But if there were bugs or thoughts or anything that happened after that point, reviewers were free to mention it, provided it didn’t include any spoilers. Reviewers were allowed to capture their own footage of any open world location, activity or collectible, but any quests, tales or the main story was limited to the “A New Horizon” mission, near the beginning of the game’s second act. Unlike other games, there were no preview or early embargoes for Sucker Punch’s epic. But before that? No direct screenshots, no direct video, and no B-roll was provided.Īnother example: Ghost of Tsushima. Once the game officially launched on November 8, press were asked to only post edited footage to the end of Chapter 3 at a maximum of 20 minutes. Most of these are generally based around spoilers, and are generally pretty reasonable. A good example: reviewers playing Death Stranding were asked to only use official screenshots during the first major embargo, which lifted a week before launch. In other circumstances, publishers and developers may ask for additional conditions. This generally covers some basics: don’t leak the damn game, don’t publish footage until day X and hour Y. Whenever there is a review period for any game, there’s always some kind of agreement between the publisher, website, YouTuber, influencer, whoever the content creator on the other side happens to be. Ghost of Tsushima (Screenshot: Gabriel Esteves – Email)
But what’s fuelled the fire is a decision that no console codes would be shipped out prior to release, which has brought a bigger spotlight on how games are reviewed, and precisely what can and can’t be said about a video game before its official launch.
But there’s a difference between not being able to grab loot because they’re carrying too many bobby pins, versus not being able to move forward because the game hard crashes or randomly resets your PC (which happened to me a few times). Games of this size and scope are always going to be buggy.
Though he’s dead, I can still talk to him and browse his wares – when I ask about business, the corpse’s head rotates to face me, jaw slack, then snaps back to staring straight ahead. Rather than his head exploding, he sinks gently into a squat against the wall, his mouth open in surprise. On one memorable occasion, I give a peddler of illegal snuff braindances two buckshot shells to the face, point-blank. These include quest progression issues and save-file corruption – though fortunately it autosaves so often that I never lose too much progress – and an amazing variety of visual glitches of which floating objects are only the most noticeable.
Even after a 49GB day-zero patch – the product of CD Projekt Red’s unfortunate last-minute crunch – Cyberpunk is still plagued with bugs.
PCGamesN, as just one example, had more severe problems, with corrupted save games and bugged quests:Īnd that’s just the stuff that’s intentional. I ran into countless visual glitches and a quirk early on that stopped progress, with some occasional hard crashes to desktop along the way. Exactly how buggy varies from person to person. Along with concerns over the amount of bugs, division is emerging over the lack of clarity around the game’s console performance, the developer’s approach to transparency, and exactly what is being kept from the public before release.Ī large running theme among the coverage earlier this week was that, right now, Cyberpunk 2077is pretty buggy.
With the first round of Cyberpunk 2077 reviews - or impressions, in the majority of cases - officially out, the internet is starting to process the state of 2020’s biggest game.