The hype for this particular Cyberpunk escaped the orbit of gaming itself. If a family member otherwise unplugged from the gaming news cycle mentioned it to you, that’s because it made mainstream news. But something about this debacle was more fraught than usual. Think of No Man's Sky, or Fallout 76, or for the real oldheads out there, Daikatana. Countless other games have found the same fate throughout history. Next year, he might give it another shot, after a few more of the glitches are ironed out. "I know that the gaming community can be overly excited about things and weirdly toxic, so I tried to keep my expectations 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. "I guess people were mostly excited and were trusting CD Projekt Red," says Cellymdewitt. 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. “It's hard to overemphasize just how quickly the tone on the forum shifted. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but this game needs another year of development time," chimed in another, for 33,000 more. "This game is unfinished and a total disaster!" wrote one user, who earned 34,000 upvotes. Once a place saturated with buoyant, carefree Cyberpunk hype, the discourse now flared with increasingly dire accusations toward the publisher. As much as Twitter felt explosive, the excoriation was most brutal on its own subreddit. 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. AI was proven fragile, mercurial, and easily broken. 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. 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. Given how rickety Cyberpunk was on high-powered PCs, that seemed like a particularly bad omen. 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. Cyberpunk 2077 launched to an ovation of positive reviews for the PC version, with caveats.