After many, many delays, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 finally came out on PC and game consoles last week, giving everyone a chance to cruise around a neon-coated future city and try out a character-creator with a vast array of genital options. Unfortunately, the general consensus seems to be that those delays weren’t quite enough, with the game hitting shelves still a bit… undercooked. The game has quickly earned a reputation for some brutal bugs and glitches, not to mention a problem with epileptic triggers that was so bad that a critic had to write a PSA about it when she had a seizure while playing for her review. Whether it’s because the game was so hyped up before release or because the bugs are actually that much worse than in other games of this sort, the issues have become tough to ignore.
So tough, in fact, that CDPR has felt the need to release an apology for the state that the game is in, written in extremely small font on a hideously bright yellow background. In the post, CDPR apologizes for effectively ignoring the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game (which have been notoriously buggier than the PC version) and choosing not to publicly show them before release. The developers promise to “fix bugs and crashes, and improve the overall experience,” giving a timetable for when new patches will be released, but if that’s not enough, they’re also offering refunds to anyone unhappy with the console version—provided you reach out to CDPR before December 21.
In other words, one of the biggest games of the year (if not the biggest, given what the new consoles launched one) was released in such a bad state that the developers actively avoided showing specific versions of it and now have to issue refunds to people who bought those versions. Making video games is hard, especially in the middle of a pandemic and especially with the gap between high-end PCs and standard last-gen consoles bigger than ever, but that’s still quite a hole that CDPR is going to have to dig itself out of. After all, people who don’t take the company up on this refund offer are going to expect it to come through on these promises of improvements.