So Christmas happened, I ate too much of my mother-in-law's trifle, and I spent most of the dead week between the 25th and now trying to get a refund out of Sony for a game I already put eleven hours into. That game is Cyberpunk 2077, and if you've somehow missed this whole saga, let me catch you up, because it's been one of the messier weeks in gaming I can remember.
Short version: CD Projekt Red shipped the thing on December 10th after years of hype, multiple delays, and a marketing campaign that leaned hard into "this is going to be the biggest RPG ever made." On PC, with a decent rig, it's actually pretty good — buggy, sure, but the kind of buggy that's charming until it isn't. On base PS4 and Xbox One, it's a different story entirely. We're talking textures that don't load, cars that fall through the map, NPCs that T-pose in the middle of dialogue scenes, and a frame rate that dips into slideshow territory the second you hit the highway near the Kabuki district. It's rough. Rough enough that on December 18th, Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store entirely and started offering full refunds, no questions asked about their usual policy, which normally requires you to have played less than two hours.
I bought my copy on launch day for $59.99, on a PS4 Pro I've had since 2018, because I didn't feel like waiting for a PC version to be worth building around. Big mistake, in hindsight. I played through Christmas Eve and most of Boxing Day at my in-laws' place, mostly to get out of doing dishes, and the game crashed on me four separate times. Once it happened mid-conversation with Jackie, right as I was about to make a choice that apparently matters a lot later, and I just had to reload from an autosave that was almost forty minutes old. That's the kind of thing that makes you want your money back on principle alone, never mind the T-posing.
Here's the part nobody warns you about: once Sony pulled it from the store, actually processing a refund became this weird bureaucratic maze. I filed a request through the PlayStation support site on the 19th. Got an automated email saying they'd respond within a few business days. Nothing happened for over a week — which, fine, it was the holidays, I get it, support teams don't work Christmas either. But when I finally got a real reply yesterday, it was a form response pointing me back to the general refund request page, which is the same page I'd already used. I'm eleven hours into a fifty-plus hour game at this point, and I genuinely don't know if that disqualifies me even under their loosened rules, since nobody's actually said what the cutoff is now.
What bugs me more than the bugs, honestly, is how predictable this all was if you'd been paying any attention. CD Projekt Red didn't send review copies for the console versions ahead of launch. That alone should have been a giant red flag, and a lot of outlets called it out at the time, but the hype machine was loud enough to drown it out. The studio's own CEO admitted afterward they knew the last-gen versions had problems and shipped anyway, which, sure, respect the honesty, but it doesn't un-crash my game. CDPR's stock dropped something like 25% in the days after the console reviews and refund requests started piling up, and there's already talk of a class-action situation brewing from investors. None of that fixes anything for the people who just wanted to play Night City on the console sitting under their TV.
I still think there's a genuinely great game buried in there. The writing, when it's not glitching out, is sharper than most AAA stuff I've played this year, and Night City itself is a phenomenal piece of art direction even at a stuttering fifteen frames a second. I just wish I'd waited. I'm going to keep chasing the refund out of stubbornness more than need at this point, and if I actually get it, I'll probably turn around and rebuy it on PC in six months once it's patched into something resembling what they promised. Until then it's sitting on my hard drive half-finished, which feels like a pretty fitting way to end 2020 honestly.