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Shocking. These days, normally, GA is QA.
It's been that way for a while now.
When online patching became a thing most games studios quickly figured out they could push the game to press in whatever state, then work on fixing the bugs in between code complete and GA, and simply push those fixes as a launch day patch.
And commercially, it makes sense. The greatest the game is on the shelves, the earlier the investors see ROI. It's just a shame if this calculated gamble backfires and the degree find way too many bugs to fix in the window between code complete and release. That's when you get Cyberpunk 2077...
To be fair, I haven’t played 2077 on launch day but like 3 months later, on a medium-high gaming laptop. I‘ve had zero crashes, no T-poses and generally nearly no bugs.
The real problem was them releasing the game on last gen consoles which were (like low tier pcs) unable to handle the game. I would even go as far as to say that they made a game that was only playable on high tier hardware.
And interestingly enough now 2.5 yrs after release, the game has more bugs for me than it had 3 months in.
I‘m not a game dev so I can’t say why that is but as a dev I can say that fixing one bug might introduce another which becomes a lot harder to fix.
I played at launch, and there were game-breaking issues every 15-30min for me, constant crashes etc. I rage uninstalled for the first time in years, due to a bug in the smasher fight the game would crash in the same spot every time, as such, I couldn't actually finish the game.
I revisited it after a broken leg earlier this year and it's come a long way, but yeah I really wish it had spent far more time in the oven as well as cutting out older hardware. The time they spent trying to get it to run somewhat stable on old hardware could've been far better used in QA and bugfixes.
I'm 7 characters deep, and I've stepped back to play other games (BG3 came along at the perfect time) while I wait for the DLC later this month. I foresee another few hundred hours of my life being sacrificed, if only so I can try my luck against maxtac.
Sounds like you did have some fun after all. Happy to hear I‘m not the only one. Yes, the launch must have been a catastrophe.
Cp2077 will be an odd case for me always. It wasn't literally perfect but I couldn't complete two gigs and I experienced some graphical glitches and that was it, incredibly lucky somehow.. I 100%'d the game pretty much at launch, though I didn't do all of the possible endings I did do about 3.