[REDACTED]

(emphasis mine)
Sure, you *can* attempt to disable most of the spybloat, and you'll need to do that every single time you get an update, and you can't choose whether you want this update or not (because there's a long history of Win10 updates breaking systems or deleting data)... but why should you have to do that?

Explain to us why we should have to actively fight against our own computers. Justify making us jump through all these hoops in order to get something that almost but not quite works as well as what we already have right now.

Back on topic, I was all ready to pre-order the game, but stopped the moment I saw only Win10 in the OS list. That's one thing that I will absolutely never use. When games do not work on either my Win7 system (possibly Win8.1, if I get a Ryzen build) or a Linux dual boot, then I will simply not play them.

Interestingly enough, I went through a similar phase many years ago, when more and more games were released as Steam only. I flat out refuse to touch it. Valve brought the whole "single player game must phone home in order to function" thing into public acceptance and I will never forgive them for that. I realised that at some point, I would never get any new games again... and I accepted that. Luckily this place came into existence, but I've been through this before and I'm prepared to never touch a new game again should it clash with my principles.

Yeah, my hopes are that it's not listed becaue 1) the requirements are not listed yet, but they know 10 is the curret OS that they need to publish for so that's set in stone already. And 2), Win7 will have reached end of life by release, so it might be not listed just like they don't explicitly list Win95 or ME or XP on the store with current games, even if those games would work on these systems.

*Addendum:
There are people who just don't trust Win10 after the repeated fiascos that occurred during its time on the market. There are those who don't like the loss of control that's deliberately baked into the kernel now and not an optional thing. Arguments using Whataboutism of other aspects in life are irrelevant, and only indicative of the very POINT these people are trying to make: the slippery slope.

The EU very recently demonstrated they don't have a fucking clue about technology as long as the lobby pays the bills (see article 13 / 17). Damage is being done, and it is up to the individual to do their best to avoid being hit by it, until hopefully, some day, these damages are recognized and legislation catches up. Until that happens, the naive have already been affected the most and depending on what it is, it might never be undone.

On top of that:
Saying you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about freedom of speech, because you have nothing to say. Others however, might have. And it's not in your rights to deny them theirs just because you (think you) don't need yours.

No need to comment on that, no. But maybe you still should think about it. Companies are profiling more thoroughly than the Nazi StaSi did back then - sure, for the sake of making money off of your data. But that still results in a very convenient and accurate profile that the government can... force them to hand out, buy it off the market, or hack one of the many unsecure systems that contain a copy of those profiles by now. That's the reason why we germans, ever since that shit happened with the mentioned Nazis, have been so conscious regarding rights to privacy, profiling and data security. That data can become very dangerous in the wrong hands years down the line and keeping it safe and out of those hands is impossible. The Nazis have been elected democratically back then, too. So please, can your awkward finnish patriotism, as no system is perfect. Whatever it is, it just needs the right - or wrong - climate to flourish, and it will.

Jeez, this took a dark turn.

But, in the end...
This still should just be about if the game releases for Win10 only, or will support Win7 as well.
Nothing more, nothing less. And that's a question only the devs / publisher can answer.

I was already going to pre-purchase until i saw this. For how much i'd like to buy this game (never pre-ordered something in my life) changing to windows 10 isn't a solution for me. I hope they consider to add Windows 7 or even better a Linux support. For now i will hold until further updates.

I will never instal Windows 10. Sticking with 8.1

I can't get behind supporting an old, outdated, OS.

Put it into perspective, if you were releasing a product that you made, would you make it available on something that only a minuscule fraction of the community has? Or something that a majority of the community has? The answer is pretty obvious. I understand your concern but, again, think about it, you are a niche, you are part of a very, very, small community, compared to the 99% of Windows users who have updated.

Generally speaking, the only REAL reason people don't use 10 is because they cite "security issues". I've seen other "excuses" but the reality is that there's nothing "less secure" about windows 10 than, XP, 7, 8, 8.1 or any other Microsoft operating system. In fact, XP was one of the least secure operating system's, but people loved how compatible it was and how it barely took any processing power to run.

Win10 is probably the best OS Microsoft has ever released, it has all the pros of 7, and 8, and none of the cons. I HIGHLY suggest those of you in here that haven't updated try dual booting and see Win10 for yourself. You can turn off all those things you don't like, such as location sharing, or third party ad service stuff. None of those things you said about Win10 are true.

-You don't have to sign in to use it
-You can still use a local admin account
-You don't have to share any information, you can opt out of all that stuff
-You can disable that powershield thing or whatever it's called, (the OS working against you) I don't have it enabled
-You can disable targeted ads
-You can disable everything you mentioned you dislike about it
-Win10 can function EXACTLY like Win7 to a T, and the fact that you don't know this shows that you aren't just "old school" but rather misinformed

Again, I understand what you guys want, but you also need to understand that you are asking for a developer to support something that is over a decade old. Which, on paper, is unrealistic and would not be worth the investment for CDPR.

Literally this

You can "intelligently" use Win10 and reduce the amount of "spying" that is done. You don't HAVE to update, you don't HAVE to use powershield, you don't HAVE to use WinDefender. With a bit of tweaking and some command lines, you can even make it so you never get reminded about any of these things either. But of course, nobody in here asking for a 7 release knows that, because they don't know anything about Win10, other than some article they read back in 2011 about why Win10 has "spyware".

Win10 is actually really good for system customization, I also agree that Microsoft most likely didn't intentionally do this, rather followed suit of every other big wig tech giant because, as you said, ISP's began requiring it to an extent, and MS just "fell in line".

I feel like the people in here are grasping at straws to further their "I refuse to upgrade" logic.

Win 10 also has compatibility issues with Old games - and i do like old games.
There is no reason to upgrade from 8.1 to win10 and i wont.
8.1 outdated - lol

I saw the newsletter today and was excited. But til now it only said W10 - which is a complete no-go for me. Unless there is a Linux version (or at least some W7 option) I am not going to buy this game, no matter how great it might be.
W10 is absolutely inacceptable.


PS: Anyone stating W7 does not run on RyZen: That is not true. AMD made clear that RyZen was tested of course also with W7. Even CP/M or DOS would run on it, of course, you might not have fine grained power management (DOS isn't even remotely aware of variable CPU frequencies), but anything compiled for x86 also runs on RyZen. It's MS that wants to push W10 and thus tries to force people to use it by all means.

Not going to work, corporate slave. it is IMPOSSIBLE to disable Micro$oft remote control on Win10 unless you physically disconnect from Internet.
Go & tell your lies to children & mentally disabled.

Lies. You HAVE to install "critically important" (as decided by Micro$oft) updates. No way around it - at least 8 months ago when I last checked.

Again, justify me having to jump through more and more hoops to get a level of security, consistency and reliability which is still below what I have now. And note that I will need to continue doing all this as time goes on. Win7 works. It is not configured to send everything home out of the box. It allows me to choose which updates it gets and when. It does not reset its settings or add worthless trash like Candy Crush to my system unasked for. It requires less maintenance.

While Win10's core is better written than Win7, and while it does have DirectX12 (incidentally, I suspect there is no reason why this can't exist on Win7 - Vulkan runs just fine on Win7), those are not compelling reasons for me to switch when taking into account the massive negative points. It's an update, not an upgrade. It's newer, it's not better.

As for whether it's intentional or not, I don't care. I only care about what it actually does.

Imagine this scenario: there are two people. One of them keeps accidentally dropping bricks on your foot, accidentally knocking whatever it is that you're holding out of your hands and accidentally reading your post and making copies to send somewhere else. The other one does none of those things and does not get in your way. Which of those two would you want to be around?

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but if I have a computer, it's supposed to belong to me. It's supposed to do exactly what I tell it to do and no more.

My next PC build will be Linux and by then the jury will have given their verdict on Cyberpunk compatability. A lot of work is being done by Steam and others to make games play on Linux. Checkout Proton - https://www.protondb.com/

Linux at present will do everything I need and I should be able to run a lot of my catalogue.

When it was free I installed W10 on several aged machines and to my suprise it ran pretty well, even on a 2006 HP laptop and a Intel baytrail Atom tablet.

The problem with W10 was that at the beginning of every install I had to go through all the settings you mentioned above and more. Even then it still called home, thats on the enforced 'basic' setting. A hosts file made it somewhat quieter for a while, but with every update I found that I had to go in and check and reset any changed settings or work out whether I wanted some new feature.
The settings were not always in one place, and there were so many of them.

The forced updates drove me to distraction, it seemed as if every time I wanted to use a laptop I had to wait while some update occured before I could logon or switch off.

The previous versions of windows (XP, W7) were stable (for me at least) and easily configurable to create a lean mean games machine and I felt that I had security and privacy defined by myself. I owned my computer and the operating system I had bought.
W10, not so much despite its no doubt useful new technologies I cannot be confident that Microsoft won't change my configs in future and hard bake something they require into my system without my say so, making my changes meaningless. The reason they can do this is because they own the processes and the operating system on my machine. I don't control what happens in my own kit, its rented and controlled from elsewhere. This was not the case previously.

Its telling that supported edition of W10 without all the gubbins and telemetry is only available in the Enterprise edition which you cannot obtain as a home user, both Home and Pro editions have the telemetry built in. The previous Pro editions used to be the enterprise standard, I cannot imagine that anyone using W10 Pro in their enterprise can do much with the current Pro version other than come to the conclusion that modifying W10 as you suggest is a waste of time these days. The next feature patch is just going to reinstall or re-enable all of it. It's a time consuming battle that cannot be won.

Should we adjust to the new OS instead of fighting it? not me, I'm stepping away from W10.

Incidentally, the baytrail tablet failed to upgrade W10 because of insufficient disk space, and with no means of increasing disk space, its now running Fedora which is much leaner and should not cause my machine to be sent for recycling in the near future. Space is an issue, W10 keeps on growing . . . why?

My 2p.

ditto.

I read the win10 license agreement and figured that Microsoft could pissoff because I had no intention of turning my $1000+ of hardware into their content delivery system - snoop through my files, share stuff with `trusted 3rd parties', maybe turn me into the authorities if they think they've found something illegal - it just boggles me that anyone would knowingly agree to the stuff in that license.

Anyways, I had pretty much already decided the next major computing purchase would be a small server running Linux sometime this year. It looks like double the cost of a good gaming system will get me a reliable, trustworthy, upgradeable server with vendor support until at least 2028, and a life expectancy pushing towards 15 years. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and allows for setting up a digital safe zone for the extended family (private Nextcloud and Collabora type stuff, website hosting, etc.) Any major gaming upgrade will have to wait until after the next gen consoles, game streaming services, new GPUs, etc., finish shaking things up.