The Fake Redemption of Cyberpunk 2077 

Install Raid for Free ✅ IOS/ANDROID/PC: clcr.me/lm25yn and get a special starter pack 💥 Available only for the next 30 days. Visit Halloween event page 🎃👻 trickortreat.plarium.com to win a bunch of real-life and in-game prizes 💥 Available only for new users. For the best possible experience make sure to use the desktop version.

Three cardinal rules for enjoying modern gaming 1. Avoid the hype, previews and launch week circus - buy a game if it's good 6 months after launch. Launch day is the first date of the public preview. 2. Don't judge a studio on it's history, a studio is only as good as the people and management making it's latest game 3. No publisher ever is going to be your friend or a nice guy - give them the sale they crave if they have done right by you

"Many will just forget". Which was just how people forgot about how Witcher 3 actually had a disastrous launch too, yet today the gaming community completely forgets about it.

When I first played 77 I had a genuinely amazing experience. Then I had to realize my genuinely amazing experience was nowhere near intended. See, I got a ton of visual glitches. But only when I got to the moment of having, In Character, glitched out eyes. Its the part where you go see Vik to get new ones. I had people popping in and out of existence and all sorts of visual bullshit going on as I'm walking down the alley to the occult shop, listening to a street preacher rant about how my eyes are not showing me true reality and how the corps are taking control of me through my eyes. I thought it was diagetic. Instead it was my graphics card struggling to deal with being fed spaghetti code.

I do think you could have mentioned how CDPR is increasing in size and dedicating a whole branch the same size as the original company solely to the Cyberpunk IP, as well as them shifting away from their in-house engine to the unreal engine. The message about skepticism towards their promises and marketing is quite a good thing to remember in the future. Personally hope they focus on doing what they originally promised for the first game for Orion when it comes out however many years down the line.

This Game is not Bad actually, just mediocre but many people love to be un denial, because that would imply CDProject Red cannot be trusted anymore. Pro-Tip: Don't trust in any companies, the very concept of "Cyberpunk" as a whole is built on that premise.

I was already a couple years into a “no pre order” phase when this was announced, due to multiple games letting me down. I figured, CDPR was the ONE company I’d be able to take the chance on. The release of Cyberpunk is inexcusable, I really appreciate all the research you did because it was generally entirely new information to me. I haven’t gone back to the game yet, maybe in the next year or so. But the anime definitely deserves all the love and recognition it got. Even as a stand alone piece of entertainment, it genuinely was top tier.

"Never trust anyone that is trying to sell you something or might personally benefit from you believing them." It's as basic as that. Great video as always, keep them coming.

Yea, people are already forgetting. Most content creators are already spinning it that Cyberpunk 2077 was unjustly criticized and the backlash was blown out of proportion. I am sure when Phantom Liberty drops the narrative will have completely changed.

that edgerunners song still hits omg

I still play this game almost exclusively

Yeah i still don't know how people can be okay with this i guess consumers dont care aslong as they consume

As someone who just buys games if they seem cool instead following their development, it’s crazy how much goes on behind the scenes to go from development studio to a disc in your console. What an interesting analysis.

You're actually one of the few RU-vidrs who's videos i watch from start to finish regardless of the video length cuz they're just THAT good

I love cyberpunk 2077, but its undeniable that people should HEED ITS FUCKING MESSAGE Corporations just want money and money wants whatever the person with the most of it wants.

I played the game before a lot of the patches (especially the recent big ones) landed. No doubt it had a ton of issues, but I think there's a good game underneath. I think focusing on the chaos and abuse behind the scenes during development is important, not only to improve working conditions in the industry but to show that these practices hurt games and the companies that choose to use them. I really like your concluding statements, they lied before and there's no reason we should believe things have improved or will improve until we see proof. But man, if they can stick the landing on the sequel that will be such a great story.

Man this video was amazing, not just the content of it, but the way you edited it together.

I love how this essentially repeated itself with starfield. The big marketing campaign, overpromising, underdelivering.

I love how thought out your videos are and how every piece of information you present is all completely relevant to the story and the point your trying to convey and all that effort realy pays off right at the end with your perfect conclusion

Congrats on a sponsor mate! Hope to see much more of your content!

40 minutes of Lextorias and Cyberpunk 2077, Am I in heaven right now?

Lex, you did a great job putting this video together. Hours of research and editing and the final product is engaging from start to finish. No matter what the views are, your videos are top notch imo.

I especially hate that CDPR won “best ongoing game” at the gaming awards just for fixing their own broken product.

YES, FINALLY PEOPLE ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS PROBLEM, THANK YOU I am very torn about the Cyberpunk "redemption". On one hand - the game had a good story to tell, and there was a lot of work put into the world and the soundtrack of the game, which, some people have found so enjoyable and loved those parts of the game, that they were ready to ignore all the technical issues, and I tend to favor the 'ugly duck' stories about games. Each was made by a lot of people, who put so much effort into making it a reality (especially when the company loves their crunch practise and bleeding staff dry), this should be respected and there Will be aspects that you can enjoy from any experience. HOWEVER Cyberpunk was sold as a lie. The fact that the marketing campaign was able to make an Unfinished and Unreleased product sucessfull even before launch is atrocious. The fact that said launch was a technical disaster, and downright unplayable on console is unaccaptable. These are all very valid reasons to hate on CDPR as a company. The fact that a good anime can 'redeem' Cyberpunk as a game, an experience, a product, is Not the lesson that should be learned from this. Publishers, companies and other big money men should Not learn the lesson that you can promise a lot through marketing, make the circumstances of development hell and then just buy good rep for an unfinished product with some money to anime studios. I am glad Cyberpunk have found it`s audience, and there are people who love this game, the tabletop and the anime. But this story should Not be one of any Redeption, because otherwise this - unfinished, untested, unplayable, will be the only types of AAAA games we will receive in the future. P.S. Congrats on your first sponsor! It was a genuinly fun bit in the video, not many content creator can manage that! Thank you for the quality of your videos and the opinion that should be heard

My bf works for a AAA company as a lead engineer (won’t say which for privacy) but he says QA is incompetent across the board. What happened to CDPR is normal and expected 😞

I love your case study type of videos . Every time I start to watch your video I finish it completely, even if I take breaks here and there. The way you comeup with script , I think it is quite amazing. Because like most other people I don,t like to watch long videos because my attention span is small. But some how (with your skills) you manage to hold my attention span for so long time which is very impressive to me.

This game's whole development and release story is terribly fascinating, and I'm glad to see that this video is able to share even more details about it. As always, incredibly well-researched and edited.

Well done Lex, you've created a very comprehensive vid that helped me understand the whole situation far more than any 1h+ vid I've watched covering the game!

I can't imagine how long this video took to make. Fantastic work on the video and the script. Your delivery made this a great watch.

Fantastic video, as somebody that's looked into this topic a lot you still managed to put a fresh perspective on it as always :0

Exactly. People who say the game was always a masterpiece and never was a bad just weren't there day one after waiting years. I can say Cyberpunk now is a good game, but that's it. It's just "good", when it should have been a masterpiece on the level of RDR2. People say the game wasn't bad simply didn't experience: -10 FPS if too much was on screen -Constant crashes -Shit driving mechanics -Falling of the map in the same street -Too many items corrupting your save -Backgrounds being useless -A story that plays on the urgency of your disease and you have to have find a cure of possible while also making side-quests about a talking vending machine, making it very tone deaf -0 customization on your characters, cars or apartment -developers jerking off themselves on Twitter saying "This side quest was so good it made me cry." and "I have save file of over 175h and I'm not even half done!" -the constant lies saying the game was ready and no more delays just to be delayed right on the next day -the crunch that fucked people -wasting more money and time on marketing than the actual game -the constant visual glitches -promised refunds without consulting retailers so a lot of people that tried to refund it couldn't -it was so bad that Sony pulled it out of the store. Never saw that happen before -so much more The game has it's redeeming qualities like the art style is amazing, the music is phenomenal and the characters feel like real people and are tons of fun to hang around with but we simply can't forget what happened because of a good anime or because CDPR made a good game before. If this was EA or Ubisoft, no one would give them any breathing room and CDPR shouldn't be treated differently.

Liked and subscribed for the combination of that last line about “promising the moon” and the fade-in of “I Really Want to Stay at Your House.” Extraordinarily clever, A+

Damn this video and all the comments seem pretty negative, I'm curious to see why that is- Oh it was before Phantom Liberty I see

can't wait for the Fallout 76 anime

You know, being a newcomer to the game only after 2.0 + PL released, going back to all the bad history is like looking through a curved mirror, just so bizzare and hard to imagine, because with a freshman perspective, the game is genuinely good currently. The story is the strong point (one of few open world games that made me want to exclusively run main story first just because it was interesting), combat is pretty fun, though a bit outta whack when it comes to balance (by max level you are deep in the Terminator/Neo/Hackerman power fantasy) but yeah, it's that. The only couple bugs I encountered were usually traffic freaking out when out of view or a bartender morphing into his bar counter or odd ragdolls or that one where my shotguns started firing slugs (and were considerably more deadly now, heh). And while the whole story had a lot of stink, when I look then towards other recent games that disappointed and continue doing so, CDPR still gets points for not monetizing the shit outta their games like, say, 343 or Bungie. Oh, and for one thing, no matter how much goodwill I can have for a company, I will never pre-order and hell, the list of devs I will buy games on launch day is very short. Like - From Software and Larian - short

I dropped CP2077 after 20 hours. Watched Edgerunners. Came back and thoroughly enjoyed it. I really enjoyed the story and the sidestories for random characters are unique enough to me that I explored them. But man, If it wasn't edgerunners idk if I would have given this game another go.

Hey man, I'm going through your backlog and just got to this video and wanted to say this is one of the better post-mortems for Cyberpunk I've seen. Also, the soundtrack to Edgerunners keeps getting me one iota closer to getting my wife into anime. So, there's that. (On that note, I'll be watching your Bebop and space western videos here soon.) Keep up the good work.

Valuable take. And absolutely important to keep in mind. Yes we're all in a renewed honey-moon-phase with CDPR, but, as consumers its imperative that we maintain some degree of objectivity. Great video. Muchos Gracias choom.

This is a fair outlook on things, and I will be the first to admit Cyberpunk 2077 is still to this day an unfinished game. I guess what makes me love it despite that is I think that CDPR did an amazing job with the atmosphere of Night City. When I first played the game it was on my old ps4 and even though it was one of the most broken games I’ve ever played, I enjoyed the experience a whole lot. One thing I will say though is that the release of Cyberpunk permanently crushed any trust I have for these companies. It was definitely a wake up call. Anyway, good video man!

Games like 2077 and plenty of others are why i refuse to get on any hype train anymore There has been SOOO many games even in the last few years that prove why hype culture is such a dangerous double edged sword Cyberpunk, NMS, The Outer Worlds, Starfield, SwordShield, the list grows with every month. And CDPR sadly is the best example of how *NO* company is *ever* above hesitancy or scrutiny Judge a game on what is RELEASED, NOT on what mock up trailers make one think *might* be in it on release

Prefect timing, I was having a rough day and this was just the cure. Great work man it was super funny!

While Cyberpunk has one of the best stories, world building and characters in recent years it is a prime example not to be tricked by big corpos no matter how much you loved past projects.

Your channel has become one of my favorites. Absolute much watch on every video. Just good vibes and good topics. I'm glad you compared it to Far Cry because I think it's a nice mix of that and Grand Theft Auto. I think of it as my favorite Far Cry game lol. As a Ps4, eventual PS5 player, I always held a soft spot and am glad it's doing better. It's not an amazing game, but it sure is a great one now. Great video once again.

This was an amazing video essay dude! Thanks for putting all these words into an easily digestible video. Keep up the amazing work :)

Really nice analysis which as far I can see really much effort from your side. I appreciate it really much, especially without hands in the pocket :D

Seeing this after patch 2.2. Huge props to CDPR, it's a pretty crazy comeback story. Cyberpunk 2077 is now one of my favorite games of all time.

Excellent channel, found it a few days ago and immediately subscribed. Appreciate the lack of cursing, have little kids running around and while they're definitely not going to sit and watch something about Cyberpunk, they can probably hear it. I know I sound old, but from a not-really-that-old-of-a-gamer, thanks. Keep it up, even if I have 0 desire to try Cyberpunk again.

Thank yoy for putting in that end message to always be apprehensive of how the mistakes of these triple A companies keep getting swept under the rug by consumers, that's the one thing that rubs me the wrong way about the monumental success of Edgerunners and how more and more people seem to have just completely forgotten about the shitshow it was un release and the sheer amount of lies that CDPR has thrown at us. If we let them then they absolutely will do it again, and seems like CDPR has already started to forget their lesson after announcing like 5 games back to back. Like Jesus did they learn absolutely nothing about overpromising and overhyping in the past 3 years?

My favorite part of youtube is watching people go from joking about having a raid sponsorship to leveling up and actually getting the sponsorship. Good for you homie

This is the 3rd video I've watched from you; I watched the Fan Service one, then Waifu, and now this. The amount of information and how you present is excellent. I pre-ordered Cyberpunk. I played it launch day. Somehow, I did not have all the horrible bugs a lot of people had, I saw some, but nothing as bad as I saw in videos. I found the game enjoyable, though disjointed at times. But I've done 1 and 1/2 replays with. Skyrim keeps calling me back in somehow. I look forward to Starfield. I hope it is not all hype. I also remember the launch of No Man's Sky and that nearly killed me on pre-orders. I went many game cycles ignoring games for weeks to months after release because I couldn't trust the companies. I'm rambling. Keep up the good work!

I was one of those CDPR hype bois befoer the launch, I thought they just couldn't miss (didn't preorder tho). On launch night I read a lot of disappointing player reports and it killed my excitement for the game completely. After watching Edgerunners, I'm hesitantly interested again but don't want to reward their corpo greed by buying it now. I'll wait and see if they ever catch up to their initial promises, hoping for a No Man's Sky turnaround. PS: Great video essay as always Lex

I will never be buying a CDPR game. Absolutely despicable company. The only redemption is liquidating the company and splitting the pot between every developer they crushed. They have not learned a thing and they won't change. They are not to be trusted.

Man I’m a relatively new subscriber but i gotta say I love your videos they are very high quality and the content is on point

as someone who playsTTRPGS like D&D and Fragged Empire, the whole cyberpunk 2077 situation just makes me want to play the origional Cyberpunk TTRPG (which if you didnt know is what 2077 is based upon and the anime takes alot of elements from the ttrpgs systems including the whole cyberpsychosis mechanic)

Ahh, finally a video to watch while I consume my iskender kebab

Love the thought you put into these. Keep it up, man.

27:19 - You glitching out for a second made me have to rewatch that part.

Man, my experience with cyberpunk has always made me feel so disconnected from the discourse around it. I played it at launch on a 5 year old PC rocking a r9 390 and an i5-4690. I had almost zero bugs and the performance was pretty much exactly what I would've expected it to be on a (by then) 5 year old PC. If anything, I was positively surprised how close I came to 50 or even 60 fps despite not running it on the lowest settings. And despite being hyped for that game I didn't really watch any of the trailers or events so I couldn't miss any Features that I simply didn't know I should be missing. In other words, I got to play something much closer to what people are able to play now rather than what I kept hearing about around release (and I'm talking about the PC version, the ps4/xb1 versions are an entirely different (horror) Story). Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that CD project Red didn't deserve the backlash they got just because I ended up having a pretty good time with the game at release. I'm just saying that it was a bit annoying that there was so little room for discourse like that because the overall narrative of the launch being an absolute failure was so overpowering. And I think that's part of the reason why the current discourse seems to have shifted so abruptly yet again. like a backlash to the backlash kinda thing *including* a "it was actually always good" narrative that -despite of my subjective experience- we all know to be complicated at best. Either way, I just wrote this long-ass comment for the engagement, shout out to anyone who actually red all of it

no matter what anyone says, songs from edgerunner just fucking slaps...

Great take and breakdown, loving your videos and hope you keep em' rolling!

Love the content man! Awesome way to spend some friday afternoon time after work!

While this has been covered lots of time, I didnt know abything about the "catch a bug" section of the vid. Great job! Overall, quite a solid and just long enough video :)

cyberpunk 2077 is a good game, it's atmosphere and gameplay hit as hard as it's graphical beauty, it's writing is really high quality for most of the main story, most of the game design is quite good as well, it has a lot of issues but it also has a lot going for it, i still quote V to this day for what he says anytime they have to transition, he always says "so... what now?" no matter the context he says that and i find it funny to say that during any awkward moment. and even though a joke referencing the worst areas of the game in terms of writing i still remember the rage i felt when i couldn't be the one to shoot dex and how immersed i was in the moments that followed, if cd project red followed through with polishing the game to it's brightest form it could have been better than gta 5 in the public eye, the game likely will never reach the same level of hype and respect it had before it launched but it's still a good game and it's worth your time, sooo many people shit on this game and they have good reason to do so but it's important to remember that few things in life are all bad and this game does not fit in with that small group, when looking into a game it's important to consider what people like just as much as what they don't like, if anything I'd say it's more important to find what people like because of how hard that can be and how long negative things remain in your noggin.

I'm really happy I get to be at the beginning of this channel's journey. Your content is awesome and I absolutely love it

Love your videos bro. Keep up the longform content youre a legend!

he made it, he got sponsored

I like how everyone just collectively agreed to forget about this game like it was a bad dream

Okay, between the detailed fact coverage, the jokes mixed throughout that made me smile, and how you want to both see things with the real critical eye and call out their bullshit but also the few positives and hope for the future (but not BLIND hope), I’m going to have to subscribe. See ya, Space Cowboy.

I bought this game for my PS4 pro, so I truly don't understand what is this "redemption" that everyone talks about. Don't forget that last gen consoles made almost 50% of the game's initial sales, if not even more. And now CDPR are just abandoning close to 6-7 million of people, because they somehow can't update crowd behaviour on the last gen. I really don't feel like buying any other game made by this company.

I'm on my 5th playthrough. No game had me more emotionally engaged than Witcher 3 and cyberpunk. CDPR's management and investors might be evil, but this team is obviously passionate about both gameplay and storytelling. At the end of the day, I just wanna play great games that don't try to turn me or my kid into gambling addicts. That's getting increasingly rare

Considering Phantom Liberty launched relatively bug-free, I’d say at least the Cyberpunk IP is safe moving forward. Cyberpunk 2077 was an incredible game I loved even before the patches, the DLC and 2.0 update only made me love it even more. So I can’t wait to see what a sequel will do for it.

Man i love your vids so much, please never stop!!

You're so damn good at what you do. Really enjoyed this video, and it really taught me a lot about the development history of the game as well as CDPR as a whole. Keep up the awesome content

I will never get over the amount of hype CDPR created themselves vs what they actually released. I know at this point there's a million nuances and things we could talk about, but just in general it's insane what their management did. That tease felt worse than actual blue balls.

For anyone that really likes the setting but doesn't want to support CDPR's business practices I'd highly recommend the TTRPG the game is based on which is very fun plus it is very easy to get a hold of all the rules for free if you want to. plus in addition to the core rules being easy to find R. talsorian has all the supplements they have released for it for free

Amazing video as always bro I learned a lot and congrats on a sponsorship!

Sony actually didn't pull the game until AFTER cdpr encouraged people to ask for refunds. It wasn't related to the performance. Sony just hates giving refunds so much that they'd rather not sell the game at all.

The first game to fail so hard and redeem itself was No Man's Sky as far as I know, I agree with the others here, Cyberpunk is not bad, just mediocre, nothing incredible to come from it, based on the persons taste it can actually be an awesome and incredible game... just not for me.

Yeah well DLC is out, where is the fake redemption now?

Discovered your channel yesterday. You do great work! May I suggest checking the settings and midrolls placement on your videos? I think yt is inserting more than you've placed. Several other creators I watch have had this issue. Council of Geeks has a whole video on it, if you want her take.

Love your editing style & delivery

Damn even in an in-depth analysis of the game and its company "I really want to stay at your home" hits right in the feels. Great video btw Lextorias love your work

I got into it, like really into it, after Edgerunners... and I love it.

I still hate the developer's attitude that the Cyberpunk is a well-made game just not recognized. The Edgerunner is a well-made anime and it's made by a animation company, not by CD Projekt.

You leveled up again, this is great!

Who is your editor?? That pre-sting was amazing

As good as Edgerunners is and how the og game has improved a bit since launch (story’s still pretty meh), I think it’s best to acknowledge how it shipped broken and buggy. Fixed later or not, that’s inexcusably bad. The fact that many games now do ship broken or unfinished doesn’t help. You’re basically given a hollow promise that eventually the devs will make it good in exchange for a triple a price tag.

my man start getting the dough with dem sponsors, love your videos, keep it up

It's funny how all of this could've been avoided (or at least mitigated) if they released it as an early access release instead of a "full" release. Why? Because Baldur's Gate 3. Seriously, Baldur's Gate 3 went into early access around the same time Cyberpunk 2077 "released" back in 2020 (which was basically an early access release without the disclosure that it was "early access" due to how buggy it was and not fit for launch it was). Being an early access title, BG3's bugs and features weren't criticized as badly because of its "early access" status and Cyberpunk 2077 could've had the same benefit. I mean, the release dates of both games are basically identical. BG3 entered EA in October 2020. CP2077 "released" in December 2020. BG3's full release was in August 2023 while CP2077's 2.0 update (which is basically the state that the game should've been at release) was in September 2023. Like, the release dates lined up pretty much identically (funnily enough both games are about the main character(s) getting a thing lodged in their head that are slowly killing them and now they must find a way to get it out)

The only thing that kept me hoping for CD Projekt Red is GOG with how much they have done for DRM gaming they deserve a ton of credit. I just hope their development arm can redeem itself.

I agree with everything except that the game is amazing in any way. Even without the bugs it's a mediocre game at best.

Studio Trigger has made such a wonderful job that when I heard the song in the outro, I almost forgot what the video was about while goosebumps took over my skin. I love that show.

I remember being so excited and playing the game at launch on PS5 and felt like I was fighting the game rather than playing it. My save kept getting deleted, visual bugs, and crashes just completely turned me off from going further than the 15-20hrs I had put in. But recently my friends have been hyping up all the updates/fixes and especially now the anime it’s making me think I should give it a second chance.

I work in software QA, having made it my career for 15 years, and the whole working philosophy of Quantic Lab doing their job is just so wrong on a number of levels. Testing is not supposed to be a bug finding contest based on counts; the most important bugs are those that are the most severe, and have impacts on large areas of the application or game. Software QA is literally the Pareto principle put to work: 80% of bugs come from 20% of the code. Thanks for highlighting this. As for Cyberpunk 2077 itself: I was never sold on the game the same way I was with The Witcher 3, and at this point I will never buy into it despite enjoying Edgerunners. Not paying for the game is my way of telling CD Projekt Red to eat a lot of humble pie for this fiasco, and maybe dial down their hubris a little.

If anything, the show reminded me how banger the soundtrack of the game was. I’ve tried going back recently, the games fun. Just wish performance was better and gunplay was less stiff. The sequel could be pretty banging. Thanks for the video. Great work as usual.

34:34 Coming here after your "shorter games with worse graphics" video, this point stood out to me: what's the anime but shorter and with "worse" graphics? Better fleshed-out world and characters you care more about despite that shorter length and less realistic graphics.

The undying irony with the reasoning of everything, lined up directly next to the story of the game, it's just ridiculous

I personally think the game deserves a second chance. While it had a very bad history with the release, I enjoyed the game on release and had it easier since I only found the most common bugs, and the game was still enjoyable. Now I'm sure CD Projekt Red learned it's lesson and hopefully everything will only get better from here.

Cyberpunk 2077 is certainty the best far cry game in years.

You know F'd up when even gamestop starts giving out refunds