The Price of Redemption: When Bad Games Go Good

Phantom Liberty, the recently released DLC for Cyberpunk 2077, is great. The story is compelling and lengthy, a masterclass in how to seamlessly add post-ship content into the middle of an existing narrative. The 2.0 patch for the game, which launched shortly before the DLC, overhauls and improves many of the game’s core systems, including character progression and vehicle combat.

The current narrative about the game is a happy redemption story for the developers at CD Projekt Red. The game’s initial launch in December 2020 was plagued with bugs, features that did not meet consumer expectations, and performance issues on last-generation platforms that were bad enough to warrant a temporary removal from Sony’s Playstation storefront.

Of course, the gaming press and the community love a studio’s redemption almost as much as they love to tear apart an overhyped game that underdelivers on its pre-launch promise. So it’s no surprise to see Phantom Liberty get amazing reviews, many of which lavish love on the developers for sticking with the game until it could make an “amazing comeback. 

But my take is this: both the “terrible launch” and the “redemption” are overblown.

A Pretty Good Time

In 2020, despite working in the game industry and being a huge fan of Witcher 3, I somehow missed most of the hype leading up to Cyberpunk 2077’s initial launch. I’d seen the omnipresent early trailers, of course. As a fan of the original pen-and-paper Cyberpunk game, I loved the dramatic reveal of the casting of Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand.

Still, I’d actively avoided getting too excited about the game. At the time I was very busy, both in my personal and professional life. My gaming PC was nearing the end of its lifespan, and I knew that Cyberpunk 2077’s visuals would push technical boundaries.

Then on launch day, I did what I usually do: dived in anyway, despite only a vague interest in the game, so I could talk about it with everyone else. After I tweaked the visual settings as low as they could go and blew the dust out of the fans of my graphics card, I fired it up. Miracle of miracles, Cyberpunk 2077 ran on my aging PC!

And I had fun. More than fun – I had a blast. Oh sure, I experienced bugs and weird glitches, but nothing much beyond what other ambitious triple-A games had. I loved the story, the gunplay, and the amazing environment of Night City.

After a couple of days immersed in the Cyberpunk world, I came up for air and poked around to see if other fans were enjoying the game as much as I was. I quickly found myself inundated with a flood of collective wisdom that the game was a disaster, CD Projekt Red had “lied” to their fans, and the positive reviews were all bought and paid for.

It took me a while to untangle why my feelings about the game were so far off the collective perceptions of other players. Some of the disconnect was platform-specific; I was playing on PC, albeit a low-end machine, but the game was essentially unplayable on last-generation consoles. Some of the disconnect was my lower expectations; I hadn’t paid attention to the marketing hype leading up to the game’s launch and wasn’t expecting anything more from the game than what I got.

The Long and Winding (and Expensive) Road

When a game has a rocky launch, a studio has tough decisions to make. Sometimes the right business call is to shrug and move on, abandoning the game rather than throwing good money after bad. But sometimes it makes the most sense to buckle down and continue to work on the title – for the sake of a studio’s future reputation, if not to save the game itself.

The launch of No Man’s Sky was even rougher than Cyberpunk’s. The developers had clearly overpromised and underdelivered, to the point that the studio appeared irreversibly damaged.

The Hello Games team responded in the best possible way, taking full responsibility for the state of the game. Over the last seven years, the No Man’s Sky team has released over thirty free updates. 

Today, the game looks nothing like its launch version. It boasts a rich feature set and has remained popular, with over 20,000 peak daily concurrent players on Steam alone as of this writing.

CD Projekt Red’s journey back into the good graces of players isn’t quite as dramatic. For the first few months, the studio was operating in reactive mode. The initial patches focused on hammering out a few critical issues – mostly game-breaking bugs, and the dire technical and performance issues on consoles.

The substantive 1.5 and 1.6 patches, which arrived around the same time the excellent companion Edgerunners anime series debuted on Netflix, are cited as the moment the game truly “redeemed” itself. Based on recent glowing reviews, the 2.0 patch and Phantom Liberty’s release further reinforced the redemption narrative, finally overhauling the game to be something that approximates the experience promised by the original trailers.

But redemption came at a cost. Reports put the price tag of the Phantom Liberty DLC at a staggering $80 million or more. The estimated costs of all the post-ship patches added tens of millions more.

From my perspective, any studio that can’t redeem a rocky launch given that kind of budget shouldn’t be in business anymore. As great as Cyberpunk 2.0 and Phantom Liberty are, the game’s redemption story was overstated in the same way the launch problems were.

The Fuzzy Reality of Good Intentions

I recently watched a YouTube video about the history of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch and its subsequent “redemption.” I won’t link to it here. It’s an example of the worst kind of gaming commentary – full of overstatement and hyperbole, designed to make viewers angry and leave the audience with what I regard as a genuinely incorrect view of how games are made.

The video’s creator leveled a full forty minutes of harsh accusations at the developers. It pointed out that their marketing materials and early trailers were inaccurate, called them out for excessive crunch, and highlighted poor QA processes. 

While the callouts on crunch and process were valid, the overall tone painted a picture of CD Projekt Red as nefarious liars, out to dupe the public with clever marketing.

Certainly, CD Projekt Red’s management team made several public misstatements in the run-up to launch. The collective blogosphere is right to take them to task for their misleading promises, and I won’t attempt to defend the executives at the company on that front.

Further, it’s entirely fair for the gaming audience to grade a studio’s end product. If a game isn’t good, you shouldn’t waste your time playing it. 

But overall, developers almost always have good intent, and labeling them intentional liars for a marketing trailer that doesn’t look like the final game or a slip in the schedule is neither helpful nor illuminating.

Marketing demos and early trailers for games of the scope and quality of Cyberpunk 2077 are created years in advance of launch. They’re often aspirational, conveying the vision of what the game will be, rather than what it is at the time of the demo’s creation. 

Everyone in the industry understands this reality; it doesn’t mean the goal at the time of the marketing trailer’s release is to lie to the consumer or not deliver the product they’re showing.

Similarly, developers are often “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” when it comes to sticking to a game’s schedule. “Ship it when it’s ready” is a great mantra if a studio has all the money in the world – but at some point, a date gets fixed on the calendar, marketing spending climbs, and the public is preordering the game. 

Here’s an open secret: developers never fix every single bug in a game. A good team fixes all the game-breaking stuff, but there’s always a cutoff point where a set of less important bugs gets postponed. When a ship date can simply no longer slip for business reasons – and Cyberpunk slipped its original launch date twice in the last couple of months before December 2020 – hard decisions have to get made.

I’m reluctant to cast aspersions on the intent of developers when they launch a game that fails to meet expectations. In a lot of cases, unless the game just failed to find an audience, they probably made a series of wrong calls about which bugs and features to prioritize.

At the same time, I’m equally wary of popular “redemption” narratives. What was the cost to “fix” a bad launch with patches? Is the game truly transformed, or is progress more incremental? Was the game that bad in the first place?

Cyberpunk 2077 with the 2.0 patch is a fantastic triple-A experience that delivers on the early aspirational promise of the first trailers. At the same time, it’s far from perfect. I encountered a fair number of bugs in my latest playthrough – seldom anything that wasn’t fixed by a reload of a quicksave, but game-breaking stuff in some cases.

In the end, internet conversations about a game – both positive and negative, whether criticism or first-party marketing content – are often just clickbait. Cyberpunk 2077 has sold a staggering 25 million copies, most long before the series of patches that supposedly “redeemed” the game. That’s why CD Projekt Red felt confident supporting the game with a strong DLC, regardless of how much it cost.

With a few rare exceptions, developers are neither villains lying to the public nor creative geniuses making brilliant, transformative decisions. They’re diverse teams of hardworking, passionate creatives – making two mistakes for every good decision, incrementally improving their work along the way, and hoping the money doesn’t run out before they get to the finish line.

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