A couple of weeks ago after a few delays, CD Projekt Red released the highly anticipated 1.2 patch which began to address some of the games biggest issues, some of which meant the game was unplayable (often fixed by a hard restart), as well as more core game level bugs.
And now, CD Projekt Red has just released a 1.21 hotfix which continues fixing some of the issues in Cyberpunk 2077. The changelog is quite long for what is just meant to be a hotfix (aka fixing highly targeted breaking bugs).
With all of these new patches and hotfixes, I decided to give the game another shot. Has it improved to the point where it’s not a complete hot mess any longer? The answer is well… complicated.
Cyberpunk 2077 is more or less the same game at launch. However, not exactly. The latest patches have made the game a lot more playable, many of the missions no longer bug out when you play them so you can complete them first time.
Police no longer randomly spawn in unrealistic locations as they did at launch, but the police’s spawns are still terrible and unrealistic. Grand Theft Auto has had this stuff worked out since GTA 3, and it surprises me that this is even an issue in a game in 2021. Don’t get me started on the driving mechanics that feel like they are from a game maker application instead of a proper game engine.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautiful game from a graphical perspective (especially with ray tracing on); it’s one of the most beautiful and hardware intensive games out there right now. Thanks in part to NVIDIA releasing drivers to improve compatibility and CD Projekt Red fixing things, it is way more stable.
But the core underlying issues that patches cannot simply fix are still there. The main issue is CDPR released a game that was clearly six to eight months underdeveloped. This is the reason why all of these months on, we are still seeing patches for bugs that shouldn’t have been present at launch.
Instead of getting new content and developing the anticipated online component, they scrapped the online aspect of Cyberpunk 2077 and have yet to release any new content in the form of DLC. CDPR are still playing catch up, buried by their own hype and overpromotion.
For a game world that seems so big and detailed on the surface, once you dig beneath the neon exterior you soon discover that Cyberpunk 2077 is a hollow shell. Even the missions are a grind, “Speak to this passive aggressive NPC, drive here, shoot there, go back to NPC” nothing interesting seems to happen.
Then you have one of the biggest cameos in gaming history: Keanu Reeves as the character who annoyingly lives in your head and bounces between cool and asshole like a haunted yoyo. How did CDPR stuff this up? They had the opportunity to make his presence so much more, instead they turned the nicest guy in Hollywood into an annoying jerk that you end up hating a couple of hours into the game.
Can CDPR fix Cyberpunk 2077? Maybe. First impressions matter and so far they’ve blown it.
