In some ways, this reminds me of the No Man's Sky launch. Massive amounts of hate from gamers, bad reviews, bad press, on and on. They overhyped and under-delivered.
Four years later, they've released half a dozen major updates, fixed hordes of bugs and have seriously made the game 10x better than it was at launch. It is now fully the game that was originally promised and more. It's also gone on sale with a major discount several times.
Now that may be an extreme scenario, but if a little shop like Hello Games can do it, I think CDPR at least has a shot. I will be happy to wait.
Bugs are one thing but we live post 2010, so patch culture is the norm. Everyone knows the bugs will be fixed, they just have to wait, hardly anyone will refund for it. They'll play other games for a couple months.
The game on PS4 running at 720p, texture replacement, drop in, you can't fix this like No Man's Sky, and the best thing to do is refund. At a certain point you hit the hardware wall of a graphically intensive game.
Your thoughts are exactly what I've been thinking lately. NMS was the most recent game I was immersed in, before Cyberpunk's release, and thoroughly enjoyed.
The thought that it was buggy as hell on release, and for some time after, seemed far-fetched during play through. There are bugs here and there, but nothing to pay much mind to.
While playing Cyberpunk, there were quite a few bugs on release for PC (crashing, catching enemies in t-pose, randomly dying, and some others), but I'm noticing them less and less. Idk if whether it's them updating or just my mind, but definitely encountering fewer and fewer bugs.
Only personal complaints I have are not related to performance (not a big fan of Johnny Silverhand's character/writing and wasn't a fan of the Panam quests/story, but that's insignificant).
Enjoying it quite a bit now, but could totally see, and look forward to, this being even better with updates. It's just a shame that the devs had to deal with crunch :/
A few of the game's alleged shortcomings I've read about are worse-than-expected AI (with both bystanders and opponents), a lack of truly divergent paths to follow (in dialogue or quests), a non-immersive game world outside the main storyline and poorly designed combat.
All of these could be improved with enough time & budget in future updates, and any one of them would make it a 'more finished' game. At this point I think CDPR will be under major pressure to do more than just fix bugs. A lot of gamers want to see significant changes in the gameplay itself, and I expect it will happen. After all, Hello Games has set expectations pretty high-- and with 1/40th of the employees to boot.
Four years later, they've released half a dozen major updates, fixed hordes of bugs and have seriously made the game 10x better than it was at launch. It is now fully the game that was originally promised and more. It's also gone on sale with a major discount several times.
Now that may be an extreme scenario, but if a little shop like Hello Games can do it, I think CDPR at least has a shot. I will be happy to wait.