Wake up Samurai, we
have a city to burn.
I really promise that we'll deliver a truly outstanding, futuristic RPG setting a totally
new standard in the genre.
Both in terms of the gameplay, but also the tech side.
You'll get an intelligent, non-linear, gripping game with cutting edge graphics.
What more could you want, guys?
Cyberpunk is a mature, visceral work in progress.
And as you just saw, we are working hard to make Night City the most work in progress
piece of s**t.
You interested?
If you've spent any time on the internet in the last few months, you've likely heard of
the game Cyberpunk 2077.
It's the long awaited follow up to CDProjekt Red's massively successful The Witcher 3:
Wild Hunt, which went on to become so beloved that it boosted sales of the original novels
that they were based upon and led to the development of a TV show.
Suffice to say, when CProjekt announced a new RPG set within an futuristic open world
cyberpunk universe, we felt we were in good hands.
But after eight years in development, hundreds of pre-release awards and near unprecendented
levels of anticipation, and this is what we got.
The game is virtually unplayable on previous gen consoles despite the developers telling
us otherwise, with a litany of bugs and crashes even on PC.
But as many have pointed out, the game's issues stretch far beyond a few glitches or performance
issues, a lot of content that was promised was cut, story choices seem to have little
impact, there's not much variety in the life path options, the AI feels unfinished, and
countless other serious issues that impact the world and sense of immersion.
This is obviously not how everyone feels, plenty of people have been enjoying the game
so far and I'm not here to try and ruin that for anyone, but regardless of one's own personal
experience, it's clear that the release did not go as the developer intended, with the
game being pulled from retail, countless people asking for refunds and even threats of legal
action against the company.
But none of this is completely new to the world of video games, and there's one developer
in particular who went through almost exactly the same thing.
It wasn't too long ago that Sean Murray and everyone else at Hello Games was in the hotseat
when releasing the game No Man's Sky.
Much like Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky was followed by a tremendous amount of pre-release
hype.
The first trailer debuted at VGX in 2013, and immediately became one of the most highly
anticipated games of its time.
With Sean Murray giving interviews to video game journalists and mainstream media alike,
captivating the world with this seemingly impossible concept.
"You get a sense of the scale we're building -"
"Each one of those dots..."
"Is a star system-" "That you can visit?"
"Yeah, just like the one we were at, with planet-sized planets, with life and ecology
and everything else."
"You know I thought Morgan Freeman was God.
You're actually my second God that I've had on the show."
An infinte universe to explore at will, with trillions of planets and star systems all
procedurally generated, where each player could approach the game exactly as they wanted.
But there was always a sizable crowd who thought all of this sounded too good to be true, and
when the game finally released in August of 2016, it seemed that those people were right.
Players reported the standard bugs and crashes that plague most game's initial release, which
were often severe enough that on their own could tarnish a game's reputation, but what
caused the majority of the controversy were all of the missing features, and sometimes
what felt like downright lies from the developer.
"And we don't want to tell people how to play the game, they can play it whatever way they
want.
It wasn't some level that we built, or something like that even though I think it looks quite
nice in places, you know, it's a procedurally generated world."
"And you guys are literally building your own, like, massively multiplayer world that's
procedurally generated and uh, is there anything that this game doesn't have?"
Most of us loading up the game for the first time felt a sense of awe and wonder, looking
to the stars and their endless possibilities, but what we got was a buggy often laughable
mess that frequently crashed, with many of the most enticing features of the game notably
missing.
There was no multiplayer, this supposed mystery that led to the center of the universe was
just a fancy disguise for New Game plus, the gameplay was a hollow imitation of Minecraft
with all of the grind and none of the reward.
And if you managed to navigate its clunky and cumbersome interface well enough to repair
your ship and travel to a few planets, you found pretty quickly that most of them looked
virtually identical, and while the scale was always something to appreciate, there wasn't
much to do within all of that space.
Countless trailers and gameplay demonstrations that offered us a glimpse at something truly
incredible, but this is what we ended up with.
Again, much like Cyberpunk 2077, it wasn't so much the glitches that bothered people,
we expect them in games and sometimes even grow to love them, the problem was the massive
disparity between what we were shown and what we were given in terms of its actual game
design.
There's a reason that The Witcher 3 was met with such an overwhelmingly positive critical
and community response, and there's a reason Cyberpunk's has been mixed to put it gently.
Both games had issues at launch that needed patching, but in spite of that one went on
to become arguably the most acclaimed game of the generation, and the other has been
mired in controversy since its release; so I think it's clear there's more going on than
just some performance issues.
People expected more from the game, because frankly, we were promised more.
But if No Man's Sky has taught us anything, it's that no game is beyond saving.
Hello Games have essentially set a new benchmark for what can be done after a game's release.
The only other times we've seen this much post-release community support are for games
with a thriving online community, or something with a subscription service or some other
form of additional revenue like lootboxes.
Because it's not easy, and it's certainly not cheap to maintain that much support for
a game that people have already paid for, but Hello Games wanted to make No Man's Sky
into the experience that we had all hoped for.
The Foundation update added new game modes and base building, The Path Finder update
introduced exocrafts and ship specializations.
Atlas Rises completely overhauled the story and added a new mission system, and Next finally
brought us the multiplayer we had always wanted.
And over the years they've eventually improved everything from the UI, to player quality
of life, customization of your character or base, with more planet variety than ever before,
taller mountains and deeper oceans, with more complex alien life, new types of weather,
and even the long awaited sandworm; as well as many technical or artistic updates to improve
the game's textures or lighting, framerate and load times; and even four years after
its relase, they show no signs of stopping.
Their most recent substantial update just came out on November 25th, which ramped up
the graphical quality, expanded the multiplayer to allow up to 32 players and added crossplay
functionality.
Given its four year long post-release history, it should surprise no one that they recently
took home The Game Award for Best Ongoing Game.
"And the award goes to...No Man's Sky."
"Wow, um, I was not expecting that."
This is something truly unprecedented.
They went from being threatened with lawsuits for false advertising to building a passionate
and growing community of people who truly love their game.
Obviously, I think we can all agree that this shouldn't become the industry standard.
Developers shouldn't release what amounts to an early access game with a full retail
price tag in the hopes that they'll just fix it in post.
But I'd prefer to see CD Projekt take this as an opportunity to right their wrongs in
the same way that Hello Games did, rather than see the game abandoned in its current
state.
Because in movies or in TV, if there are serious enough issues with the story or the characters,
there's no amount of recutting that's going to fix it, and if you screw up badly enough
you might just destroy a legacy.
But a video game is a bunch of code that can be altered theoretically forever if the developer
so chooses, and if a tiny little indie studio can manage to bring so much new content into
a game as massive as No Man's Sky, there's no reason a giant Triple A developer like
CD Projekt couldn't do the same.
And conveniently enough, Hello Games have already laid out the path for how this is
best approached.
"No Man's Sky was this crazy, innovative, ambitous game, it was a procedural universe;
something nobody had done before.
But our release was also one of the most intense and dramatic that I think the game's industry
has seen.
We faced some really difficult challenges, everything that you can imagine from like
the worst of the internet, we hit.
But two things forced me to get out of bed every morning.
One was that we could see something that others couldn't, we could see hundreds of thousands
of people playing the game every day.
The second thing that really made me want to get out and fight is that the narrative
around games that launch like this becomes about the team being maybe dishonest, or lazy,
or something like that.
I've never met a lazy developer, I've probably made bad mistakes in my time but...the team.
The f**cking team at Hello Games are incredibly talented and so incredibly hard working, and
so I felt like their legacy deserved to be correct.
So at first the intensity of that feedback was overwhelming, but I decided you either
had to hide or you to had to face it, so I did something that I wouldn't recommend but
I decided to kind of drink from the firehose.
The second most negative cohort of players was actually people who'd played the game
for about 100 hours in the first week, and their feedback was actually incredibly useful.
37% of people were stopping playing or frustrated in playing just because they didn't like the
inventory system, and suddenly you're like 'That!
That I can fix!'
I can sit down at my computer and fix that, not just that, I agree with you.
And now we know what we're doing, we're back making games for people who want to play them."
You don't have to work to satisfy every whim of every player but when a vast majority of
the community is asking for the same thing, it shouldn't be too difficult to decide what
to prioritize.
Functionality should come first, anything that stands to hamper the experience on a
technical level should be the most important thing to start with, but they shouldn't stop
there.
While it's clear that many are enjoying the game as it is, none of the suggested updates
from the community would in any way taint that experience.
If people are enjoying the combat or the driving, or exploring the vast landscape of Night City,
then populating the game with better AI or more significant player choice would only
improve that experience.
And they could release these updates in similar compartmentalized packages.
Each of No Man's Sky's updates served a specific purpose, and each offered new functionality
as well as performance optimization, so with enough time I see no reason why CD Projekt
couldn't improve on everything that's plagued its release.
Despite its controversy it's still been incredibly successful, they have one of the most talented
dev teams out there, and considering how well this approach worked for Hello Games I think
it's clear that it could absolutely work for CD Projekt.
Because look at No Man's Sky now, what once felt too good to be true, then turned to be
out worse than we ever feared, has come back with arguably the greatest redemption arc
in gaming history.
"Someone at Valve who's a fan of the game said to me; 'what you do now is more important
than what you say.'
I can't tell you how many times I sat down to write a blog post to explain to people
our side of the story or calm the storm, or set things right.
However as a developer of a released game, I think that there's only one thing that's
credible, and that's your actions.
We decided to talk to the community through patch notes alone, now obviously yes: listen
to the community.
That's very important, for problems not necessarily for solutions, we changed the game radically,
but we changed it in line with our own vision.
And there's something really pure and simple about that, and for me over the last few years
I've learned to love tending my garden.
No Man's Sky for me became the perfect outlet, it's this huge universe filled with players
and somewhere where anything could exist."
They could have simply fixed the bugs and called it a day, but they went above and beyond
and worked to make their game into something that I think is even better than what was
initially promised to us, so maybe I'm being naive or overly optimistic but I just want
to believe CD Projekt will do the same.
Because there is no other game that can offer what Cyberpunk 2077 promised us, a massive
open world RPG in a cyberpunk universe with complex characters and player choice guiding
an intense and action packed narrative, with Keanu Reeves to top it off if the rest of
that wasn't enough.
That is the game we wanted, and considering just how good The Witcher 3 was on even less
advanced hardware, I think it's understandble why so many feel let down.
Because I think it's fair to say that the game hasn't fulfilled its potential, but it
could, and I hope that in time it eventually will.
Thank you for watching.