Not content with safety pushing their game out of the Corona danger zone before any of the panic began, nor with securing the populist vote for most anticipated title of the year, or even having a practical shoe in for the 'ultimate game of the year 2020' award; it seems that CD Projekt Red are trying their darnedest to steal headlines once again. "So what grand stunt earned the attention of the presses once again?" I hear you ask. "Did they suddenly speed up the release window of Cyberpunk, much to the shock of the gaming world?" Alas, I can only wish for such luck. No, instead their gift was primarily to the game reviewers world, although in truth the whole thing feels more like a powerplay to show off how unwaveringly confident they are in the strength of their title.
By that I am of course referring to CDPR's decision to debut Cyberpunk 2077 early for the gaming press, if not for the public. How early are we talking? Weeks, perhaps even- no probably just weeks. But is this the huge upset to the game marketing world like folk are saying it is, or just an overbloated cynical vanity project to strut their stuff in front of the gaming public? Both, of course. Historically in other forms of media, such as movies, the length of time that the studio will allow reviews to be released before the movie drops is usually a good indicator of how decent they think their product is. If reviews are dropping months beforehand then that likely means the studio think they're sitting on the second coming of Jengus Christler, whilst if they are held until the very second of release then it just raises the honest question "Well, what are they hiding?" Somehow this is a model that isn't typically used to discuss the quality of gaming, and there's a thousand possibilities as to why that could be but I'm not sure which is true. With this grand gesture for Cyberpunk, however, they could end up starting a trend.
Of course, there is the truth that more-and-more each year the wants and whims of game reviewers are slowly drifting away from the spectrum of influence as traditional media finds themselves supplanted by new media. (Do we still call influences 'New Media'? I mean they've been established for over a decade at this point.) I think the concept of 'subjectivity' has dawned on populace to such a degree where for the first time in forever knowledge and experience with the genre is being taken into account, which is a weird concept to consider until you realise that this is probably the way that things should have always been. Do you want someone who plays Sports games all day to tell you the ins and outs about how great the latest 4X game is? Of course not. They'll have no clue how to explain if the endgame falls into the same repetitive loop that all of those games do. (Seriously, are there any 4X titles with a more active endgame? Even Stellaris makes you wait a good 200 years in limbo before throwing their endgame up in your face.)
That being said, reviewers scores and aggregates aren't entirely redundant yet, as some might claim, even if they are headed that way. There are still some of the populace who aren't heavy into every aspect of the gaming world that they like and don't heavily research each title before spending their money, (Like they really should) and so they use game score to get an idea of what to expect. There's also the fact that some publishers and investors put heavy stock into review scores and use them to predict the relative health of a brand and it's chances to succeed in the near future. We all remember the story about how 'Fallout: New Vegas' missed out on it's target aggregate score by 0.1 or something minuscule and thus Obsidian did not receive their promised bonus from Bethesda, despite the undeniable fact that 'Fallout: New Vegas' is easily the greatest Fallout game ever made. (Honestly, that is pretty artistically criminal.)
Speaking of Bethesda, they are an interesting company to bring up when talking about the relationship between publisher and reviewer, seeing as how they seem to have a polar opposite approach to CDPR. Following the launch of Fallout 4, Bethesda started to air their grievances with the journalist world and built up a bit of a beef, culminating in the lead-up to Fallout 76 wherein they straight-up refused to allow reviewer copies to hit the world. Now we know this was partially due to the fact that the game was a non-functioning mess, but they claimed that this would be their policy going forward and that has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. 'Wolfenstein: New Blood' was similarly a huge mess that was essentially dropped upon the public, and I may be wrong about this but I think the first title since 76 to actually do the reviewer circuit was Doom Eternal, and that's only because Eternal seems to be tracking pretty well with critics so far. (That's pretty manipulative if you ask me.)But at the end of the day the question should be poised, are the weeks of extra access going to mean anything significant for Cyberpunk 2077? Well, it'll mean that some of the more elaborate reviews might have a better chance of releasing on time, but aside from that I do wonder. Reviewers are well-practised in speeding through games at this point, and thanks to the healthy 'guidline' that publishers provide, it's not as though they'll miss some huge story beats without the extra working time. Perhaps this move serves as an indication that there is some significant replay value to the title that CDPR don't want reviewers to miss out in their impressions, as that is an aspect which the team have been fairly quiet on up until now. But I'm just speculating at this point, and the truth behind such a decision might be fairly more pedestrian.
If you cast your mind back to 'Assassin's Creed Odyssey', there was an interesting conversation that had been brewed between if a game should be punished for being unfriendly to reviewers, and this has been brewing for a long time. Along the 'game reviewer' world there is a perception that 'long games = bad' because 'no one has the time to go through all of this. They need to finish the title succinctly and move onto the next one', which when you think about it is actually a very personal problem for that line of work, as the typical person doesn't really need to finish 4 games every month to stay in business. In 'Odyssey' this gripe was whittled down to one with the concept of 'grind' and how much is acceptable for anygame to have, which caused quite the hub-bub between ordinary players and reviewers. (A discussion only slightly muddied by Ubisoft's prehistoric microtransaction sense.) As it turns out, quite a lot of people like significant amounts of grind in their games, whilst almost every reviewer seems less than fond.
I suspect that as Cyberpunk 2077 is styling itself as a traditional/ new-wave RPG hybrid which demands time to be paid to it, the team want to avoid the potential backlash of transient reviewers lacking in a little empathy for their reader base. By ensuring that reviewers have more than enough time with the game, they can hopefully avoid any unnecessarily head butting that may detract from the success of the game and ensure that as much praise as humanely possible is facilitated. At least that's my cold read, and personally I think it's pretty solid. At the end of the day, I think this is a positive change to the status quo of game reviewing and I hope it does catch on as a trend, because it may work to alleviate some of the nagging concerns that some people have in the weeks before a game. Plus it means we'll all see the next Fallout 76 coming from a mile away, and that's good in anyone's book.
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