The release of Cyberpunk 2077 is already causing crashes on Steam. CD Projekt Red's newest open-world RPG has been a hot-ticket title for years now, and it's maintained a very large crowd of deeply enthusiastic gamers who've stuck with it through numerous delays. To reward these fans' endless patience, CD Projekt Red treated them to a dramatic new launch trailer centered on the story and journey of customizable protagonist V.
With the game release imminent, fans are more eager than ever to find out if the title truly lives up to the massive amounts of hype that it has generated over the years. There are plenty of reasons to doubt; stories abound of the crunch CD Projekt Red's developers were forced to undergo in order to crank the game out. Furthermore, a new controversy arose on the eve of the game's release concerning fans with epilepsy. Cyberpunk 2077, it seems, is rife with bright flashing lights that can trigger seizures in photosensitive gamers; one piece of machinery in the game even bears an eerie similarity to a piece of medical equipment used with the express purpose of triggering such episodes. CD Projekt Red has, to its credit, promised to investigate and, if possible, remove these offensive light features. But accidentally alienating an entire community of fans before launch like this is still not a good look.
However, it also isn't enough to quell the desperate excitement that's been building up for this game. And there's no better indication of how many people are eager to get their hands on Cyberpunk 2077 than the Steam landscape right now, as downloads become available online. Understandably, the sheer volume of fans rushing to dive into the dystopian world of Night City have caused a high volume of traffic that Steam isn't prepared to handle. Down Detector has recorded thousands of gamers complaining about a service outage on the digital storefront, peaking at 19218 reports at around 4 pm PT. In typical fashion, fans have taken to Twitter to vent their frustrations over this lapse in service, rallying around #steamdown to bemoan the overloaded servers.
This doesn't seem to be the only technical difficulty Cyberpunk 2077 is responsible for. By all accounts, Cyberpunk 2077 is full of bugs. This includes not only the minor visual glitches that are generally expected of a massive open world game, but major, game-breaking issues, like freezes, crashes, and forced restarts that can eat up hours of progress. CDPR has already promised a day one patch that will fix most if not all of these issues, but given how many delays the game suffered, and how much onerous crunch the developers were placed under throughout the lengthy development time, a final product this glitchy is cause for concern.
Still, reviews that have come in for Cyberpunk 2077 are largely positive. The consensus seems to be that while it doesn't do much to revolutionize the RPG genre, it's still a solid title, and one that's worth the wait. Hopefully Steam will eventually get its server issues worked out and fans can finally dive into the new game and learn for themselves if they agree with the critics about Cyberpunk 2077.
Source: Down Detector, Twitter, Austin Smith, xXxArcadoxXx