CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand

I played it on PS4 and while I mostly able to enjoy the game with only minor issues, there definitely were many issues and I could imagine some people aren't as tolerant towards bugs as I was for a game they paid full price for.

My experience has been roughly this: every 4 hours, the game crashes. Guaranteed. Luckily I haven't lost more than a few minutes of gameplay, between auto saves and just saving very regularly. I have a lot of bugs related to content not loading in quickly enough: eg I can pass through objects/people (including doors!) before they load properly. This has occasionally meant I got into a place I shouldn't have causing me to have to reload (eg one mission you were meant to interact with the doorbell, but I glitched into the building by passing through the not-yet loaded door. Now I was stuck because the doorbell triggered the next part of the mission and I was now behind a closed door. I had to reload). I have experienced tons of audio glitches (subtitles not disappearing, audio playing on top of other audio especially multiple phone messages, etc). I have experienced tons of physics glitches, floating people/objects/cars. I've had at least one mission where a door wouldn't open (I actually "fixed" this by glitching through the door and opening it from the inside... I checked online and yes, it was definitely meant to open from the outside). I've experienced lots of times where things just weren't there and eventually loaded in and just appeared: objects, people, items people were holding (eg guitarists), cars.

I've also seen bugs other people have hit: lots of physics and animation issues (eg T poses, I haven't personally experienced many of those), corrupted saves, missions that couldn't be completed, performance issues much worse than what I've noticed (mine mostly plays well enough).

So, count yourself lucky that you only had one bug where you had to reload!

Even with the bugs I hit, I still enjoyed the game a lot, and didn't have it as bad as what many people report.

The most visible aspects of online gamer culture is whatever some gaming "journalist" dug up on the internet and wrote an article about.

They're trying to get the attention of whoever happens to see the mysterious file, and they often use that kind of extravagant tone with a lot of exclamation points. The goal is to extort as much money as possible and they think this is the best scare tactic to achieve it. Ransomers also may not necessarily be the smartest, oldest, or most educated people.

I'd be extremely surprised if it was somehow fake, given the company posted it all themselves.

>On the other side of the war, a very vocal subset of the gamers is treating gaming as the only purpose their lives have, and will viciously attack developers personally with death threats and doxxing, or review-bomb even unrelated games into oblivion if the game publisher did something wrong. Which will hardly affect the giants at all (what will you do, not buy the next game from a popular series?), but can crush indie developers. Not to mention the whole work culture that expects any game developer to work 80h per week for less pay because you "love gaming".

It bothers me that so many dysfunctional people occupy so much space in gaming culture, but it is a fundamental feature of the hobby given its structure, consequences, and accessibility.

That said, there has never been as much absolute human activity focused on making high quality games in positive settings. It's just that there are so many projects around that just getting an understanding of the market and which games would give you memorable experiences requires hours of research and discovery. Don't let the negative aspects that get disproportionate air-time color your perception exclusively.