| Mummelmann said: What everyone needs to take into consideration when viewing the whole situation is what role CDProjekt has taken and been given in the industry today. They have made a whole, huge thing out of taking the crown as the one AAA developer that doesn't end up in the many pitfalls of the industry at large, such as unfinished games, forced wokeness, tacked-on gimmicks, and unethical business models paired with other anti-consumer practices. This is part of what has propelled their popularity, and they've played along really well with it and ran with it for some time, heads held high (by rights at that). |
They never deserved that reputation to begin with, to be honest. This is coming from someone who had followed them long before The Witcher 3 came out, who played The Witcher 2 on Xbox 360 and who played The Witcher 1 (almost to completion, which is saying a lot) before they got the super mainstream appeal they now have. Everything about their reputation was mostly because there was a weirdly large bandwagon surrounding the release of one game, and not even an original IP or an entry in a long-running franchise that was mostly standalone, but a title which was the third in a game series that focused heavily on plot. There's really not been anything like it in gaming history, the huge gap in popularity between what they had with Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, for third party developers at least. The closest that I can think of is maybe Final Fantasy VII but that at least was a standalone game from a company that would go on to handcraft many masterpieces that generation. What that games reputation did for Squaresoft (and really only did it in the West, mind you, as they were already huge in Japan) was largely deserved, what Witcher 3 did for CD Projekt Red absolutely wasn't. Don't get me wrong, their reputation had slowly been building up, with The Witcher being an absolute technical showcase for PC's for quite a while during the end of the mid 2000's, and The Witcher 2 being one of the last big WRPGs to be both a technical showcase for the 360 as well as a console-exclusive to the console, which garnered a lot of attention to it I think. But this is discarding the fact that The Witcher played like ass, aged much worse aesthetically than other PC technical showcases from around the time, and The Witcher 2 was straddling the "RPG-lite" and "Action game" genres a little too hard considering how half-baked both portions ended up being (especially on the action front, despite taking up most of the games gameplay).
Now, we can talk all day about how great GoG is. And it is a great service. But, as a developer, was that huge boost in popularity deserved? Absolutely not. They released one game, and frankly as good as it was it felt like a lot of the hype surrounding it was just because the Playstation 4 and Xbox One console libraries got off to such a slow start. It is like you said, except where I'd diverge is I'd ask the question "If one developer's hype mostly comes from how mediocre and disappointing other developers' games were, is that hype really because of how great that developer is to begin with?". That's not to say The Witcher 3 isn't an enduring and charming game, it is absolutely both of those things. But it is just a much, much better version of what Dragon Age Inquisition was in 2014: a game that signified some level of care was finally being put into triple A products to not make a wholly disappointing experience, only for Inquisition to be forgotten as soon as it won a game award. Witcher 3 is obviously much, much better than that, but I think a lot of it's reputation comes from the same idea. This generation largely sucked for big WRPGs, not because companies stopped making them, but because the ones that did sucked at their job. Doesn't make CD Projekt Red a messiah or prophet.
