IGN posts written review of Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty, but withholds video review. CDPR is, once again, not letting reviewers use their own gameplay footage before release.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty feels like the game CD Projekt Red set out to make all those years ago, and marks a truly great, original entry into the cyberpunk genre.
Arbitrary limits on information just mean you have something to hide
And even if that's not the case for a specific game, normalizing this shit means that once you have something to hide, it's no longer raising eyebrows.
This is my experience with Cyberpunk 2077 in 2023:
this summer, i built a new PC specifically so that I could play the game with good, stable performance. With ray-tracing on, the game would curb-stomp my RTX 3080 (not a cheap card mind) with 30 fps in the inner city. Not great, kind of disappointing.
What followed was nothing but a never-ending stream of bugs. Feel free to sample from the smorgosbord;
night would shift to day in an instant
characters would t-pose on reload
characters would walk through cars like a tank and blow them up
npc driven cars would run through walls and cars and blow them up
ragdolls would flip out and fly out of bounds
citizens walk in circles through the streets
animated objects like cell phones would not disappear when put away and instead float around their bodies
npc driven cars would teleport forward when driven
lost count of how much clipping issues were present
All this after about 5 hours of game play. It was brutal until I could take no more. And the game play is just not that fun, even though most of the characters are interesting and the story is good.
The absolute most damning thing is that the game demands immersion, the world is built around the concept, but with a bug every 15 min throwing you out of the experience, it's just too much.
I've played though the game twice on the Series X and didn't have any if that. Once that got the frame rate up to a solid 60 in the first big patch, it's a really solid feeling title.
I've had pretty much the same experience, but with an RX7900 XTX, which is an even moer expensive card. In the end I even got soft-locked, because I was playing on the highest difficulty, and in some random side misssion I just kept respawning in a spot, where I could not reach any kind of cover before being killed. Of course I tried to lower the difficulty, but that just instantly crashed the game. That was the point where I uninstalled
The last time I played Cyberpunk, it was actually good fun. Game was a bit empty, and it was pretty obvious they'd been forced to cut a lot of stuff, but I played it for several hundred hours without too many bugs. Pretty and ran well on my budget pc too.
Good job cdpr, I was planning on finally actually buying this game. Now you've told me it's still the same mess it's always been, and to continue holding off. Maybe in a few more years, when I can get the full game with dlcs for less than $30.
Since that 1.6x is pretty stable and performant, I’d be shocked if this rollout was bad.
That said, given 1.0’s monumentally terrible launch, and the press restrictions that hid performance problems, you’d think CDPR would be trying to be transparent AF this time around.
I just thought it was a fascinatingly bad marketing decision that made this an interesting review worth posting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It has nothing to do with DMCA. It's not copyright infringement.
It's violating an NDA on an unreleased product, and even if they can't actually get damages, the day they do it they never get a review code from anyone ever again.
Yeah like if IGN doesn't follow their rules. Welp no Witcher 4/whatever its called review copy when that comes around. Even though IGN sucks its probably better to have more voices than less in the review space. Playing these stupid games set out the publishers is the only way to play since I doubt there will be any solidarity done for IGN.
Hell I'm scheezed out by so many games doing this whole "preorder for early access" and getting around reviews. Look at Payday 3, it has done it and there are basically no critic reviews on it. Not sure if its due to an embargo or they literally didn't even send out review copies, which isn't a great look.