Videogame Discourse: More Broken Than Cyberpunk (The Jimquisition)
Cyberpunk 2077 is finally out, which means people are unhappy, because that's how videogames work.
We know the routine with massively hyped "AAA" videogames by now. Before the game is even out, it accrues a mass of fans who've already decided to love it and will attack anyone who disagrees. Then the reviews come out, and all hell breaks loose.
Between a stagnant games media, permissive industry, and violently zealous fans, videogame discussion is well and truly broken. As broken as Cyberpunk 2077, which - after all the controversy and hassle - launched as a complete bug fest!
Videogame Discourse: More Broken Than Cyberpunk (The Jimquisition) (YouTube)
Comments (18)
I bet Ubisoft are pleased that Cyberpunk has taken the PS4 bug heat that should also be going their way!
Watch Dogs Legion mostly runs pretty well now, I played it on the base Xbox One for several hours(just finished it last night) and I think it only crashed on me like once, occasionally NPCs would get stuck in walls but aside from that, the game ran really smoothly.
Where are the Boston's Favorite Son posts on Parteon? I don't have twitter so it's the only way I know how to give my feedback for the content that isn't on YouTube.
Absolutely brilliant! On the level of your politics of Dark Souls video. Very very well done. 😃
And I just want to say that you're literally my hero. So. Oh, also, all these bugs - because they're literally the most entertaining thing about the game - I keep seeing them independently discovered by people, the same bugs, over and over again, across all platforms. So these things must have been known issues and in the game and yet they shipped with the game. With its fucking massive day one patch on Xbox. And I got it with the full intention of returning it to EB Games anyway because why not finish it and then do that because fuck EB Games and fuck CDPR. And it's two discs, and the patch is 43gb. And it took three fucking hours to install on Xbox Series X. And it's still fucking shit. So shit that I might excuse some things, I might say "hmm" to others, but it's not just buggy. It's an ugly mess. It's got godawful writing and storytelling. It's got at best average acting. It's not even an actually good game - it's got janky combat, movement and everything is generally purposeless. And I just gave the fuck up and took it back the next day instead of in the 10 day return window I was abusing for my own personal gain because fuck that. Also you're still my hero. <3
Strongly disagree, I think it has a damn good storyline and acting, Reeves is especially good here, I think the combat is really fun and the game has plenty of "purpose.
The thing that truly baffles me about the cyberpunk "discourse" is that there are people out there saying that they've not encountered any bugs. I'm on pc and having a much better experience from the game performance wise than I expected (5700xt for once is not acting like a pos) but I'm encountering "minor" bugs constantly. In 30 minutes of gameplay I would quite happily bet money that I'd spot a bug that really ought to have been spotted by Q&A - we're talking really dumb stuff like hud elements getting stuck or NPC's smoking 2 cigarettes at once. More problematic though is there are obviously some really huge issues with ai pathing that I am not convinced they are likely to fix anytime soon. If you actually take some time to observe how the ai drives it is quite obvious it doesn't actually know how. I just took a trip where I was a passenger and my driver hit the rear of a van stopped at a light at 60mph. Cars regularly turn from the wrong lane. The traffic signals seem to have little to no impact on what the ai does. Cars regularly create traffic jams because they get stuck navigating. The criteria for vehicles turning their running lights on truly escapes me. The people claiming no bugs must be playing another game or lying (probably the second one) I just don't understand what possesses someone to act like this is fine - we've all paid for it why wouldn't you want them to fix all the broken stuff? (edited for paragraphs)
I guarantee you that qa has a backlog of 10k bugs of which 1 to 5 percent were critical. They know the problems and they have a timelime to fix them. They just didn't. They have bugs but they overlook them. Hell, they have huge issues or a 4k computer. If I had 2 3090's and an i10 with 64gb of ram and a super fast ssd, I too could run this game at 4k with Ray tracing. But the 10 grand to shell out might not be worth it for 1 game.
Regarding this whole mess there seems to be one elephant in the room that nobody in games journalism seems to want to address as the main culprit behind this toxic behavior, and that's Metacritic itself. TotalBiscuit was calling out MC years ago and rightfully so as I truly believe the industry and gaming culture as a whole would be a lot better if Metacritic didn't exist period, it's done nothing at all worthwhile for the industry with it's "one size fits all" aggregate model that treats a 3 out of 5 as the same as a 7 out of 10 and has zero requirements for users posting reviews to prove whether or not they actually played the game(I'm shocked it took as long as it did for them to make people wait for several days after a game comes out for them to allow user reviews, should've happened way sooner) and with it's scoring system it flat out encourages the kind of fanboy tribalism that runs rampants amongst AAA games, not to absolve the truly shitty fanboys of all blame, but I do honestly and truly believe that Gamergate NEVER would've happened if Metacritic hadn't existed in the first place as that whole thing started because one person got upset over a positive preview of a game written by someone's significant other, to be clear that person was wildlly overreacting and getting upset over stupid reasons, but I don't think many other people would've cared about his whining if Metacritic hadn't spent years conditioning people to fight over every single review. Another problem with Metacritic is that they don't let reviewers replace reviews if they fuck up, one Gamestop reviewer gave Natural Selection 2 a 6 out of 10 and it was blatantly obvious that he'd barely played the game at all, a fact which he later admitted and corrected that by playing more of the game and actually enjoying it and giving the game a higher score, but when he tried to replace the old review on Metacritic, those morons refused to let him do so, so the game got stuck with an old outdated review on MC that isn't at all accurate and the games score suffered as a result and i'm sure it's far from the only example out there. Metacritic also has a negative influence on games development as we all know the story of Obsidian missing out on a bonus because Fallout New Vegas get one point below the target metascore, and i'm sure that's far from the only example. Not to mention some studios are so obsessed with getting 90s on MC that they deliberately frontload their games as much as possible so that critics will praise them, knowing most critics won't have time to push on far enough to notice any of the games problems, Simcity 2013 and several Total War games(Rome and Empire most notably) were accused of this, as it took many hours before those games issues really reared their ugly heads, by which point it was too late for those that bought them(and ensures they can't get refunds on Steam cause of that stupid two hour time limit). Like TotalBiscuit I personally do believe scores are a genuine problem as they just encourage people to ignore the text altogether and just focus on the number, and several times the score is at odds with the text, i've read plenty of reviews that came off as mostly negative yet the game still got a 7 out of 10 which just made no sense. I was personally happy when you stopped doing traditional reviews with scores myself, not that your reviews were badly written or anything, they were often entertaining, but I couldn't help but feel like you were sticking with scores more out of tradition then anything else as more then one of your reviews sounded more positive then the accompanying score would indicate and I wasn't surprised when you admitted that your desire to complete a game before reviewing it was lessening your enjoyment of games overall, you definitely seemed a lot happier doing first impressions reviews. There's a reason why outlets like Eurogamer and Polygon ditched review scores altogether and studies did show that comments were overall a lot more positive after those sites got rid of scoring(for one thing it put a stop to any and all "why did you give X a higher score then X?" discourse)I do hope this convinces Gamespot to ditch scores themselves. Quantic Dream is still pretty good though, sure you can do better but you can also do a hell of a lot worse too. Don't really agree on GTA V being misogynist but yeah the backlash over that review was ridiculous. Cyberpunk's character creator could've been better, but it's still definitely a step above what most games have done and I think CDPR would be willing to do a patch so that gender is no longer tied to voice as they've already toned down the strobe effects in braindances with a patch. You are right that fans tie their identities to video games too much, I also see this with MCU fans who are so determined to go to war against DCEU fans that they'll attack anyone that dares to express the slightest praise for Snyder's films, it's getting old.
I know it wasn't about that and i'm well aware of the source of GG nor do I at any point in my last post say I was "pinning everything on MC", I wasn't saying it was, what i'm saying is I don't think believe GG would've likely happened(or at least not gotten nearly as big) if Metacritic hadn't been pandering to those kinds of toxic assholes for years and encouraging that kind of mindless corporate asskissing, TotalBiscuit said as much and he was absolutely right. I'm not going to criticize CDPR over the strobe issue too much as there's no secret morse code of flashing lights that makes EVERYONE with epilepsy get a seizure-its totally different for everyone, so there's no way they could've predicted something like this would happen. Anyways they properly addressed this by toning down the effects in a patch and putting in a proper disclaimer so they didn't pretty much everything you could ask for to address this. I just don't want a repeat of all the stupid hysteria over Pokemon that we had in the 90s over that Porygon episode(those seizures apparently were caused more by Japanese families tendencies to have dark living rooms which forced their kids to sit close to the TV as opposed to the strobe effects in the show itself. I believe there was a strong encouragement for families to keep their living rooms lit to avoid future incidents like that)so i'm a bit reluctant to burn CDPR at the stake over that(though I certainly will do that to the shitheads harassing journalists with seizure videos though) I think QD are damn good and not "mediocre" in the least, i'm with TotalBiscuit on their games, I found them genuinely gripping and intriguing, I still remember getting the best ending for Detroit right on the same day that the democrats crushed it in the mid-terms in 2018, it was just exactly the game I needed back then(like how a lot of people needed Animal Crossing New Horizons this year). I don't think Cage is a total prick(at least not on the same level as say billionaire CEOs like Andrew Wilson or Bobby Kotich or as liars like Randy Pitchford and Dennis Dyack), just a bit tone deaf at times is all I specifically mentioned in my last post that my issues with Metacritic DON'T absolve the shitty fanboys of their behavior, all i'm saying is that kind of behavior does not simply happen in a vacuum or manifest itself completely out of the blue, it happens because websites like MC encourage that kind of tribalism. Rottentomatoes is almost as guilty, with some 2.5-4 reviews being labeled as "Fresh" yet other reviews with the same rating from different critics being labeled as "rotten" which makes zero sense, and it's user reviews are also pretty worthless, it took alt-right shitheads bombarding Captain Marvel to get them to finally prevent users from posting reviews until the day of the film's release when that should've been standard a long-ass time ago. I don't think CDPR can be sued over this as its totally random what combination of lights can cause seizures, after all Pokemon avoided being used over the Porygon episode and that was a way more high profile case. They just had to ban the episode(though that was a pretty big overreaction on their part IMO, they could've just removed the strobe effects as it's not like the technology to edit episodes didn't exist back then).
16:25 in the video is great example of reason why people would hate reviewers for saying stuff like that ... because you present your subjective criticism as unshakeable fact that sounds almost like a demand to the developers. Meanwhile ignoring that your point of view comes from living in UK/US (slaver countries) where black people were relocated to not too many hundreds years ago.
but even people in Poland agreed that the lack of black people in the game was out of laziness on CDPR's part.
The only thing missing is a roadmap. I am so tired of developers putting out garbage, demanding 70$ or 60$, working employees to breakdowns for 18 months when the game needs 36, and then saying that they are sorry. If a game like this needs 36 months to finish, you can't wait 4 years to start, work like mad for 18 months, and then pit out something good. It will never work.
It was a reference to how every failed massive game that was over hyped and under delivered have a roadmap to content. It never actually happens. It is never really real. It is just some promise that a bunch of very underpaid developers are forced to work on. This was avoidable. It was entirely preventable. If I form a company in 10 years, it will be based on this promise. If they needed 18 months, stop promising 2020 and start promising 2022 or hire a bunch of people. Fix the issues and demand a 40h work week. This garbage is what happens when management demands the impossible. A bug that takes 8 to 16 hours to fix gets 2h on a timeline. No one wants to hear that it takes 16h but it still does. This is what happens in software all of the time. Except in open source where someone actually cares. But here, they promised 18 months, it took 24, and they needed 36. In 12 months, it will be the best game on the ps5. It might be for 5 years. But darn it if they just couldn't do 36m worth of work in 24 months. So you get a car without breaks or wheels and has engine trouble. All of it can be fixed. It will take a long time. It might take a very long time depending on how rushed the code was. If they wrote tests that took 4 to 8 hours and they passed, an 8h bug now takes 4. If they were told to make an 8 hour problem disappear in 2 hours, your bug will take 16 to 24. It 8s the magic that makes everything run. I am intimately familiar with it.
Yeah, I'm shutting down any attempt at conversation about Cyberpunk 2077 beyond 'I liked it' or 'I don't like it'. I just don't need to hear about this from people who are taking a damn game WAY too seriously. People's heads are screwed on a little wrong about games lately, yeesh.
On the beat!
Keep fighting the good fight Jim, thank God for You
Keep up the great work Jim. Let the haters hate. We all Thank God for You.