I personally disagree and the experience changed my opinion I had for CD Projekt after TW3, Gwent beta & GOG Galaxy 1.0
I don't dislike them per se, but I don't have the same level of sentiment I had, to me they are back to being another untrustworthy publisher. 8 years since The Witcher 3 launch is a very long time in the industry.
Either they are out of touch, or they are trying to rewrite history... neither of which is a good look. The handling of Cyberpunk 2077 didn't only change my view on them but pretty much soured me on all AAA publishers, "good" or not. There are way more than enough amazing indie games on offer and not enough time to play them.
Ooooh, if you followed the story from the very beginning then you would know that they are not out of touch. Those greedy fucks know exactly what they are doing and have no respect for the players.
For me it definitely reinforced the "don't believe it until you see it" mentality to anything AAA publishers claim about their games. Just like their words in this article, they're meaningless.
Yeah thats why I didn't buy it. I saw the hype. I knew it would not even be close to what they were promising and then it was way worse than I was expecting. Come on! You can't go "it wasn't so bad. Only console gamers couldn't play it!" Thats half the people who bought it!
Well, the biggest problem for them was the decision to release it on last gen consoles because nobody had next gen, only for it to be broken on last gen. A huge swath of their player base were playing a broken game on launch. If they released it on PC and next gen only, I think they would have been in a better state.
But even given a next gen experience, they still overpromised and underdelivered. The game still doesn't have stuff that they promised for launch. The multiplayer apparently got canned so they could fix the game for multiple years. The wanted system is still a joke. The city still feels dead and robotic. Driving is still a pain. The auto-generated "jobs" are boring and pointless. Yes, its has an interesting story and some cool side quests, but once you're done with that, there's really nothing compelling me to come back to it.
It's fine. But it's not great and not what they promised.
And the cherry on top is that the only new content we're ever going to get is a $20 story expansion. Despite promising free content updates including a multiplayer mode. All their post launch plans were canned just to fix bugs, not even to flesh out the features they promised.
CDPR, this was a disaster. Stop trying to pretend it wasn't.