Cyberpunk 2077
Credit: CD Projekt Red
At this point, we’ve seen enough. We’re now three days out from the launch of Cybperunk 2077, a sprawling open-world sci-fi epic that is honestly one of the most technically impressive games I’ve ever seen on my high-end PC. On other machines, however? Not so much. These three days have been an endless parade of memes and disappointment from every corner of the internet, and it seems there’s only one real option here: if you plan on buying Cyberpunk 2077 on base model PS4 or Xbox One, for yourself or as a gift, reconsider. Or at the very least wait.
For a deeper dive on just how busted this thing is, I’d recommend Eurogamer. Long story short: resolution hovers between 720 and 900p, frame rate can drop down to 20 when driving, textures take forever to pop in, and even beyond that the thing can be incredibly glitchy, with NPCs spawning in T-poses and all manner of other glitches. The thing has become a magnet for memes over the past couple of days, and for good reason.
Even on Xbox Series X and PS5 I’d warrant extreme caution. People have been able to play the game on these consoles, but they’re playing a backward-compatible version of the Xbox One and PS4 versions. That means that there are still tons of glitches and overall graphical problems, even with the increased hardware power. Our own Paul Tassi showed the difference between the high-end PC version and the Xbox Series X version, and it’s not pretty:
If you head over to the subreddit for the game, there’s a lot of rage and disappointment: the overriding sentiment is that this is an unfinished game.
This might not hold true forever: in the case of Xbox Series X and PS5, it’s likely that this game will get much closer to high-end PC parity when CD Projekt Red actually releases the version of the game intended to run on those machines(still undated). And even on Xbox One and PS4, we’re likely going to see improvement over time—CD Projekt Red has said it’s releasing a patch for PS4, but it doesn’t seem likely to address many of these concerns. There will be more, but at this point, I won’t believe until I see it.
But that’s then, and it remains speculative. Right now, there is nothing to indicate that this game should have been released for Xbox One or PS4, and that’s a major breach of trust from the developer. There is an argument out there that this is just a game built for powerful PCs at heart, and you shouldn’t be playing on older hardware. But the game costs $60 on Xbox One and PS4, just like it does on Steam. And people who paid that money for this game are getting an unacceptable experience.
It’s a disappointing punctuation mark in what’s been a long, long story. But for right now, it’s just not worth getting on last-gen hardware.
