Michael*

For sure, the Twitter feed in particular seemed to spend a very long time playing to the lowest common denominator. I've heard that the content of the story is actually far more introspective, but it was pretty clear what CDPR wanted its fans to think the game would be, and I always feel that can come back to bite you. When you're equipped with such a uniquely cult-like following, you cross them at your peril.

Oof. That whole self-consciously edgy style of marketing has always been an instant eye-roller for me, what's weird though is that I don't even think it's worked all that well. Much has been made of how effective it was in targeting a certain type of gamer, but it also appears to have degraded the expectation that a lot of people would have had about Cyberpunk being a sophisticated prestige product, like Witcher 3.

Yeah, it sounds very much like less could've been more. Developers keep trying to release bigger and bigger games, but a lack of detail in a large world can all-too quickly become a detriment. For what it's worth, I'm hoping for the best on next-gen systems. As strange as it feels to speculate on what it could end up being (CDPR could just as easily decide to pull the plug altogether), this is still a game of immense potential.

I must confess, most cosplay these days is a little too slick for my liking. I much preferred when it was low-budget and a bit ramshackle.

Exactly, this thing has already sold millions of copies. Given that it's now been delisted from PlayStation Store, presumably as a partial consequence of CDPR basically telling people to go and ask Sony for a refund, my gut feeling is that we'll probably see the base console versions written off completely. Perhaps not immediately, but certainly at some point in the near future. You'd like to think all the negative press would put other developers off releasing games in this kind of unfinished state, but if I know gamers, they'll probably do an about face when a trailer for Witcher 4 arrives.

You always had that feeling that someone would sound the Big Sam alarm at some stage of the season, and having already tried Pulis and Pards in the last five years, one could never accuse West Brom of not knowing their place in the footballing world. Just seems like the right club at the right time.

Anthem was probably doomed to fail anyway to a certain degree, I always got the impression that it was made as a cash grab to follow in Destiny's footsteps, but EA/Bioware didn't seem to notice that Destiny 2 had already seen a decline in popularity. That being said, I hope they're keeping their promise of doing a proper reboot, if just for the curiosity factor of seeing how many players would return to it. I'm sure CDPR will iron out at least some of the performance issues and other surface-level problems too in the coming months. I know with Witcher 3, we saw significant improvements to things like Novigrad and the now-infamous Crookback Bog getting better as various patches were rolled out. To be frank though, I'm not too hopeful of ending up with an acceptable base console port of Cyberpunk. The distance between where it is now and where it would need to be implies a radical overhaul, which may be an impossible task.

I thought I'd seen every worst-case scenario season imaginable, but Schalke's epic 28-game winless run is something else. That might be the point where even I'd start looking at alternative weird obsessions.

I think the moral of the story is, once again, that there's no point in pre-ordering games. Pre-orders were originally meant to ensure supply when physical stock was expected to be limited, now they're basically a commercial down-payment designed to secure or predict revenue on day one. Players have no idea what they're going to get and the poor souls who bought this on base consoles effectively ended up spending their money to become unpaid beta testers. It would certainly appear too, that the game's problems extend beyond performance issues on base consoles. It's got a lot of engine jank, the city itself is close to non-interactive, and the balance between game progression and power-ups is rather inconsistent. It sounds like it's basically only saved by a fantastic main story.

I think there were always going to be questions asked after the CEO said two weeks before release that the game ran "surprisingly well" on PS4 and Xbox One. They must have had an inkling by that point that they were shipping a broken product and that those versions would be in no shape to sell. This isn't on the people at CDPR who only had artistic control of the game, of course. I can't imagine they would have wanted this thing released in its current state.

No doubt they'll have been looking at potential sales from the established user base, when the more reasonable thing would have been to just release on systems with hardware that can actually handle the game. I can't imagine this does anything other than kill console version sales stone dead. I dare say CDPR must be almost neck and neck with Elon Musk for failed launches at this point.

I expect they'll have sensed the backlash coming ahead of time, hence the very selective media they were feeding people pre-launch. Another cautionary tale, I suppose, on the risks of believing the hype of a game based on little more than game publication “previews” that were probably written on the strength of two hours of gameplay. Thinking back to the marketing and with the benefit of hindsight, there was very little to give the impression that Cyberpunk was developed with consoles in mind. The base-level versions are just too poorly optimised to suggest that they were making concessions for those systems at any point in its development. Again, to me, it's a next-gen PC game with consoles as a secondary consideration. Obviously I hope they can turn it around for the next-gen systems, but I'm far from optimistic about the current-gen ones.

To help cut down on reposts, duplicate threads, and just as a general resource for anyone who's found that content has gone missing, we'll be compiling a list of model delete requests in here so that members are somewhat in the loop with regard to what's been removed. This is the list as it stands, with more to be added as and when. Alan Carey Brandon Fox Buster Battreall Hyacinthe Geyer D’Orth Jakub Jujka

To help cut down on reposts, duplicate threads, and just as a general resource for anyone who's found that content has gone missing, we'll be compiling a list of model delete requests in here so that members are somewhat in the loop with regard to what's been removed. This is the list as it stands, with more to be added as and when. Amalie Lamarche Andreanne Robillard Anna Deverischeva Anouk Schouten Anthea Page Blaga Miteva Branka Savic Camille Gelix Celesta Hodge Celine Theron Aboud Dasha Dereviankina Diana Schalagan Elsie Hewitt Estefany Vallenilla Eva Smite Fedja Temim Francesca Farago Gillian Nation Hamidah/Hammi Brinkley Irina Illichova Iris Lie Jana Jung Janina Schiedlofsky Janna Palma Jenifer Nailer Jennifer Gomez Jill Verhaeghe Julia Frauenrath Justine Delcroix Karlijn Marit Coreline Lauren Bazergui Lidiia Timofeeva Lioudmila Nesterov Lizz Mohin Lolita Pinter Lotti Mrotzek Louise Greggory Lucie Plaumann Maddie Demaine Manon Castelli Manon Defever Marie Everth Mariya Vinogradova Marjorie Lévesque Martyna Smulkyte Mary Rose Stickley Meredith Hennessy Michelle Schlaman Mojca Gert Nadezhda Ruf Nadine Brantschen Nanna Breinbjerg/Nanna B Olga Radashevskaya Paula Beckman Pauline Houssinot Presley Elise Rimma Happy Ryli Smith Sabrina Verkest Sindy Bruna Sofia Kondra Sophie Lempers Souhela Ferrah Una Vidakovic Valerie Antonieta Vanja Matic Vera van Kuijck Weronika Pila Zaga Skerletovic

There's a staff list that allows us to keep track of what's been removed and why, but to the best of my knowledge it's not visible anywhere else on the forum. I do think a pinned public thread to detail them would be a good shout, though.

The idea of a GTA/Deus Ex hybrid still sounds great to me, but I do wonder if the game has become so huge and expectations have grown so much, it simply can't be what everyone wants. It's certainly arrived at a strange time, though. Play on current gen, you get a game that struggles to perform. Play on next-gen, you basically get a playable current gen game with few discernable upgrades.

I guess given the game's protracted gestation period, and presumably having had far more development time for last-gen hardware when it's really a next-gen game, it was probably always likely to end up occupying a slightly weird territory. Somewhere along the line though, CDPR made a mistake, either in failing to establish a reasonable target platform, or realising too late in the day that they'd underestimated the task of retrofitting the results into base consoles. Ultimately, I think they should have been selling it as "early access" because that's almost always what these things end up being.

This one was kinda fine, but it felt like a bit of a waste to have such a disposable episode at this point in the season. They could have built some real momentum for the finale by super-sizing the Mando-Gideon confrontation instead. Surprisingly good character work for Mayfeld though and the Imperial showdown was tense and well done.

Hopefully we'll see a bit of consistency in the episode running times. I know for me that's been the most off-putting thing about The Mandalorian, although I wouldn't have been so put out if the season had dropped all at once.

I've taken most of what we've seen up to now as confirmation that the best time to play a CDPR game is probably about three months after it initially drops. Witcher 3 wasn't at its best until a catalogue of problems had been ironed out. Overall, what counts for me is the first impression that a game gives me. That's much more important than playing on a specific date and nothing ruins that first impression more than a feeling of things still being under construction. It's like arriving at a five star hotel and discovering that the builders are still decorating your room.

Yeah, this will almost certainly be something that players just end up having to like or lump. Enemy AI has seen very little innovation for at least a couple of decades at this point, whenever I play something old from the same genre it's mildly shocking to note how little some things have progressed.

It occurs to me now that I haven't really seen any info on whether episodes will be released weekly or if seasons are going to drop all at once. If it's the former, the finale of WandaVision should more or less coincide with the debut of Falcon and Winter Soldier. If it's the latter, then the release schedule could start to feel a bit inconsistent.