I'm so glad I waited nearly 3 years to play Cyberpunk 2077, but I dread the fact that this is our new normal
How did we get here?
How did we get here?
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One of the few games I don't regret buying before release was Baldur's Gate 3 but that's an anomaly. Most games I'm happy to wait a year or more when it's in better shape.
It's funny that you mention Baldur's Gate 3 because the game is blatantly unfinished. Act 1&2 are pretty much 9-10/10 but Act 3 is like a 6/10 at best. I'm surprised it gets a pass where Cyberpunk didn't because in my experience they are equally as buggy. Because of my beefy PC and the scope of the games I think Cyberpunk may have even had less bugs than I've had in BG3. And I played it on release.
In BG3 I have quests breaking, characters not showing up where they should, continuity issues, obvious cut content, etc. I just gave up halfway through Act 3 and started a new playthrough instead because I adore the first half of the game and it makes the latter half that much more disappointing by contrast.
I agree completely. I'm even very forgiving when it comes to bugs and performance - especially when it's a studio I trust will address them - but the huge swaths of obviously cut content combined with the way the story wraps up really gets to me and left me massively disappointed. I too still love the game for the gameplay and Act 1 and 2, but it really didn't stick the landing in my opinion.
Even just things like the reactivity of your companions stands out; in Act 1 you could barely sneeze without everyone at camp chiming in with a comment about what just happened while in Act 3 you'll do massively impactful things in both main story and companion quests and be greeted by the standard "Well met" or "hello soldier" at camp.
And that's not getting into whatever scraps of the stated 17k different endings actually ended up not getting cut or the sorry state or the epilogues. Not even all companions get one!
You get "Larianed" a lot in BG3 just like you did in DOS2, plenty of inconsistencies, annoying pathing and quirks that make you wonder if they even played their own game before releasing it. But to put it in the same vein as cyberpunk 2077 is kind of disgusting. CDPR completely lied about the product, it barely ran on most PCs and didn't even function on consoles.
BG3 while far from perfect, is much more of a game than cp2077 will probably ever be and Larian are firing out patches left and right at the moment while CDPR are still forbidding reviewers to even use their own game footage.
Baldurs Gate 3 will go down as one of the greats. Cyberpunk 2077 will be forgotton about.
I am talking strictly on the basis of bugs/incompleteness not the overall quality/scope of the games. But also "it barely ran on PCs" neither did Act 3. I have a 7950X and I still drop down to 40fps in some places even after the patches. People with say a 3600X were barely scraping 30. If we're talking about the trend of games being unfinished or buggy on launch then BG3 deserves to be called out for the same.
On just bugs I still disagree that it's anywhere near cp2077, but yeah there is a trend of games being buggy on launch and that defo has to be called out, especially when it's bugs that most people come across that are not even niche or very specific. Performance in act 3 still has a long way to go yeah, luckily it's not a fast paced game or a... shooter, so it's not the end of the world, but not very pleasant either.
I'm surprised I don't hear more people talk about this, maybe because they seemed to strategically handle bugs and content more thoroughly in the early game so that a lot of players would gush about that and be more forgiving by the time they got to act 3, along with everyone who didn't even make it that far and only praised it online instead.
Starfield gets dragged through the mud for both deserved and undeserved reasons, almost universally without nuance, and BG3 gets blanket praise and acclaim, almost universally without nuance, and then I see this comment thread where there are apparently some serious issues grouped within a specific portion of the game and I'm not sure if that's better or not.
Part of it is the game just being so huge. Most people aren't even going to hit Act 3 until 50-60 hours in which is already much longer than most other games. So you've already formed your opinion of the game by the time you hit the less polished part.
And to be fair, those first 50-60 hours are pretty great. (Minus some gripes with things like pathing and inventory management) If the game just straight up ended with Act 2 I would be completely satisfied. I didn't even mention this because I wanted to focus on the bugs but even narrative, pacing, and quest design in Act 3 is just so rough compared to the other two. It almost feels like a different game or a different developer. The quality drop is that drastic IMO.
I am worried that other studios might look at this and realize they can just front-load the best content and all the polish in the first section and neglect the rest to fix later. It sets a bad precedent.
Indeed, that's the worry. It sometimes seems like AAA game development is learning just how far you can push the average gamer and still get good word of mouth online by way of leaving choice aspects incomplete and compromised
Worry now about front loading?
MMOs have been front loading the best content since at least Conan. Remember that one, the first zone had amazing quests and voice acting that the rest of the game didn't.
I agree. I have had major show-stopping bugs with main story quests in Act 3 and more crashes on the PS5 than I have experienced in any game by a huge margin. I love the game but it has been buggier than CP2077 for me as well.
Cyberpunk for me was not as buggy as for my friends. I find that a lot of the games I play on release aren't as buggy for whatever reason. It could be my AMD setup. It could be that I'm on Linux and use Proton or sheer goddamn luck. Callisto Protocol was fine for me but I've seen so many videos of the game running terribly and some crazy bugs.
The biggest problem with Cyberpunk was the performance. It ran horribly. The bugs were just the icing. My issues with Cyberpunk was that it felt hollow and lifeless. I loved everything about it but it just didn't feel like it had a soul.
My PC wasn't as beefy as it is now when Cyberpunk released so I felt that pain. I'm still on Act 1 on BG3 (because I insist on exploring everywhere) but I see that it has a huge amount of polish put into it. It makes sense that the earlier parts got more attention because that's what the majority of the players will experience. At the rate I'm going, Act 3 will be in great shape.
Baldur's Gate 3 is great at story and choices, which I think is where a lot of praise comes from. But it has a lot of really questionable issues with smaller mechanics.
The one I'm hating the most is how NPCs react to many summons and wild shape. Having a wild shaped party member makes most NPCs run away screaming, which is very painful in the NPC heavy areas of act 3 and basically discouraged you from even using wild shape or summon elemental, even though those are both incredibly powerful. You can dismiss the summon/wild shape, but it uses resources, so it sucks to do so. People have reported the bug for months but it doesn't seem on the devs radar (they purposefully made NPCs run away -- it's a "feature").
And just the other day, I discovered weirdness with warlock spell slots. Something about having used an elixer that gives me an extra spell slot (and then having consumed the spell slot) was preventing me from casting certain warlock spells (I think those of the spell slot's level) because it claimed it needed that spell slot, even though I had higher level warlock spell slots. So a bunch of my spells couldn't be used! When I searched, I found many reports about similar issues when people multi classed.
I maybe be wrong but I think they just fixed the NPCs running away in the latest patch. One of the patch notes is, "NPCs will no longer run away from anything but the Dark Urge Slayer form to improve interactivity and flow." I'm not sure if that is referring to Dark Urge only or if that means they exclusively run away from that one form and now all other summons are fair game. But I haven't had time to jump back into the game to try it yet.
There is actually a quest where you need to escort an NPC and when we got to the boss the NPC cowers in fear and tries to run away. But because I had an elemental summoned he would run towards the boss and instantly die. At first I just thought that was how it was supposed to be but after defeating the boss 3 times I thought it was way too hard to keep the NPC alive and it didn't really make any sense for him to run straight in after dialogue saying he doesn't want to go in there. The quest/dialogue also acted like he was still alive so it's as if the developers never even planned for the possibility of him dying in that area. On my 4th attempt I moved the elemental in front of the door and sure enough he ran the opposite direction and stood in the corner he was supposed to, safe from the fight.
Yes! Can confirm it's fixed. It's great and revitalized my interest in using certain characters. I had almost sworn off some characters because of the bug and now they're back on the menu.
Druids are insane. Owlbear does utter bonkers damage. Far beyond what I could do with any other character (I can't tell if that means I built my other classes wrong). Only downside is that druids feel super limited. Usually to just melee attacks with no items and most equipment doesn't even do anything (there's little reason to ever purposefully revert to your original form, since you'd just eat a wild shape charge).
I love BG3, but agree that it deserves some criticism for act 3 bugginess. Just remember Bethesda basically forced them to release a month early when they announced starfield was coming out on the same weekend.
Even with BG3, act 3 of the game is in much better shape than it launched with.
And their history of making "definitive" editions is looming a year or two down the road.
Oddly, as is their gameplay style of act 3 being the buggiest and least directed along with artificial difficulty of grouping the party in a tight clump via cutscene before the hard fights.
Still an utterly fantastic game despite those minor gripes.
Any game that has to release endings in patches means it wasn't released as a complete product. BG3 is great, but it is so hypocritical that other games get dragged through mud for bad launches, but BG3 is getting nothing but praise despite releasing incomplete and full of bugs. I can forgive some stuff, but this hypocrisy and inconsistentcy in the gaming community bothers me to no end.