Today is the day that one of the most eagerly anticipated games of the decade finally arrives. That’s right, Cyberpunk 2077 is yours to play right now. Or at least it will be, once the day one patch has downloaded and installed.
Unfortunately, that’s going to put PS5 and PS4 users at a disadvantage, because it turns out their download is going to take an awful lot longer than it does on Xbox Series X or PC.
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The problem stems from the fact that both the PC and the Xbox versions of the game are downloaded differently compared to Sony's consoles. According to Marcin Mormot, global community lead at CD Projekt Red, it’s a difference of 35-50GB.
‼️ If you bought a boxed copy, on PC and on Xbox the game & Day 0 update will download together (between 60-75 gigs, depending on platform) while on Playstation the game and Day 0 update will download separately and will weight around 110gb. ‼️December 9, 2020
The first point to note is that day one and day zero patches are the same, and as Mormot points out everyone who pre-loaded the game on Xbox and PC will already have that update installed. That’s one extra advantage to skipping discs, we guess. Unfortunately, as Gizmodo Australia points out, that wasn’t an option if you’re a PlayStation gamer.
The question is why do PlayStation consoles treat downloads so differently from Xbox and PC? It could be that this update has Xbox consoles only downloading what’s necessary, while PlayStation consoles overwrite the existing files and download everything from scratch. One Reddit user has even suggested that since Xbox consoles default to English, while PlayStations download all language files, this leads to the PS5 and PS4 having a larger file size.
Honestly, though, we don’t know for sure, and all of these suggestions are just speculation. Whatever the reason, PS5 users are missing out, and are going to have to wait a long time to be able to play the patched version of the game; possibly days if their internet is rather slow.
Thankfully, if you have the physical version of the game, you can still play without installing the patch. You just end up playing with all the things the patch was intended to fix. Though unfortunately people can’t seem to decide whether this avenue reduced the amount you have to download.
Some people on Reddit and Twitter say it's the full 100GB+, while others say it’s close to 45GB. It would make sense for it to be the latter, given both the discs can hold a decent chunk of data. So hopefully that’s the case and discs are still pretty good after all.
Couple this new information with the fact PS5 owners don’t have the “quality mode” for Cyperpunk 2077, which prioritizes resolution over frame rate, and it’s putting those gamers at a significant disadvantage compared to the Xbox Series X version that has quality and performance modes.
It’s worth mentioning that PC platforms aren’t all created equally either. Anyone who preloaded Cyberpunk through CD Projekt Red’s GOG platform will only have to download an additional few hundred megabytes to play the game. Those using Steam or the Epic games launcher will need to install an extra 2-3GB. Fortunately, a couple of gigabytes isn’t a huge deal. Not as huge as 50GB, anyway.
