Another pre-order email landed on Tuesday. Deluxe edition, three days of early access and a skin.
I deleted it without opening it.
They can shove their early access.
And the second it was gone I realised I had been doing that for years without thinking, the way you wave off a flyer in the street.
It wasn't always like this.
I bought Cyberpunk 2077 on launch day for the PS4: sixty euros up front and the hype through the roof.
It wasn't a game with bugs, it was a bug with a game somewhere inside it. Forget half the promises missing, you couldn't even play the thing. Not even the slop on Steam had the nerve. I dropped it after two days, with that mix of anger and embarrassment nobody admits to.
Six days later, Sony pulled it from its own store.
I asked for the refund, and even with my sixty euros back I still felt robbed.
This one was a "it's not me, it's you". They had sold me a living city. What booted up on my PS4 was a Temu diorama: cars materialising out of nowhere a few feet in front of me, pedestrians frozen staring at a wall, and the textures always arriving two seconds late.
The worst part wasn't the money. It was spending two nights hunting for the game from the trailers.
Five years later I bought it again. PS5 this time. Ultimate Edition, thirty five euros, patched, expansion in the box. It cost me almost half and gave me ten times more.
Some people call this being a patient gamer.
I'm not the patient one here. I didn't wait five years for Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk waited five years for me, and in that time it fixed itself.
Well, not by itself. An entire studio fixed it, working for free on my behalf.
The only one who did anything here was the game.
Day one is the worst possible day to play a game. Period.
It's the most expensive day. The most broken day. And the loudest.
I don't have time to be anybody's beta tester.
The only thing that expires on a game is the hype. Everything else improves with the years: the patches land, the editions fill out, the prices drop, the toxic conversation dissolves.
The industry spent five years telling me Cyberpunk was already history. It kept saying it while they were fixing it.
Over on the forum of the people who do call themselves patient, someone set out to spend a whole year buying nothing and playing what he already owned. Hundreds of upvotes. And the replies weren't about money: they were about people discovering that the best games of the decade were already sitting in their house.
Arriving late isn't missing out. It's letting other people test it, fix it and mark it down for you.
The day one crowd rolls out the red carpet. Somebody else walks it.
For when…
…you owe yourself a long evening with nothing in the way: Cyberpunk 2077, Ultimate Edition. The one that got pulled from the store in 2020 is today, with Phantom Liberty inside, one of the best RPGs you can buy.
You stop whenever you like, because there is nobody waiting on the other end. Saving is another matter: you save almost anywhere, but not mid firefight, so getting up costs you a minute rather than nothing. And if you leave it three weeks, you come back with no idea what you were in the middle of.
Not for you if twenty minute gaps are all you get this season: Night City charges you admission every time you come back. And not with the kid next to you. It's on PC, on PS5 and on Switch 2.
Hit reply with the worst day one of your life. You already know mine.