Cyberpunk 2077 on PS4 is a Disaster. We Were Supposed to Burn City, not Consoles
Cyberpunk 2077 is a great game that can delight you. As long as you're playing PC or next-gen. I played on the basic PS4 and a great I have perhaps seen, but buried underneath a rubble of issues.
The review is based on the PS4 version.
- The thick guise of a technical disgrace still hides a very good game.
- Stellar problems with loading textures;
- Noticeable framerate drops, especially while driving vehicles;
- Incorrectly adapted interface and font size, ill-considered controls;
- Overwhelming number of all kinds of bugs of all shapes and sizes;
- Graphical concessions are clear at every step of the way, making the game clearly stand out from other PS4 games;
- All of this together kills the immersion and places all the unusual situations in the game world under the category "is it a glitch or not?"
A good few years ago, during one of our annual, editorial gatherings, one of my more experienced colleagues said a very true thing: The measure of how good a video game is, is how many of it's blemishes you're ready to condone. You don't have to look far to verify this statement. There's a whole range of crude games, that fans loved anyway, such as Gothic. These games were usually somewhat underdeveloped upon release, and often brought terrifying technical issues. This didn't stop hundreds of thousands of players from enjoying them, for years on end.
The Witcher 3 itself was struggling with a multitude of problems for the first months, which were subsequently forgiven in face of a well-conducted story and a perfectly created world. I myself have waved off so many issues of NieR: Automata, and I actually consider it one the best games ever made.
Cyberpunk 2077 has also been recognized by many people as an outstanding game that can be forgiven many of its sins. On the PC and next-gen consoles, at least. Unfortunately, when it comes to PlayStation 4, on which I've tested this game, the situation is quite... different. There is always a limit to how many technical problems you can shrug off, and when this limit is exceeded, even the best storyline and revolutionary solutions in gameplay cannot compensate for the slew of blemishes and issues. That's how it is with the latest CD Projekt RED game.
What you can see here is not the score of the game, but the score of Cyberpunk 2077 on PlayStation 4 (v. 1.04). Therefore, in the article, I focus primarily on the technical aspects of the console port (because it is only a port, not an equivalent PC version). If you want to read more about the game proper, head to the full review written by Mike, and based on the PC version.
The only place where the game runs as it should.
What starts with laughter...
However, before CP2077 showed me the middle finger, the first impression was quite good. I wasn't expecting miracles from the version on a console using the 8-years-old, 28-nm Liverpool GPU. The game may have not looked the most beautiful, but it kept a stable framerate, which I didn't expect, and everything worked roughly as it should. If instead of Cyberpunk , CDPR made a Mad Max, we wouldn't have to write a separate review dedicated exclusively to the console edition of this game.
The spell broke as soon as I finished the prologue and got to Night City. My subsequent adventure with CP2077 on PS4 showed that the game runs well only in wastelands without any particular objects. In the big city, full of skyscrapers, winding alleys, ubiquitous neon ads, people and (at least in theory) cars, Cyberpunk shows true colors. And these are not the colors you want to paint your room in.
No traffic is among the greatest featurs of the game world on PS4.
So come, load the textures of my world
PS4 Cyberpunk 2077 could play the technical issues bingo and easily beat any game. Dipping framerate? Of course, sire – every goddamn time we sit behind the wheel of a car, the animation plummets, and if we move too fast, the things turns for a slide show to digital art exhibition. Complete freezing of the game? Why, of course! Not only does it require restarting the game: it often also resets your settings, so you have to reconfigure language, or graphical settings. By the way, settings like to reset even if you turn the game off the regular way.
Fonts that have nothing to do with legible? Of course, but this is also a glorious tradition brought from The Witcher 3. Non-intuitive interface, in which many elements are illegible and buttons are mapped so that certain actions interfere with each other? Well, if you've ever skipped a dialog by trying to exit crouch, you know just what I mean. An overwhelming amount of glitches? We have a whole chapter on them.
The highlight of the last-gen console version, however, are the problems with loading of textures and objects. This issue is familiar to users of hard-disk drives, but it's exacerbated here to stellar proportions. In these terms, CD Projekt RED sets a new standard with Cyberpunk 2077.
On the left, the location just after I entered it; on the right, the same place a few long seconds later.
After entering a crowded alleyway (wide streets have been preemptively cleared of crowds and almost all car traffic, so it happens less often there) we may be greeted by a handful of character models straight from the first 3D games, which only gain details after a few seconds. Walls, billboards, ads, and neons all take shape in front of our bare eyes. Looking in the mirror, you can first see the naked torso of your character, which is only complemented with clothes, limbs and head after a while.
By driving the car faster, we can admire practically the whole city changing as we traverse it, as if it were some kind of living, organic creature. The game sometimes also needs even a dozen or so seconds before it allows to change the camera after entering the car. Don't let Cthulhu try to read the message you received while driving – you will lose control of the vehicle for a good few seconds and it will move inertly ahead before the game is finally stopped and you see the communicator screen.
On the left, the location just after I entered it; on the right, the same place a few long seconds later.
You are a PC player, but would you like to feel the taste of the experience that CDPR has served to the owners of last-gen consoles? Play the game on a HDD. Cyberpunk 2077 will behave more or less like on a PS4 – the slow-disk mode available in the settings does not offer much respite.
