I was really interested in this game, but it's release was a disaster. I'm curious to know if the game was ever fixed.

+1. I hear ya.

After how active the dev was on the forums, I'm kind of shocked he just disappeared.

But yeah, now that you mention it, I'm pretty interested in hearing if it was fixed, as well.

Likewise. I'm not much of an IF guy, but It'd like to know as well.

That's the thing. I'm hoping that they didn't just pull a hit and run and try to get as many sales as they could at launch. This is a game that I'm really interested in, but the devs seem to have gone quiet.

I'm definitely interested in picking up the game at some point; what happened wit the release, why was it a disaster?

While we're on the topic of updates, what happened to that Steam game giveaway?

The game was translated into English by someone that isn't native, because of that the core function of the game is broken.

I'm not, considering that was the one of the worst threads I've ever read through on this forum.

To be more specific, the in-game text was horrendous, with exceedingly awkward turns of phrase, atrocious grammar and spelling, and simply outright wrong uses of vocabulary. This wasn't just the use of Engrish in a Japanese VN; it was on the verge of being incomprehensible. A patch has been supposedly issued to fix this, but the translation quality still remains poor.

But that was just the surface. The text parser – the most important element of any text-based adventure by far – only accepted certain patterns of English. Patterns of usage that would make perfect syntactical and grammatical sense to a native English speaker simply weren't recognized at all.

What really offends me most of all about this though is the fact that the game was even released at all in the state that it was. It almost leads me to believe that it was either sheer arrogance or complete incompetence to believe that the English translation was perfectly acceptable.

To add insult to injury, all indications that I've seen (in the GOG forum) seem to be that the changes that they are making are to the translation text only, and not to the text parser. There's also this line that I saw on the header to their support forum: I realize that was made in good jest (?), but if they really believe that the game's text parser as it is now is perfectly fine, then they are simply flat out wrong.

I'd have no problem shelling out for the complete uber collector's edition of this game, just because the game oozes so much personality and its central gameplay element is so novel – but until the text parser and the translation text are fixed, I see no reason to reward them for what is essentially a fatally broken game.

You made some really fine points here.

Hi!

We just ran a promotion this week: win a free copy of CYPHER.

http://www.cabrerabrothers.com/cyberpunk/

You guys can participate if you want! ;-)

The game has been a HUGE hit on france, spain, russia, etc. We had to work with these communities too, not just two sites, although we came here and posted a two weeks ago. We had official communications through our own channel at http://news.cabrerabrothers.com , the mailing list you can subscribe on the web site, the mailing list you get subscribed when you buy the game, twitter, facebook and several blogs and magazines (outside RPS and GOG).

If you need news about CYPHER, just head over there.

Things look GREAT for us right now, we put a game out there, people is buying it, there has been tons of youtube let's play over the last two weeks and the players response is just amazing.

We spent a lot of time improving the game through: we patched it twice (that's since it launched) and there is another patch coming out this week with some more improvements. The parser we are improving just a bit (tiny bit), but it will be mainly the same parser so if you think it won't be fun to play like it is for you because either you're an old school text adventure player (although we have a good bunch of these playing the game without complaints) or you are just too used to play with the inform or infocom parser, then it may be best for you to move on and find something else. There are a bunch (literally hundreds) of free inform games out there and the inform parser is the BEST there is. You can't go wrong with these. I just played a game a CYPHER fan made just a couple of hours ago and I had a blast. Here's the link:

http://www.textadventures.co.uk/review/495/

You won't be playing CYPHER though, but that's a personal decision everyone should make. There is just so many potential on text adventures and authors around these sites I can't even start thinking what the future will hold for us IF players. We can only hope other dev can make more modern text adventures with graphics and sounds and a lot of things that just work on a IF environment.

With CYPHER, we managed to steer a lot of new players (I'm talking about guys who played Call of Duty, Counter Strike, LA Noire) into playing text adventures; there has been reports of people moving into other IF games and even trying to come up with their own which is just amazing!

A guy (smart, clever guy) even made a plugin for CYPHER to export his savegames and be able to play your CYPHER game on other machines and shared it with the community. So now if you have a 1.5hs trip to work, guess what you can do? And you can pick up your game right where you left it at home. That is what we were hoping to see, people getting in there and getting excited with the genre. This guy could be doing a counter strike mod or something else, but he chose to go with CYPHER and after that, text adventures in general because he got really excited about the whole thing.

If we can make a new guy/gal play text adventures, and he or she wants more after that, then its mission accomplished.

Like I said, there are a bunch of Lets Play video online now, and reviews too, so you guys can check these out and see what the game looks like if you are still unsure. If not, there's always another game to play. ;-)

I will be checking this forum from now and then but the posts will be made in our official forum and the news.cabrerabrothers.com site for those who want to keep up.


Cheers.