As someone who played Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time only after it got its big 2.0 overhaul, I feel confident saying that it’s one of my favourite RPGs of the last decade. A veritable banger that I almost immediately picked up again—this time to 100% the game with a Netrunner build—as soon as I finished it the first time.
Wasn’t always the case though, was it? Around four years ago, Cyberpunk was in the middle of its historically bad launch, one that saw it banished entirely from the PlayStation store amid wave after wave of bug reports. You think Bethesda games are messy on day one? Cyberpunk 2077 screeched onto digital distribution platforms in a million different pieces and they were all on fire.
But it could have been worse, if you can imagine it. In a big breakdown of CDPR’s comeback after the game’s disastrous launch over on Eurogamer, Cyberpunk’s lead engine programmer Charles Tremblay broke down just why the game was so legendarily buggy back then. It was a mix of factors, as you’d expect, first among which was the fact that old-fashioned spinning hard drives just weren’t up to the kind of streaming the game required. But also? Sometimes you could either bug out or crash the game completely, and the devs preferred option one.
Cyberpunk suffered from memory leaks, says Tremblay. “In theory, the game could run infinitely, and at some point we’d get some fragmentation issues or memory problems.” Once you hit that point—not difficult on the 8GB of RAM in the PS4/Xbox One era of consoles in particular—you run out of space to handle anything else. “And then you have a choice,” says Tremblay, “either you show a T-pose, or you hard crash. What do you prefer? We prefer not to hard crash.”
I, also, am brave enough to admit that I prefer not to hard crash. T-posing is either immersion-breaking or funny—sometimes a bit of both—while sacrificing progress to a crash is completely defeating. No wonder the devs made the choices they did: Letting the game freak out rather than smash hard into the wall of not having any RAM left.
Other devs on other games, doubtless, make the same kind of choice all the time, and this won’t be news to them. But to laymen like you and me, it feels like a fascinating insight into the countless weird trade-offs that have to happen in development, particularly in games as huge and unwieldy as Cyberpunk, with “lots of complexity, lots of interconnected systems,” per Tremblay. Put that thing in the hands of countless players and, well, it gets weird. “You have all those permutations of conditions, you multiply by one million people, then you have just one weird bug—you’re like, ‘Oh my god’.” Or, you know, you have the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.