I don't even own this game and I'm highly pissed about what I saw from the developer.
Here's what I saw: A giant mea culpa letter, posted on Twitter, promising to fix all the issues the game
is having on PS4 and XBOX ONE consoles. It reads in part,
We would like to start by apologizing to you... we should have paid more attention to
making it play better on PlayStation 4 and XBOX ONE.... We will fix bugs and crashes
and improve the overall experience. The first round of updates has just been released
and the second is coming within the next 7 days... we'll release two large patches [in
January and February]. They won't make the game on last-gen look like it's running on
a high-spec PC or next-gen console, but it will be closer to that experience than it
is now.... We would appreciate it if you would give us a chance, but... you can opt
to refund your copy
These assholes built the game using next-gen technology which, as far as consoles go,
pretty much nobody can get their mitts on — at least in the case of the new XBOX
Series X/S. They received so much money in preorders that they recouped their entire
production budget and marketing costs. 1
When the public, who had been waiting for the game since 2012, bought it to play
on the last-gen devices they have, it looked and played like shit. The Wikipedia
article I previously cited reports that sales plummeted four days after release,
when word got out about all of the technical issues — that is, when people realized
they'd bought a complete shitburger of a game.
Companies rush software to market all the time, thinking they can just release
patches afterwards to fix the problems they ignored beforehand. I promised that I'd
never buy another EA game ever because of all the bullshit I saw in their Battlefront II
title — and I bought that game like two years after it debuted — plenty
of time for them to patch whatever needed to be patched. I tweeted to EA every
bug I found and never once saw any reply. I saw so many bugs it became a labor to
track them. That game could have been amazing, but it wasn't. It was a complete
shitshow, and for that, they'll not receive another penny from me.
I don't know if CD Projekt Red (the studio that made the game, which I'll abbreviate
to CDPR) rushed their product to market, or if they just concentrated so much
on consoles nobody fucking has (perhaps anticipating Microsoft and
Sony would have no problem sourcing and distributing their next-gen consoles) that it
simply never crossed their minds that people would play them on the last-gen consoles
they already own. What a colossal oversight this would be.
But the real problem with that scenario is that they released the game specifically
FOR last-gen consoles last week. Hell, their release for the next-gen consoles isn't
planned until sometime next year. So there's the answer to the question: it's
both — CDPR didn't perform appropriate QA testing using last-gen consoles, AND they
released a last-gen version of the game hoping to capture holiday sales.
So, knowing that they released a version of the game strictly for last-gen tech,
WHY include a warning in the letter about how when it's fixed it won't look as good
as it does on next-gen consoles? It's like selling a used car, then promising to do
a ton of work to fix it, and then saying "well, I mean, it's never gonna run like a
new car." Would I go back to a dealership that did that? Nope.
A reviewer of the game has published a sort of a retrospective on his experience.
He claims that CDPR only showed the PC version of the game (likely running on a
tricked out machine) and never showed customers the last-gen console versions —
something CDPR cops to in its letter. The reviewer suggests that CDPR manipulated
testing by only offering codes for PC users, and not allowing critics to post images
or footage of bugs and crashes until two days after CDPR published "glowing reviews"
of its new game. 2
I'm livid. And IMHO, CDPR deserves
all the shit they get for this. They had a fan base of people thirsty for
this game since 2012, who paid for it in advance, and CDPR made these people a
shitburger.
All of this could have been avoided had they only released it for next-gen
consoles and PCs with high requirements. Then you'd only have people bitching
about how they have to buy a new machine to play it on, but at least they'd
maybe get the game they paid for. Instead, CDPR released it for older consoles,
and people were pissed when it kept breaking. Imagine that!
I've worked for a company like CDPR. In fact, the company closed and we all lost
our jobs because the company president made an outlandish contract with an automotive
manufacturer. He bet the house on this application, making a deal that was so one-sided,
the client would double their money by not accepting our product. So the client
didn't accept it (duh) and doubled their money, and we all lost our jobs.
But at least my company was up front about its stupidity. People who are trying to
get their money back apparently aren't even hearing back from the company! In fact,
the Venturebeat article (cited above) claims that CDPR has essentially placed refund
processing responsibility onto Microsoft and Sony; Sony is denying those refunds.