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Comment by ajkjk | Hacker News Reader

I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.

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Launching broken isn’t an unexpected thing for this type of game. Everyone is used to falling-apart-at-the-seams Bethesda games, constant patches, even full-on crashes are now apparently acceptable on a console. I saw some people saying “I bought it, but I’ll wait a few months to play until they’ve patched it,” and they think that’s fine. I totally understand why CDPR made that choice. A console game being broken on release is no longer a disaster.

Even worse, despite the outrage everyone will immediately purchase or even preorder a hypothetical Cyberpunk 2088 again.

Well, I'm on a PC, and frankly my experience was good. Yes, it would be better without some glitches, but they don't kill the game for me.

Maybe. It's also quite possible that they felt so much pressure that they believed what they needed to believe rather than the reality.

IMO they should have just delayed the last-gen consoles. Would have sucked, but that would have avoided most of the backlash for another delay as well as that for the buggy console release.

It's not like the PC version was ready. It has issues that can not be fixed in another 6 months of development. But as bad as the PC version is, it's at least somewhat playable in contrast to the console version.

I've watched a few streams; while there are bugs, they are more of the variety found at Skyrim's or Witcher 3's launch. Annoying, frustrating maybe, but not to the point of making the game unplayable as it stands on PS4. The severe performance issues appear to be solved by just flipping a setting or two.

I believe tsss is referring to things such as terrible AI on PC, and other complaints about the game such as a lack of interactability with the world outside of quests. Not bugs necessarily (although the AI certainly is in a grey area) but issues with the game, certainly. Whether they'll be fixed remains to be seen

It could be like a Bethesda game where there’s more bugs than actual game content, it’s never fixed, but nobody actually cares because everyone plays with a hundred mods.

Witcher 3 was very buggy on launch, the bugs were fixed over time and it runs flawlessly nowadays.

Skyrim still has plenty of content-related bugs (i.e. not graphical or performance related); Bethesda never fixed them but oddly enough, modders did and you can download a bugfix mod from Nexus or Steam.

They announced the game in a Microsoft E3 presentation and were supposed to be a launch title on the new consoles. That probably comes with contractual obligations, like the requirement to release on PS, XBox and PC at the same time, with materially the same game (plus/minus graphics).

Pretty plausible. It would be hard to put off that cash infusion.

perhaps they didn't have the choice of not launching, money-wise?

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