randomuser.833: Something I will never understand about these threads.
People who claim to have a long term relationship with CD Project but are still surprised about Cyberpunk.
Witcher 1 was in a bad state, when it was released, got constant work and an Enhanced Edition for a reason.
Witcher 2 was a buggy mess when it was released but they ironed that out.
Witcher 3, I am not sure if the amount of Cyberpunk bug and glitch videos already surpassed the ammount of the same videos for Witcher 3. Over the time it became the Witcher 3 everyone is holding up high.
Nobody with a sane mind would have though, that Cyberpunk will be that much better, after this track record.
And hoping, that their QA gets way better in this pandemic, with home office on all ends and _all_ other software companies getting worse at QA - that is something far above my mind.
And I wasn't even looking at the open world RPGs or the open world games of the last months to years.
All of those where in need of a lot of love.
The only thing I can't unterstand is, why they even bothered with the old consoles, when their game is build to make use of a high class today PC.
And now people with hundreds of hours want to "give back" that game or even their whole library they own for years.
I would call it fun to watch.
About the other things.
Still waiting for the announcement of the Hollywood Red Dawn remake...
Feels like the time is right.
I wasn't exposed to or aware of the Witcher franchise until long long after both games were out for quite a while and when I got both of them was when they were in their long since finished state, so I can't speak to the state they were in on release.
Having said that, I installed The Witcher 3 the split second it was released and experienced the game in its original state, installing each patch as they became available so I can speak to this. I literally dedicated my entire life to playing The Witcher 3 when it came out, spending 8-16 hours per day playing it until completion some 6 weeks or so later.
The Witcher 3 like every single game ever released of this scope and size had bugs in it and nobody would ever contest that, however the game was in extremely good shape all things considered compared to any other games of a similar size and scope that I've ever played. I would go as far as saying that The Witcher 3 on release day had less bugs in it without any patches and updates, than Skyrim has today after a decade of updates and refreshes. I did experience bugs in Witcher 3 but most were harmless and minimal to be fair. There were some T-posing in Novigrad that was disturbing but got fixed in the next patch that came out after I encountered it, and there were missing achievements and some broken side quests that never registered that I completed them right away. All but one of those that I encountered got fixed quickly in a patch within a week or two.
So from my perspective and experience at least, Witcher 3 was not a buggy shit show like I've seen some others make it out to be, it was fairly smooth sailing here. The complaints I had about the game were relatively minor and user interface related etc. rather than breakage in the game per se. Yeah, I fell through the world once or twice due to a game bug (name a game that that never happens in if you are a nook and cranny explorer of such games though), and oddities with how some of the NPC models moved (such as the guy carrying a crate with a ministry of silly walks walk), but no anger inducing "this game was released before it was ready" type stuff.
Cyberpunk 2077 on the other hand, and I hate to say this, I really really hate to say this... is the buggiest video game I've ever played in my life, buggier than Skyrim although the bugs aren't as serious as the ones in Skyrim in terms of game breakageness, but rather in terms of quantity and frequency of occurrence. Despite the bugs Cyberrpunk has though one thing that has surprised me is that in my now over 400 hours of game play, the game executable has only crashed to desktop 3 times, one of them was due to my having a static configured swap file in Windows that was not big enough and the game running out of money (so my own fault, not the game's), and twice the crashes crashed due to the nvidia video driver - which for the record is the latest greatest one from nvidia that has Cyberrpunk updates. So despite all of the bugs in Cyberpunk that I see on a minute by minute basis practically... so far none of them actually crash the game executable, at least on my system.
Yes, I did expect Cyberpunk to be a lot more polished and bug free based on the premise that a company and its developers learn more over time and are able to produce higher and higher quality products and get more things right the first time. It just seems like something natural that should occur, especially coming off the tail of something as epic as The Witcher 3.
We base our expectations off of our own personal experiences, and my experience with The Witcher 3 was fantastic, so the bar set in my mind for Cyberpunk was at least on par with the experience I had with The Witcher 3, both the game itself and the actions of the company surrounding it. Everyone out there has their own experience however, and they wont all necessarily be the same, so if someone else has a better experience than you do, it's because they had a better experience than you did and their opinions will be shaped differently from that.
I'm enjoying the Cyberpunk 2077 main story line, and think a lot of the side quests are fun/entertaining as well, and the game has a lot of other subtle humour and other things to stumble upon which are entertaining etc. But despite all of these good things, it is impossible to overlook all of the bugs in the game and just how nowhere-near-ready this game was for release.
The company or anyone else can come up with reasons or explanations for why this happened but none of them change the fact that it did happen, which is why anyone/everyone is expressing their opinion about their experiences. People can compare the game with other games from CDPR or other companies but none of that is relevant or meaningful. What matters is the experience that players are having with Cyberrpunk itself and how that diverges from what they expected it to be - regardless of how or why they expected it to be whatever they were expecting.
If I read your post correctly, you seem to be suggesting something along the lines of "Why would Cyberpunk be any better than their previoius games which were buggy and unfinished also." so to speak. Well, if someone disagrees with the premise of these games being that way, then that is one reason why they would expect differently.
But, another thing is important to note, which is that "past performance is not indicative of future results", and that statement goes both ways. Just because a game company has put out good or bad quality in the past with any game or games from anyone's perspective does not indicate that their future games will follow suit no matter how someone perceived their past releases to be. Every game is its own product, and while we may expect things based on our past experiences - even if our experiences may differ from someone else, there are no guarantees either way.
The take home is that it is perfectly fine to have expectations, we all have them. Some of us will have our expectations met, and others will have disappointments, while others have a mix of both sentiments. There is no wrong in how people feel about these things, everyone has their own experiences and none of them are wrong to have.