Perhaps the most hyped game of the decade, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 is (actually, for reals this time) out now – but what should be a day of celebration and hi-calorie carb-o-snax has instead become, for some players, a frustrating disappointment.
If not exactly an unexpected frustrating disappointment.
The PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game, according to evidence like this on social media, is an unoptimised mix of low-res graphics, wobbly frame rates, texture pop, glitches, crashes, and much more. Polygon has published a series of videos from Twitter but I think this comment and screenshot from Reddit user chelinchan24 sums it up.
Did anyone notice that all advertise signs on the highway show only the text “DEBUG”?
However, if you switch to photo mode it’ll be showing what it supposed to be.
Awkward.
A day one update was supposed to be out in time for launch that CDPR claims fixes most of these problems, and a lot of this content is from a pre-update install of Cyberpunk 2077 – but some players haven’t even able to get the update, Kotaku’s Ethan Gatch explains.
My game’s version is 1.0.0.6, which appears to be the pre-patch version, but it won’t let me install any further updates, even after re-downloading the entire game from scratch. It’s unclear how many people who are currently experiencing poor performance are also missing the patch. A number of players on Xbox One and PS4 have reported having similar issues on Twitter, not knowing if they have the day one patch, or how to download it if they don’t.
I’ve got the game on Xbox Series X and besides occasional, temporary freezes as, I dunno, things load or whatever, I’ve not had significant technical issues but there’s a big visual difference between the “Performance” and “Quality” modes. Performance mode prioritises frame rate over res, and works okay, with infrequent frame drops in busy locations. Quality mode boosts the pretties, but the frame rate instantly drops to sub-30, making this an almost totally irrelevant option. Bummer.
[UPDATE] I must’ve chosen the worst moment to swap to Quality mode the first time, because I’ve since tried it again and it works totally okay too. Disabling chromatic aberration, motion blur, and film grain in the options also helps. I’ve now clocked over 20 hours on my console with zero crashes, one geometry glitch that necessitated reloading a save to get unstuck, and one hilarious physics glitch that pushed me back over 200 metres when attempting to climb through a window.