Cyberpunk 2077's launch was surprising but not in the way many would have expected. While it did surpass the company's sales expectations, there are some areas where Cyberpunk 2077 didn't meet fans' expectations. While CDPR, as a company, has certainly come a long way since The Witcher 3 was released, there are a lot of issues to be acknowledged from the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.

The Witcher 3 is considered one of the most critically acclaimed titles of the PS4 and Xbox One generation. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 owes a lot to The Witcher 3 for its commercial success, as it's because of the latter, CDPR garnished such widespread attention, and ultimately became one of the most valuable game companies in Europe. However, with such unprecedented popularity came an abundance of hype and expectation, and while CDPR delivered in some aspects, it faltered in others. A more direct comparison between the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3 reveals where CDPR did right and where it did wrong with these gaming juggernauts.

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A week before the release of The Witcher 3, CDPR revealed that the game had received over 1 million pre-orders. The numbers were massive for a game having a development budget of US$ 81 million and an in-house team of 15o employees, which were bumped to 250 in the next three and a half years. Cyberpunk 2077 pre-orders numbers, on the other hand, were unrivaled with a whopping 8 million preorders. While the pre-orders for the CDPR's latest were 8 times than its previous major release, it's also important to note that the company grew significantly in that time period. About 500 people worked in-house on Cyberpunk 2077, which is double the number of people that worked on The Witcher 3.

While the pre-orders are indicative of the hype surrounding a title, it's also important to analyze how consistent the sales remain after a game's launch. Two weeks after its' release, The Witcher 3 had sold over four million copies, whereas Cyberpunk 2077 sold more than 13 million copies in that same time period. While GOG is the lead platform of choice when it comes to buying CDPR games, the company's titles have also broken sales records over at Steam.  Steam's bestseller list of 2015 revealed that The Witcher 3 was the third best selling game of the year on the platform, surpassed only by Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and Fallout 4. Cyberpunk 2077, coincidentally, also racks up at 3rd, surpassed only by Counter Strike Global Offensive and Among Us, however, it's important to note that Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December and had only twenty days to make it at the top.

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The Witcher 3 served as a genre-defining next-gen RPG that took the gaming community by storm. Where RPG giants such as BioWare and Bethesda moved beyond the RPG genre to make games more accessible, CDPR stayed true to its root and produced a massive open-world filled with mature characters and branching stories. The Witcher 3 reviews suggested that it is "one of the best, if not the best role-playing games of all time." The game surpassed expectations and went on to become the most awarded video game of all time, a record which was recently broken by 2020' s The Last Of Us 2. The PC version of The Witcher 3 has a Metacritic score of 93/100, making it one of the highest-rated games of the last generation.

The success of The Witcher 3 made CDPR a blockbuster studio from a niche one. Due to this, the expectations from Cyberpunk 2077 were insanely high, something that is clearly reflected by the game's pre-order numbers. Cyberpunk 2077 reviews suggested that it's a great RPG, overshadowed only by a multitude of performance-related issues. Overall, the game got mostly positive reviews for its PC version. The Metacritic score of the same is 85/100. However, the console version of the game suffered immeasurably and have a Metacritic score of 56/100 on the PS4. It's also important to note that the digital version of Cyberpunk 2077 was pulled off from the PlayStation Store days after its release. Additionally, Sony offered refunds for players who bought the digital version of the game. While the Xbox version of the game has not been pulled off, players can get a refund if they want.

Bearing the weights of massive open-worlds and complex level designs, both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077's performance on consoles and PC wasn't up to the mark. While the PC version of these titles performed relatively better, the console versions felt like a missed opportunity, at least at launch. The Witcher 3 had glaring issues on the PS4 and Xbox One. In densely crowded streets of Novigrad and the swamps of Velen, the FPS dropped down to the '20s, if not less at times. On Xbox One, the uncapped FPS didn't help either, making it for an uneven experience. Moreover, the game's dynamic resolution flustered between 900p to 1080p resolution. If that wasn't enough, exploit glitches, alongside a plethora of quests-related bugs and texture pops-in also made it to the game's launch. The Witcher 3 did, however, get a 400 MB day one patch that fixed some of its issues including boat behavior.

Cyberpunk 2077's performance, on the other hand, was troubling to a far more extent. On PS4 and Xbox One, the game rarely maintained a 30 FPS and often dropped down to '20s in narrow alleyway shootouts. On the base Xbox One, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at 810p, which dipped to 720p during combat and driving. Cyberpunk 2077 had a wide array of game-breaking bugs as well that made it impossible to progress and as a result, unlock certain achievements and trophies. While most of them were in regards to the side gigs, some even persisted in the main missions. Cyberpunk 2077 launched with a day zero patch that was included in the digital launch. Since then, CDPR has launched three hotfixes and patch 1.1.

Its clearly evident that both The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 launch were similar in one major aspect, the game's performance, while it differentiated vastly in other areas such as reviews and sales. While it's too early to predict whether CDPR's next big AAA release will have similar issues, it's safe to assume that the company would be more cautious about optimizing its game on all the platforms before release.

Cyberpunk 2077 is now available on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with a free PS5 and Xbox Series X/S upgrade coming in 2021.

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