There’s a special brand of “clearly bullshit” marketing. The CP2077 marketing campaign was properly deceptive. Features were stated matter-of-factly and we all technically feasible.
I bought CP2077 after watching this video. I returned it the next morning.
There was similar backlash with Fable 1. Peter Molyneux talked a big game and didn’t deliver. I’d argue that Fable 1 at least made a genuine significant effort to have “actions affect the game”. Mechanics changed from behavior. That was considered a AAA disappointment in 2004. Now I long for the quality and depth in 16 year old AAA disappointments.
There was similar backlash against every open world game, particularly RPGs.
Skyrim and GTA for instance were just as bad with the progression breaking bugs on launch. Part of me wonders if that's why both those companies seem more focused on releasing the same games with their decade or so of bug fixes rather than take another stab at the PR gauntlet of managing expectations of an open world game.
The crashing bugs in the low end consoles is unacceptable (and Sony and Microsoft are just as much to blame. You shouldn't be able to pass TCRs with crashing bugs, so they knew what was coming and allowed it anyway), but the progression bugs on launch like this is par for the course for the past couple decades of gaming.
I don’t remember a similar backlash against Assassin’s Creed (specifically: lying about features). I don’t remember any hype for that game, but it delivered fun, new gameplay.
I do remember the launch version of AC being rather buggy. Perhaps that was a signal of things to come.
There was absolutely huge amounts of backlash against AC, as well as hype.
People complained that it was a shallow facade of an open world game, with at best a handful of formulas for encounters, where you could beat the whole game with dodge then attack, and escape any situation by running a hundred feet.
It was billed in pretty much the same way as Cyberpunk with the idea of AI cities that lived and breathed.
CDPR is made up of developers, artists, QA staff, managers, marketers, a board of executives and other roles. Journalism reports and publicly available call transcripts are painting a picture of internal conflict between the creators and leadership. In this context, “developers” means the creative roles within CDPR.
