Whether we like or dislike a game doesn’t matter in the eyes of people who like to pretend to believe we’re a bunch of shills.īut I digress - even if you entertain some self-righteous idea that the media is corrupt and refuse to believe in our ethics, you must be at least clever enough to understand that nobody would sacrifice their potentially lifelong career for a quick buck. I had people lose the plot at me because I liked The Last of Us Part 2 - and I didn’t even review that game. Conversely, plenty of critics - myself included - will receive an onslaught of frankly disgusting messages if we criticize (the obvious verb for the job of a critic, by the way) a game that someone likes. I’ve recently seen a lot of Reddit posts like this one that imply journalists have become a marketing arm of a developer because they complimented a game. I feel like all of this should be common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. We’re often not playing the same build that goes out on launch day - we’re playing a content-complete version of the game with small glitches that nobody else will experience. I thought, “this is the kind of stuff a day one patch is designed to fix.” Critics often encounter bugs in games that we are told about in advance - if this level shits itself and crashes, don’t worry, the day one patch rectifies it.
When critics put out scores for Cyberpunk 2077, which mostly ranged from 7/10 to 10/10, we weren’t grappling with the broken version of the game. I have often been urged to play on PC by PR and can think of several occasions where “console code is coming at a later date” indirectly translated to “you’ll only have enough time to finish the game if you play it on PC.” So if you want to write an exhaustive review based on an entire game, you’ll probably be seeing what it looks like when it’s run through a powerful GPU.
I personally thought that, because PC is traditionally smoother than consoles - especially last-gen ones - CDPR wanted reviewers to play the best version of its game, which is not unusual in the slightest. We were told that code for consoles would come at a later date, but were not informed about why that was the case. When we received code for preliminary coverage of the game - which obviously included a review - we were only given the PC version of Cyberpunk. I’m going to do my best to be as transparent as possible about what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. That is not how this works, and you need to acknowledge that. But - and I mean this from the bottom of my heart - you are simply wrong if you think that anyone has been paid to write either good or bad things about a video game. People have been accusing critics of being paid off for years, so it’s no small wonder that a certain brigade of idiots are up in arms about the media’s treatment of Cyberpunk 2077.
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