Now that the dust has settled and Cyberpunk 2077’s release date finally arrived, you would expect fans who have been waiting for the game for years to be having a good time in Night City, Cyberpunk 2077’s futuristic setting.
But unless people are playing on a cutting-edge PC or a new-gen console, things won’t be so great as those running the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game have found out.
This is because Cyberpunk 2077 has apparently shipped with major glitches and performance problems on the base consoles as was recently covered on Forbes, giving players the world over a hard time.
Players have been posting videos on social media mocking the game’s poor visuals and performance on last-gen machines, pointing out how different the game looks to the videos seen at E3 2018, for instance.
Welcome… to #Cyberpunk2077 on PS4 fat / XBO ! pic.twitter.com/77BSmEuw6y
— Legolas (@Legolas) December 9, 2020
One Twitter user posted a video of driving around Night City, highlighting how long it takes to load textures on PS4.
This is Cyberpunk 2077 – PS4 version 1.00. Resolution is literally below 720p and the game takes 20 seconds to load in textures. Inexcusable. Unfathomable. Unplayable. pic.twitter.com/AZ2OPTnkdL
— Michael Does Life (@MichaelDoesLife) December 9, 2020
Aside from the lack of performance of the PS4 vs the newer PS5, this problem might be due to the fact that the PS4 ships with a standard hard drive vs the SSD or solid state drive that the new-gen consoles come with. The far greater throughput of these drives coupled with the PS5’s (and Xbox Series X) processing power means this problem is unlikely to show up on the new consoles.
Of course, all reviews to date have been on PC. The PC is likely the ideal platform for this kind of game, even if you’ll need a pretty beefy PC (with you guessed it, an SSD drive) to see the game at its best.
But it certainly won’t be fun to be playing on PS4 (or Xbox One) and see a blurry mess instead of a character’s face, which won’t clear up for another 10 seconds because the corresponding texture hasn’t loaded yet. Other bugs such as the game freezing for a few seconds before resuming are arguably just as annoying, as well as the crashes which are forcing some players to restart the game.
As can be expected, CD Projekt Red is now hard at work on rectifying these issues, so expect quite a few patches to be released in the coming weeks as the Polish developer tries to get the game, especially the PS4 and Xbox One versions (not saying the PC version isn’t buggy by most accounts) into shape.
We are truly humbled that so many of you trusted us and decided to support #Cyberpunk2077 before the release! Even 8 million thank yous isn’t enough! The journey has just begun and we are hard at work on the upcoming fixes and updates to the game. See you in Night City! pic.twitter.com/ycIe2kN0Zq
— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) December 10, 2020
Cyberpunk 2077 has had a bad launch overall, then, even if CD Projekt Red has announced in a tweet (via IGN) that the game had gotten more than 8 million pre-orders, a stunning number.
Nonetheless, in a way Cyberpunk 2077’s launch has been as bad as Assassin’s Creed Unity’s was back in 2014. Ubisoft’s game shipped with a ton of glitches that made the game unplayable for many, and was only worth playing on consoles after many months of patching (people got the game running at 60 frames per second on the Xbox Series X only recently).
Like Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin’s Creed Unity was an extremely ambitious game, let down by poor optimization for consoles before release. Other high profile games like No Man’s Sky also provided a bad experience at launch, only to come into their own years later after some massive updates.
Of course, you could argue that Cyberpunk 2077 should have really been a new-gen game, and all that. But that’s something that CD Projekt could never afford taking into account the game’s development costs. There are more than 100 million PS4s out there, the majority of which are the vanilla model, so there’s no way CD Projekt wasn’t going to make the game available to that audience. The same goes for the Xbox One – most people have the standard console instead of the Xbox One X, which does deliver better performance in Cyberpunk 2077 as can be seen in the video above.
Here’s hoping then, that CD Projekt can patch the game into shape quickly, so that playing Cyberpunk 2077 is a better experience on both PC and the base consoles sooner rather than later.
Read more: Cyberpunk 2077 delayed again, will the game be a disappointment on current-gen consoles?