Cyberpunk 2077 Bugs: The Biggest Performance Issues So Far

Cyberpunk 2077‘s early reviews suggest that the most anticipated game of 2020 is quite good. Yet, there is a worrying takeaway from those initial impressions, too. The game appears to be very buggy.

While we anticipated that Cyberpunk 2077 would ship with plenty of bugs, which honestly wasn’t all that difficult to predict given the game’s turbulent year, those who have played the full version of Cyberpunk 2077 have confirmed that the game isn’t just burdened by the usual array of open-world performance issues but a truly worrisome collection of game-breaking glitches that could severely impact the title’s launch.

Based on the early Cyberpunk 2077 reviews and other impressions of the full game, here are some of the more notable Cyberpunk 2077 bugs you need to know:

Cyberpunk 2077’s Visual Bugs

It probably won’t come as a surprise that the vast majority of reported Cyberpunk 2077 bugs are what you could typically classify as “visual bugs.” That is to say that they’re the kinds of bugs that result in some kind of unintended visual effect. Here are just some of the more notable visual bugs that have been reported in Cyberpunk 2077 so far:

• Some items will simply not show up when you’re looking at your character screen.
• Pieces of clothing and other equipment will randomly disappear from NPCs.
• Lootable items will randomly float in the air from time to time. It seems you’re still able to loot those items most of the time, but some players have reported that these bugs make them inaccessible.
• Your character screen will show that certain items have “zero” stats. Initial reports indicate that this seems to be just a visual bug as the performance of those items doesn’t appear to be affected.
• Characters often break their animation cycles and randomly strike “T” poses.
• NPCs will clip through random objects. This appears to be especially common in cutscenes, but there are reports of it happening during open-world gameplay segments, too.
• Specific NPCs are repeated throughout the world. While you’d almost expect some basic character models to appear in different parts of the city, it sounds like very specific character models seemingly designed for one location will sometimes be repeated.
• Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have quite a few audiovisual bugs that seem to boil down to the wrong objects producing the wrong audio cues. For instance, it sounds like there are times when a character running away will trigger the sound of a screeching car.
• Various additional animation bugs see characters protrude from cars, turn around randomly, or generally behave erratically.

We could certainly go on, but the general idea is that Cyberpunk 2077 is loaded with those Skyrim-esque visual bugs that often lead to hilarious moments rather than game-breaking occurrences.

However, many reviewers have pointed out that these bugs are frequent enough to break the “immersion” of Cyberpunk 2077. Given how much of the game’s appeal is tied to being able to dive into the world of Night City, the prevalence of these bugs could certainly make them more impactful than they necessarily would be in other games.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Performance Bugs

We know that Cyberpunk 2077 suffers from a variety of visual bugs but how many of the game’s glitches affect the title’s performance?

That’s an interesting question which honestly hasn’t been satisfyingly answered based on the information that’s currently available. Many reviewers noted that they were playing the game on high-end PCs with GPUs capable of producing ray-tracing effects. While the PC Gamer reviewer noted that enabling ray tracing and other high-end effects did result in frame rate drops, it doesn’t sound like the game is an optimization nightmare along the lines of the early PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight. However, it’ll be interesting to see whether or not PC users who end up playing the game on lower-end systems report significant performance issues.

The bigger question at the moment is how Cyberpunk 2077 will run on consoles. All of the Cyberpunk 2077 reviews so far reflect the PC version of the game, and we haven’t heard a detailed report from anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with any of the console versions.

This is why the expectation at this time is that the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077 will underperform at launch. Some fans are worried that the PS4/Xbox One editions of Cyberpunk 2077 could be especially rough if not nearly unplayable. CD Projekt Red has said that an early console patch has fixed most of the early notable performance problems on those platforms, but serious questions remain about the game’s console launch.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Cutscene Bugs

While Cyberpunk 2077‘s cutscene bugs would typically be considered visual glitches, early reports indicate that they’re prominent enough to be worthy of their own category. Here’s a sampling of the most notable reported cutscene bugs so far:

• NPCs play out multiple conversations at once. This can actually result in gameplay issues, but it seems that most of these moments just caused multiple audio tracks to play over each other.
• There were multiple reports of V’s voice changing randomly during cutscene sequences. As you might imagine, it’s both annoying and genuinely confusing to hear a random voice change from an unseen character during a cutscene.
• The game’s advanced lip-synching technology will sometimes completely fail during story sequences. Reports of these occurrences seem to be rare, but these moments do tend to be pretty dramatic when they do happen.
• Multiple outlets have reported problems with the game’s final cutscene. While they obviously couldn’t dive into details, it sounds like there may be a problem with the scripting of the game’s final sequence that can be escalated by the appearance of multiple other bugs.

Based on what we’ve heard so far, it sounds like the problems with Cyberpunk 2077‘s cutscenes are specific and prevalent enough to likely merit some kind of targeted fix in the near future. While there may be too many general bugs for CD Project Red to address all at once, these cutscene bugs will likely be at the top of the list given their prevalence.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Game Breaking Bugs

The most disappointing of Cyberpunk 2077‘s early bugs are the glitches which several reviewers noted broke the game in some way:

• Enemies can sometimes see you through walls during stealth sequences.
• Invisible walls seemingly prevent you from being able to access necessary areas.
• Certain doors won’t open when they should. This problem seems to be especially common during “scripted” gameplay sequences and key missions.
• Certain objects can’t be climbed, even when they’re necessary for progression.
• Players can get trapped in the world at random points.
• Killing certain characters will result in a delay that allows them to trigger alarms or other nearby enemies.
• NPCs will sometimes spawn in places that prevent you from being able to complete missions.
• A couple of reviewers noted that bosses, including one of the final ones, would freeze in the middle of a fight. While it was sometimes possible to simply defeat them without any resistance, this can force you to restart the game.
• Some quests will never start properly.
• It’s apparently possible to trigger an invulnerability bug after death that makes your character invincible. Sadly, it’s apparently not possible to progress through the game at that point as you’re considered to be dead.
• Incorrect dialogue choices will occasionally appear which can either hinder progress or otherwise make it impossible to build your character a certain way.

Any one of these bugs would be worrisome in their own right, but what’s really troubling is that many (we would say “most”) reviewers noted that they had to restart their game at some point due to some kind of bug. While we haven’t heard any stories of a bug so bad that it required the player to start over from scratch, it’s disheartening that these issues are as common as they seem to be.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Day One Patch

At this point, you may be wondering whether or not all of these problems will be addressed in Cyberpunk 2077‘s day one patch. The answer to that question is frustratingly vague.

While PC Gamer noted that they received a “Day 0” patch that CD Projekt Red says is the “Day One” patch with just a few missing fixes, other outlets seem to have not received that patch — or otherwise did not specify that they were playing the game with that patch installed. Furthermore, CD Projekt Red has still not detailed what’s in the Day One patch beyond general performance improvements. To make matters even more frustrating, it’s been reported that review copies of Cyberpunk 2077 were sent out with some level of DRM protection enabled that will not be enabled in the retail edition of the game. Many DRM systems can cause performance problems, so it’s entirely possible those safeguards resulted in additional issues.

Once again, the biggest unanswered questions involve the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt Red informed IGN that the Cyberpunk 2077′s Day One console patch makes it a “different game,” but we haven’t heard any reports of anyone playing the game with that patch installed and CD Projekt Red has not detailed the fixes it contains.

Generally speaking, it sounds like those who play Cyberpunk 2077 on PC when it is released will experience a more optimized version of the game than the one most reviewers had access to. However, it’s highly unlikely that even the majority of the game’s reported bugs will be addressed in that patch. Furthermore, we still have no idea what shape the console versions of the game will ship in.

More on Cyberpunk 2077 as we learn it!