indeed be a potential reason why performance, bugs and glitch are all over the place for all platforms.
I am on PS4 base for the great majority. There I'm nearing the 300 hour mark while on PC I only have about 70 (and yes, I do prefer to play on PS4 while hanging like a lazy bastard on my cough)
But I have seen an incredible amount of posts from people who either have really bad experience, or speak along with the general perception that lastgens are suffering from terrible performance.
The truth is simply that that is not the case for everyone.
And the same goes for PC and Xbox and the next-gens, also there performance is all over the place.
And I never really gave it much thought, but it could very well be related to Red Engine that it "runs itself into the ground" from time to time as it were.
If we're talking about engine-level in the sense of a black box, then I agree that CDPR won't have that level of challenge with a home-grown solution. But I would still expect issues at the engine level to have a higher complexity ceiling and to take longer to identify and fix than issues with the game logic.
