>"Some of you might also be wondering what these words mean in light of us saying we achieved gold master some time ago. Passing certification, or 'going gold', means the game is ready, can be completed, and has all content in it. But it doesn't mean we stop working on it and raising the quality bar."
No... that's actually exactly what it means. Going gold means the branch is cut, it's in the can, and discs are being printed. Just admit that you exaggerated for press coverage and get over it. No one really cares about another month delay, but lying about going gold is just bizarre.
I'm always fascinated by people who insist on applying their own interpretation of something to other people's lives/businesses/processes.
Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.
I don't understand the fixation of catching people in an alleged lie.. What's the difference whether they genuinely underestimated the time required to do something _they've never done before_ (testing on so many platforms) or whether they actually, completely unreasonably, decided to lie to everyone about having gone gold?
Not to mention that if they hadn't actually gone gold, there are tons of outside parties who would probably have realized it pretty quickly (given the production work that happens), and we'd all have found out anyways.
I am not familiar enough with gaming jargon, but I must say I am not happy with the trend of businesses deciding to change the meaning of a word and everyone else playing along. For example:
- Unlimited data plan: it means you can use it until you hit 10GB, then the speed will be cut to 40kbps. But hey, you can use as much of the 40kbps speed as you want.
- Lifetime updates: we provide updates until we decide the device has reached end of life, which is approximately the same time as we stop selling that specific model of the device. [0]
- Native application: a web app packaged with Electron
"Unlimited" in terms of Internet access/bandwidth has always been a contentious term.
And I mean _always_ because back in 1995 I worked for an ISP and when we introduced our "Unlimited" dial-up plan, I can't tell you the number of people who got mad at us because they couldn't dial in and stay connected 24/7 all month long.
We explained it in our terms of use (and actually had a really clear tl;dr in non-fine print in our ads) that customers could use as much as they could without worry of being charged for overages or getting cut off after a certain number of hours, but it was not a _dedicated_ account that promised 24/7 service.
But certain customers insisted that _their_ interpretation of the word was the one that _we_ should be held to.
One customer even took us to small claims court, and lost.
For the rest, our typical response was to say we were sorry this wasn't the plan they were expecting, and we'd happily refund their most recent month and close their account. That's almost always when they would change their mind and suddenly be ok with the terms. ;-)
That sounds like you're talking about the distinction between an unlimited connection with a SLA, and an unlimited connection provided on a best-effort basis. But the modern corruption of "unlimited" doesn't even rise to the level of "best-effort".
I think the similarity (in my mind) is the "you can't be charged for overages" aspect of it..
Use as much as you can, you won't be charged any more than X dollars per month..
But past a certain point, you will be throttled.. Not cut off, but slowed..
And back in the ISP days, we would actively disconnect high-usage users to free up phone lines during peak times (which was typically 6-10pm on weekdays and 1pm to 10pm on weekends)
Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember a time when ISPs advertised their "user-to-line ratios", meaning we didn't have a phone line for every customer - we maintained a 7:1 ratio which was considered good back then).
So in order to allow the lower-usage customers to get online to check their emails or surf after dinner, we had to make sure that there were lines available.
If you had already used more than (I think - memory is fuzzy here) 150 hours per month, then you were subject to being disconnected during peak hours.
So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...
> So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...
No. Dropping a dial-up connection when all lines are busy is not the same kind of artificial limitation as throttling/de-prioritizing someone's traffic after X GB even if the network is uncongested, or unconditionally throttling specific types of traffic (eg. all video traffic, to prevent HD streaming).
> Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.
no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not.
I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes.
how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?
With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets.
But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.
Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.
From what I've gathered this has as much to do with for the Xbox One and PS4 the discs are only "installers" these days (and sometimes worse, just "activation tokens"), and for various reasons both the Xbox One and the PS4 have some very interesting heuristics of what they bother to pull from the disc versus what they just grab from the internet. The Blu-Ray discs on those consoles are slower than people tend to think they are and I get the impression a lot of times the consoles this generation themselves just think it is faster to fetch everything from the internet than to bother trying to pull it from the drive.
these 40gb patches happen because they had to put assets in multiple times in such a way as to cause less seeking time on the internal hard drive. They're too slow this gen to be able to do this all without problems. So games would put various re-used assets in multiple places in the game's file bundles so that when you're in section A of the game it can access that file with all the other files of section A. And likewise it puts a duplicate in section B so that when you're in section B it doesn't have to seek to section A's files to find it, which would be slower.
It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.
They might actually be printing discs, though. Nowadays, multi-gigabyte day-one patches are commonplace, so all the disk is for is shipping art assets cheaply (and supporting legacy retail sales). So as long as the art assets are 95% done, that’s good enough to “go gold” and start printing.
Nothing says “We don’t give a shit; you gave us your money” quite like having to wait a couple of hours for an update immediately after installing a game.
As if the superiors punched out and went home and told the engineers to keep going and fix more bugs.
Software estimates are hard and superiors don't magically have more insight into when the game will actually be finished. It's all a gamble and sometimes you have to postpone the release or ship a buggy product.
Gold just means you have a MVP that will pass certification on all platforms. It's content complete and it would, in theory, be fine to play all the way through without a patch. It allows manufacturing and distribution to begin.
There are frequently many tweaks one should do to that product that companies will work on after reaching that point.
This has changed so much over time. Par for the course these days is shipping a buggy mess as a GM. Then a massive as hell Day 1 patch to fix it all.
I forget the exact details but there was a game this current gen that had a 40gb day one patch. I felt so bad for those that bought a disc version just to have to download a massive patch after installing the game.
The delay doesn't annoy me that much but the Day 0 patch trend does.
Seriously why people can't just release 1.0 software that is 1.0 anymore?
Although broadband now is widespread, in many situations people might not have it.
Situations where day-0 patch is bad:
1. Countries or places with poor infrastructure
2. Rural areas
3. People using the software after many years when the server with the patch might be gone.
Also there is the fact many companies abuse patches to add features they shouldn't or remove features (rootkits, DRM, or Paradox habit of removing features in a way to "encourage" people to buy DLC, or PS3 suddenly not supporting Linux anymore, and then there is Epic "hotfix")
The possibility of having patches is good. The habit of patching is bad. Or course adding features and content over time is fine, but releasing software you know it is buggy intending to patch is later is not.
I'm not sure if that's still the case, but one of the main reasons were the publishing platforms and deadlines (@someone more knowledgeable, please correct me if I'm wrong!) :
As a game developer you'd need to set the publishing date weeks if not months in advance. Due to the store policies, missing that slot would result in another, potentially very expensive, delay.
Now, marketing is a significant part of the budget and you really want to sync your marketing campaign with the release date. Postponing the release by a few weeks is almost guaranteed to damage the sales drastically, to the point where it could kill your game before people even have a chance to learn about it.
You're late. So what do you do? You release all of your fixes in a huge day-0 patch. It's still better than the alternative.
The increasing overall complexity of the product itself and the diversity of platforms the product needs to ship on makes actual 1.0 nearly impossible. Games especially never ship as 1.0, they ship when the deadline comes and it's in somewhat playable state. No matter how much you delay, there will always be more shit to fix and letting it go is always a compromise.
Those people angry that a software corporation lied to them about the certainty of a product release should just consider the game to have started early.
"Welcome to Cyberpunk 2020! All public statements are bottom-line-boosting propaganda, and if you want the real truth, or our software, so bad, break into our systems and take it."
The Twitter replies are absolutely brutal and overly aggressive towards the developers, but I do have some level of empathy for it. This is such a hotly-anticipated release and people are craving escapism in 2020, and this game is going to provide that for so many people. That said, the level of aggression is intense and crosses the line.
Still, I feel sorry for the developers who were seriously in a Catch-22. They are (correctly, IMO) prioritising the right thing by focusing on quality over the short-term negativity from a very vocal group. I wish more companies would take this approach (or, in the case of Apple, rediscover this approach).
It's not just that people want the game. Fans have been increasingly concerned in the past year about CDPR's history with crunch and incredibly negative reports about their workplace culture. There's a lot of concern that the people making the game they love have been working horrible hours for the past month and will now have to keep doing it for another month and a half. This is part of a broader concern over mismanagement of their human resources generally.
I've been eagerly waiting for this game to get my RPG fix, but recently the agony became too great and I bought Ghost of Tsushima instead. What a great game! Now I'm more glad I didn't wait. I can only play a couple of these sandbox monsters each year, so I'm penciling in Cyberpunk for 2077, when I can download it to my brain implant in the cryo tank.
There is at least one 3rd-party benchmark available at this point. AMD is slightly, possibly margin of error, ahead of NVIDIA.
Assuming that the benchmarks are good, that AMD will undercut NVIDIA (as they tend to do) and that you don't want to do ML, Radeon is probably going to be the one for those who have been waiting.
Have you seen the power consumption numbers for the 30xx series? I'ts pushing 400w at full load[1]. Not sure AMD can just smash their voltages up to try and be competitive this time.
Are the physical disc games getting regular updates? What I mean is that besides the "GOTY edition" or "Platinum" and so on, if Cyberpunk 2077 gets a patch, are the discs produced after it automatically produced with the latest version?
I probably will buy this game in January, but it bothers me to get a game that if I play 10 years later when the original updating service is no longer active, it may not be playable.
Exactly, especially when developers having been crunching it for the past months, I do believe all the extra delay will be the best thing for their health. After all, kids can’t have their shiny toy with minor bugs. It would be even better if devs were not told about the extra delay, and only got the news through social media like it happened.
This is its third delay I think. And AFTER announcing its gold status. This is so bizarre. And it's not even an amateur studio or a monumental project like Star Citizen. They delivered multiple projects that were at least of comparable size.
They released so many trailers in the last weeks and even days. This must be so expensive purely from a marketing perspective.
Also none of the reasons are news. Corona has been here for a long time now, and other teams deal with it, too. And I'm sure the release platforms have also been set in stone for a long time.
Well sure they've delivered projects of this size before but as they said themselves, they've never had to test on this many platforms simultaneously, or do it all while working remotely..
So in fact this isn't something they've done before, so it's not _that_ surprising that they underestimated..
How is this expensive? Almost all of the trailers I watched had in-game action, and only one featured Keanu and his bike company, which was obviously shot months ago.
Absolutely. First it pertains to the persistent problem of projecting release dates and committing to them.
More importantly, it adds data points to the story of CD Projekt Red getting press for bragging about no ‘mandatory’ crunch time and subsequently adopting a brutal mandatory crunch at the home stretch.
They also told their staff there would be mandatory overtime after promising the community that would not be the case. And now it's being delayed, so does that mean the mandatory overtime just got extended another few weeks as well or did they delay it so that they could cancel the mandatory OT?
It was my understanding that they asked people to work an extra 8 hours per week (the maximum under Polish law, for no more than 150 hours per year) and paid extra for it (again, as required by law). While this is definitely not ideal and crunch is, IMHO, due to project mismanagement, especially after promising they wouldn't, but I wouldn't exactly call this "brutal", especially considering that covid has messed up many people's plans.
Now, if non-polish contractors got a worse deal, I don't know...
The delays of Cyberpunk have been one of the most high profile stories regarding developer crunch I can think of in years. The video game itself isn't necessarily HN relevant, but the delay very much is.
That's what people asked for before and also what we got, "Early Access" games. But instead of getting games that steadily improve radically over a long period of time, you get unfinished games that get a bit of polish before "1.0" is released as a marketing update almost.
Of couse, there are a few exceptions to this rule, like HNs favorite; Factorio, and Kerbal Space Program, Prison Architect, Rimworld are a few other examples. But most Early Access games released are in reality excuses for releasing something unfinished early, and only do small changes after that.
the mvp model works well for games like this that aren't really story based. I'm always happy to start a new map in factorio to see what got added in the latest version. I'm not gonna go back and replay a 40+ hour rpg just to see what it's like with a few less bugs or a couple new cutscenes.
Almost all indie games seem to be doing early access these days and I agree that it's a good idea in many cases. In a narrative game like Cyberpunk, however, I want the game to be right at launch because that's when I'll be playing it and I'll probably only play once.
Not in this case: it's a large and complex adventure game that most people will only play once or (if obsessive) a few times with major plot and character variants, not a puzzle or strategy game that is meant to be replayed over and over again, enjoyed at launch, and enjoyed again after updates.
Only the "maximum viable product", the best possible version of the game within budget and technical limitations, is relevant.
It was speculated that No Man's Sky launched in a minimal state due to meddling from Sony.
The fact that the devs improved it significantly afterward for years is unusual, especially since that game in particular does not rely on microtransactions which would benefit from a strong base game.
If properly managed, sure. The problem here is that its been reported that the studio has been crunching and working 6 day weeks under the assumption that it was the final push for nearly a year now, but release keeps getting pushed back, for the third time now.
how does this make sense for a single-player rpg? most videogame sales happen within one or two months of release, and most people are not going to replay this kind of game unless they really like it.
this is pretty much the only release I'm looking forward to this year, and I very much appreciate that they are pushing it back until they feel it is finished.
No... that's actually exactly what it means. Going gold means the branch is cut, it's in the can, and discs are being printed. Just admit that you exaggerated for press coverage and get over it. No one really cares about another month delay, but lying about going gold is just bizarre.