Sony relists Cyberpunk 2077, includes new warning: Base PS4 “not recommended” – Ars Technica

After facing arguably the biggest retail delisting yet on PlayStation consoles, Cyberpunk 2077 has returned to the PlayStation Network online store today—though even after months of patches, the game isn’t necessarily getting a red-carpet welcome.

The game’s December 2020 launch was marked largely by bugs and glitches on every single platform, with performance on “base” versions of Xbox One and PlayStation 4 suffering the worst. After seven days of bad press and CD Projekt Red launching a refund program, Sony went one step further by yanking the game entirely from its online shops and informing buyers that they were eligible for a refund if they were dissatisfied with their digital purchase.

At the time, neither Sony nor CDPR offered a road map for exactly when the game might go back for sale on Sony’s digital shops, even though the developer made clear that it would continue patching the game on all platforms. (The game was never delisted on Xbox.) Last week, CDPR confirmed in a regulatory statement that the game would return to PSN this week, and that came to pass on Monday. In conjunction, the game’s digital purchase price dropped $10 to $50 (possibly because the news coincided with Amazon Prime Day, where the game’s digital and disc versions are also discounted).

But CP77 returns with something new. Its PSN product page includes this warning at the very top of its “game info” text crawl:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: Users continue to experience performance issues with this game. Purchase for use on PS4 systems is not recommended. For the best Cyberpunk experience on PlayStation, play on PS4 Pro and PS5 systems.

The latest patch on consoles, version 1.23, appears to have far more stable performance on base PS4 than at launch, with some of its busiest scenes sticking relatively close to a 30 fps refresh. Still, this comes at the cost of reductions across the board: pixel resolution, level-of-detail (LoD) draw, texture fidelity, number of objects on screen, and other rendering drawbacks. (Whether CDPR has truly squashed all of the base console version’s bugs, on the other hand, is trickier to confirm.)

You’ll get more fidelity and on-screen activity with the PS4 Pro version, and if that version’s more stable 30 fps target is fine by you, you no longer have to hunt for a disc copy to try it yourself. As CDPR confirmed at launch, both next-gen consoles run the game in backward-compatibility mode for now, offering 60 fps refreshes and other performance tweaks. A patch for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S is currently slated to launch by year’s end to add further performance tweaks.