CD Projekt Red is under investigation

Now Morgan Stanley appeared that they already bought over 5% of CDP stocks and I'm waiting for hostile takeover and gamers to cry again - or maybe not cause they are already blinded by their nice beloved corporations - and say goodbye to another independent studio. Well we'll see. Everyone believed that CDP is big studio yet if you see on CP2077 credits most of graphics / QA work was outsourced, 3-4 people were working on AI and only 1 on R&D software. They managed to make game on their own engine and launch it on 5 platforms at the same time that's impressive to me based on number of developers I saw in credits.

At the end it's always people fault. I don't say it's all ok with CP2077 game but people were so much depressed at the end of 2020 that even if this game worked they would be angry cause everyone demanded different things, probably 90% of people who bought the game are happy cause the story is solid and you can go trough story without problems - all major main story related problems were fixed before Christmas. If you focus on dialogues and don't try to destroy city like in GTA the game is great. I see that most of those who are angry wanted GTA in future and are now pissed that they can't play it like GTA and they're trying to make it GTA using various mods. You can just go and see what mods are most popular - those are mods that mimics GTA game. They're probably even not target group of this game and shouldn't play it but they're like junkies and even if you tell them that they don't have to play this game and they can refund they're be angry about it cause they want to play this game how they like it and they want to play it like GTA. That's insanity.

I disagree that this is getting worse. Every game of this magnitude of complexity has shipped broken, even way back in the nineties. The Elder Scrolls series in particular comes to mind. Back then, you'd get patches from print media.

The games that didn't ship broken simply weren't that complex. Console games never were that complex. PC gamers gamers accepted this in order to be able to (sort of) play through an experience that was at the edge of what was possible. There was no Digital Foundry to count pixels and analyze frame drops. If you hit 20FPS most of the time, that was considered "playable".

If a game like Cyberpunk 2077 can't ship broken, then it can't ship at all. It can't even get produced. Nobody is going to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to maybe ship next year, forever. Nobody except maybe the Star Citizen community.

Well I've played it and I love it.

I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.

If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."

The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.

The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.

On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."

I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.

I wouldn’t argue with much of this on the face of it but I think people forget that this is a single-player RPG, not some game-as-a-service designed to support an endless grind. The fact that people are working through the content (of which 80+ hours is plenty, IMO) and then setting it aside to wait for DLC is perfectly in line with my expectations of how people engage with a game like this. Maybe they invited the comparison with grindy looter-shooters by having looter-shooter-style loot, but at its heart it really isn’t that kind of game.

Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.

Most people in the Polish software industry works on B2B contracts, for 30-50% better pay. And we typically don't need employment protection, since there's a line of employers eager to hire us. "Normal employment contracts" are for losers (Ok, they are useful under some very specific circumstances e.g. when you have a newborn baby and need a lot of paid sick leave. Outside of that situation, you're simply leaving money on the table by choosing employment contract).