If you were active in the gaming scene back in 2020, you may remember the disaster that was the release of CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077. On that fateful December day, players around the world launched the game for the first time only to find a giant mess coiled in a tangle of bugs and glitches. This spawned anger and confusion that people across the World Wide Web were quite vocal about and for good reason.
It’s now nearly midway through 2024, and a lot has changed since the initial release, namely updates, overhauls, and a successful DLC. It has turned from being a prime example of terrible launches to the very definition of a comeback story. It may even be a big reason as to why sometimes you can’t judge a game by its state at launch.
The Evolution of Cyberpunk 2077
On December 10, 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 was released into the world and wreaked havoc across consoles and PCs, but it was mainly PS4 and Xbox One users who took the brunt of the seemingly limitless amount of bugs and glitches that were encountered in the game. Players were forced to deal with game-breaking issues like falling through the map, sudden loss of gravity, graphical glitches that made NPCs look like eldritch horrors, and many, many more. And that’s only for the players who could actually launch the game.
This spawned outraged discussions across cyberspace, parodies of the trailer featuring bugs, and it was even temporality pulled from the PlayStation store. CD Projekt RED ended up uploading an apology to YouTube, which doubled as an explanation as to why the release was so bad. In that video, the path to making the game better and regain the trust of players was revealed. And make the game better they did indeed.
As of last year, CD Projekt RED has spent roughly $125 million to fix and add new content to the game, including complete overhauls of how players level up, the police system, and vehicular combat. Almost $41 million was spent on post-launch updates, and a whopping $84.3 million was spent on producing and marketing the widely successful paid Phantom Liberty expansion. Speaking of the expansion, it adds roughly around 13 hours of extra content to the game, including all new endings.
What this Major Comeback Story Means for Gaming
As with the classic redemption arcs seen across all genres of anime, the arc for Cyberpunk 2077 rivals the one of No Man’s Sky. I’m willing to bet if you told a console user back in 2020 that this game would end up winning a BAFTA Award for Evolving Game and take the victory for Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards, they’d likely say you’re crazy. However, that could be said about any game with rocky beginnings, and it could also be said that most games have a shot at their own redemptions.
Across platforms like Steam, you’ll probably come across droves of games that are in early access or made by a brand new team of developers. You may also see that the reviews for those games aren’t particularly the greatest at times. These are games that often still have teams dedicated to improving and reworking them enough to finally make the game that they want to make. They are likely doing almost exactly what CD Projekt RED did but on a smaller scale.
You may or may not be guilty of this, but sometimes when people play a game like the ones I just described, they will never give that game a chance again. If every player that was disappointed during the launch of games like Cyberpunk 2077, we might not have the amazing content that exists in the game today. I believe this comeback story can be a reason people return to the games in early access that had a bunch of kinks to work out or the indie games made by small teams who are still learning and have amazing stories to tell.
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