Let’s not get chumped—Cyberpunk 2077 has become something beyond a video game. It’s a digital persona, a joke, and for many PC gamers, an extended tech experiment with an emotional investment. Since its disastrous launch set the internet ablaze, it’s had the reputation of a gorgeous mess—a game of breathtaking ambition perpetually fighting a losing battle against its code.
For PC players, simply putting Cyberpunk on can be as tricky as an extra game task. It’s not just about a strong PC. Take Mara, who has an RTX 4070 Ti. She told her tough story online. Even with her great PC, the game kept failing.
Her fix? She turned off ray tracing, stopped using path tracing, cut down her mod list, and kept a few old Nvidia DLL files—just in case. She liked mods like Nova City and GITS? Gone. Playing well in Night City means giving up some good looks.
The game being unstable goes beyond mods or picture settings. For instance, Patch 1.62 came out with new bugs—glitches that would pop up once you left the map or issues tied to certain GPUs. Some thought that stopping cross-platform saves or changing shadow settings would help, while some started over and set up Windows again.
Even putting the game on clean doesn’t make things right. And sometimes, the only fix is to go back to an old version and sadly admit that your PC set-up might be jinxed.
It’s crazy how gamers have come up to meet this test. Websites have DIY guides for newbies on how to handle crashes. Back this up. Skip that. And don’t use path tracing if you want your GPU to last. Other gamers even say that how you read in-game items or go to tasks can change if bugs show up or not. It’s like the game fights back as you try to beat it.
Even though this might seem silly, it’s tiring too. CD Projekt Red’s fixes are unsure—some help, some make things worse. A fix might up your FPS, but the next one could mess up your game tasks or ruin cross-save help.
With each update, players wait, hoping for good news or bracing for the bad, never really knowing what will happen.
Litigation firms, such as Rosen Law Firm, didn’t hesitate to speak out, referring to the company’s comments as “materially false.” Stocks plummeted. Gamers were incensed. PR professionals cited CDPR’s glacial response as an example of how not to handle a crisis, a textbook case, and yet, folks keep coming back to Night City.
The people, the world they live in, the strong way of telling a story—when it works, it works. One fan put it well: “It’s not perfect. But when it works, there’s nothing like it.”
Years on from its tough start, Cyberpunk 2077 is still a wild ride in game mess, gamer issues, and the big hunt for cool stuff. It shows that oftentimes, the games that get a lot of talk are not the easy ones— they’re the bold (or busted) ones that keep us playing to the end.