Posted January 24, 2021
It’s clear to me the ‘roadmap’ is all about bugfixing. Zero hope of fleshing out/restoring/improving game mechanics.
People bang on about the developers of No Man’s Sky ‘regaining trust’ - but ‘fess up, if Sean Murray announced another major release pre-order, would you really have faith in him again despite the NMS one-off rescue heroics?
I suspect releases like this burn bridges with much of the fanbase/developer faithful.
Even though CDPR is a much bigger company with a lot more money and developers, and a lot more trust out the starting gate, after this big of a blunder it is very difficult to see how they could do a No Man's Sky epic turnaround for reasons you mentioned primarily. Will the money be in it?
I mean NMS was epic fail and the game was like $66 CAD at launch and basically never went on sale nor had a price reduction at all despite the horrid state it launched with. Even now the game only goes on sale for 50% off on occasion 4 years later.
The fact Cyberpunk 2077 is going on sale for half price in less than a month of launch seems like some sort of desperation move than anything.
Will they put 4 years of bug fixing and free updates into this game, plus release the free DLC, the multiplayer game and expansion packs? Will there still be enough players for all of this, and what financial incentive do they have?
I mean they're in a tough position because if they DONT do it, it will probably end the company as nobody will ever trust them again and what would their next game be? I mean after the free Witcher 3 RTX update (is that even going to still happen?) Will they do a Witcher 4 next and make it epic AF to recover from this, or a Cyberpunk 2078? Some other completely different new game? The pathway forward seems dark at the present at least.
I think it really comes down to doing their best to try to do the right thing now, for better or worse either way. I know I wont be buying the paid DLC expansions as pre-orders when they do eventually come out though. Will probably be waiting until months after release to see general reviews and feelings about them and then buying on sale during quarterly blowout sales or similar.
Witcher 3 was an $80 CAD game I only paid $47 for, but Cyberpunk 2077 in its current state is a buggy $50 game that I paid $80 for. I guess I paid the same either way but I've only ever done 3 preorders in my life now, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and recently Subnautica Below Zero (to get the lower price before price increase). I wont be doing any more preorders in the future even from CDPR.