It was inevitable. Cyberpunk 2077 had simply existed in the hype cycle for too long. When it finally arrived in early December, after numerous delays, controversies, sizzle reels, and previews, it felt as if a shrieking, collective mania was doomed to subsume the culture. All of this energy, finally exhausted, in one white-hot moment. Few studios enjoy CD Projekt Red's dual pedigree; both an indie messiah and a gargantuan triple-A moneymaker, and when the company announced they'd be leaving The Witcher behind for a sojourn in Mike Pondsmith's glossy, gutter-tech Cyberpunk universe back in 2012, it already seemed like the hype was boiling to a dangerous smoke point. Naturally, by the end of 2020, Cyberpunk taught the rest of the gaming industry a valuable lesson; if your product stumbles out of the gate after years and years of marketing hype, your community will let you know. And in Cyberpunk’s case, this was nowhere more evident than in its subreddit.
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You know the story. Cyberpunk 2077 launched to an ovation of positive reviews for the PC version, with caveats. Critics noted a litany of bugs and hiccups, and also, forebodingly, confirmed that they did not receive codes for either the PS4 or Xbox One. Given how rickety Cyberpunk was on high-powered PCs, that seemed like a particularly bad omen. The base consoles are significantly less powerful than what's possible on a modern desktop, so how would they hold up under Night City's glowing skylines? Not well, as it turned out. At the stroke of midnight on December 10, 2020, Twitter slowly began billowing with damning evidence of Cyberpunk's cut-corners and technical shortcomings on its console versions. AI was proven fragile, mercurial, and easily broken. Car models were falling out of the sky. Some players said that they were lucky to achieve 720p on their pricey LCD screens, and that often, the framerate nosedived to about 20 frames per second. As much as Twitter felt explosive, the excoriation was most brutal on its own subreddit. Once a place saturated with buoyant, carefree Cyberpunk hype, the discourse now flared with increasingly dire accusations toward the publisher. "This game is unfinished and a total disaster!" wrote one user, who earned 34,000 upvotes. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but this game needs another year of development time," chimed in another, for 33,000 more. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Once%20a%20place%20saturated%20with%20buoyant%2C%20carefree%20Cyberpunk%20hype%2C%20the%20discourse%20now%20flared%20with%20increasingly%20dire%20accusations%20toward%20the%20publisher."] It's hard to overemphasize just how quickly the tone on the forum shifted. Cellymdewitt, the user who posted that aforementioned "unfinished and a total disaster!" thread, tells me that, for the most part, the r/Cyberpunk community spent its time in the prerelease cycle lusting over the scintillating map of Night City, or generating their own adoring Johnny Silverhand memes. Nobody saw the coming revolt. "I guess people were mostly excited and were trusting CD Projekt Red," says Cellymdewitt. "I know that the gaming community can be overly excited about things and weirdly toxic, so I tried to keep my expectations [in check.] But I was still waiting for something really good." Once Cellymdewitt saw how poorly his copy of Cyberpunk ran on base consoles, he decided to cut bait and delete the game from his hard drive. Next year, he might give it another shot, after a few more of the glitches are ironed out. This isn't a particularly novel saga. Countless other games have found the same fate throughout history. Think of No Man's Sky, or Fallout 76, or for the real oldheads out there, Daikatana. But something about this debacle was more fraught than usual. If a family member otherwise unplugged from the gaming news cycle mentioned it to you, that’s because it made mainstream news. The hype for this particular Cyberpunk escaped the orbit of gaming itself. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/cyberpunk-2077-the-funniest-glitches-and-bugs-weve-seen-so-far"] The dust has settled a bit since those chaotic days — the Cyberpunk drama has ceded the spotlight to far more pressing concerns in the world — and I was curious to regroup with some of the people who lived through every twist and turn in the narrative. I reached out to the moderators of r/Cyberpunk; the people responsible for keeping the discussions civil, even when the community is on the brink of mutiny. I spoke to a user who goes by Dani, who forwarded my questions along to the rest of the mod panel. Dani edited their answers together in order to offer a holistic voice of their experiences. According to them, the team brought on five additional members in the weeks before Cyberpunk's release, as the total number of subscribers swelled from 500,000 to 800,000. Each of them believed that the biggest issues they'd face as the game hit entered the ecosystem would be the usual mob of bad actors eager to ruin the fun for everyone else by posting early spoilers. "We expected a lot of malicious users posting spoilers intentionally, but we realized a few weeks after launch that that would become the least of our worries," says Dani, later adding, "We expected a forest fire, and we got a meteor strike." Initially, says Dani, as the reviews hit the internet and it became clear that Cyberpunk was hamstrung by some vintage, Skyrim-style open-world jank, a number of users put their faith in the promise of the Day One Patch — a classic bit of gamedev chicanery aimed to squash a few lingering bugs that the studio couldn't attend to before the discs hit production. In fact, the majority of the community stayed entirely optimistic about CD Projekt Red's ultimate intentions."When CDPR blocked the release of gameplay footage, we had assumed that was to prevent spoilers. We were strict on that, classifying any footage outside of CDPR released as leaks, and were removed," adds Dani. Of course, bedlam broke loose as soon as the game made it out into the wild.