Not good enough.
It should be on first page on first spot.

You mean like a built in bootloader but for bootable drives? That'd be perfect if W10 doesn't overwrite it as well.

I have a a few obscure games that simply don't work on W10 and some programs one of my Profs wrote and I'd like to continue using.
I don't have to connect to the internet for that so it doesn't matter if it's supported or not. And even if I don't use W7 the issue with the bootloader being overwritten with some of the updates remains.
My parents have 3 laptops with W10 and regulary have trouble after updates (one not updating at all anymore), it seems to be a gamble and that's not something I want to happen at my PC.

Oh, it will be. Believe me. If it doesn't end up there with just the pre-orders (which I don't believe, the release is still 10 months away, so there's more than enough time), launch day will be huge, too.

Your screenshot is for the entire collection of CDPR games. Witcher games run on all of those operating systems, but Cyberpunk 2077's store page clearly shows that it only will run on Windows 10, so people should set their expectations accordingly, unless they change it at a later date to expand what operating systems are supported. I don't think that's likely to happen though due to older versions of Windows going end of life before the game is officially released.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Makes sense now.

I'd say it's rather unlikely the game will work unofficially on older versions of Windows, because it will most likely use the DirectX 12 API which is only available for Windows 10. They would have to also support DirectX 11 in order for the game to run on older versions of Windows. And that's just the graphics API. If they are advertising it as Windows 10 only, they most likely wouldn't have wasted all the effort required to add in API support for older operating systems at all, meaning it wont be able to run at all on older operating systems.

In order for any game coming out to run on older versions of Windows, they either have to use both new and old APIs, or just limit themselves to older APIs like DirectX 11 and give up on new features and performance of the new APIs. For a game like this which is so cutting edge, they're guaranteed going to be taking advantage of current generation graphics and other APIs though.

The only likelihood of it running on older Windows releases would IMHO be if they built the game engine on top of the Vulkan API. Personally I think that would be the best choice as it would provide all of the same benefits that DX12 provides more or less, but give the option for the game to be easily ported to older OS releases if desired, as well as to other platforms like Mac, Linux etc. The previous version of the engine was built on DX though so I presume they're building the new engine on that as well.

But the graphics API being used is not the only API to target, audio and various other things matter as well as any middleware they are using and whether the companies that provide that middleware plan to support it long after support for EOL versions of Windows dies.

Economically it makes no sense to support EOL versions of Windows due to the overhead of maintaining it and things breaking. It gives customers false hope, which is why very few companies bother to do it.

People should set their expectations about what the game will run on directly to match what the company is stating clearly the game will run on, which is Windows 10. I would not expect it to run or be able to be made to run on anything else honestly. They'd have to take too many concrete decisions to add code to the game to make it run on older versions of Windows. It's not impossible and tonnes of games on the market now do just that by providing DX12 and DX11 support built in, as well as any other multiple APIs needed under the hood. But they only do so because there is a large enough market out there using these operating systems and the systems are still officially supported by the OS vendor.

In the case of Cyberpunk 2077 however, it releases *after* Windows 7 goes EOL, and the number of people still using Windows 7 at that point in time will be much smaller than it even is now which is shrinking every month.

So it'll be an unpopular thing to say for many people's eyes to read or ears to hear, but I'll go on record to predict that the game will not run on anything older than Windows 10, and I don't expect that to change officially nor for it to be able to run unofficially on anything older.

For the record, I use Windows 7 and would love nothing more than to hear Microsoft is going to extend it's life officially by 5 more years. I hate Windows 10 and do not want to use it, but I know I'm going to be more or less forced to use it one way or another whether I like it or not (and my laptop already has it so I already bit part of that bullet and don't care for it). So I'm not a fan of this stuff happening, but I observe it and recognize it for the reality that it is ultimately no matter how bad it tastes to say it or hear it.

I will say that I will be pleasantly very pleased if they have chosen to use the Vulkan API for CP2077 however, and such a choice would make it at least viable for them to make the game available for other platforms in the future if they thought there was enough market interest. If it's DX12 based though then that's very unlikely to ever happen.

I base it off the fact that the game's store page explicitly states that the game's operating system requirement is Windows 10. Windows 10 comes with DirectX 12, which is what all modern games will use to get the best graphics performance and feature set (or alternatively Vulkan which provides the same). DirectX 12 is not available at all for older versions of Windows. In order for the game to run on older Windows then, they would also have to add DirectX 11 support to the engine, but why would they go to all of that extra effort to then publicly state the game system requirements are Windows 10? That would make no sense. I elaborated more about this in my previous comment above.

This isn't just my own whimsical ideas. For a game to work on a given operating system, the developers must write code that will run on that operating system, and in the case of supporting Windows versions older than Windows 10 that requires either designing the game explicitly for older Windows and giving up on features of the newer OS, or it involves duplicating effort to support multiple APIs.

Why would they duplicate that effort and then turn around and mark the game as officially supporting Windows 10 only in the store? That wouldn't make a lot of sense.

The only remote chance is if the new game engine uses Vulkan, but that seems highly unlikely to me, and even then there are many other aspects that would need to be special cased for older versions of Windows of which they wont have any incentive to do so due to the OS being end-of-life several months before the game is ever even released to the public.

Do I know that this will be the case for certain? No. Do I have any inside knowledge? No. It's just simple logic to me, and while I'd love to see the game run on older systems myself personally, I'm willing to bet that it absolutely will not because that's the only thing that makes any logical sense to me based on what we know about Microsoft's OS end of life and how virtually all software companies handle it out there including game companies.

Bookmark this post now under a bookmark folder called "SkeletonBow's insane predictions" and when the game is released, come back and necro this thread to laugh at me for being wrong if that actually happens. I'll gladly bow my head in shame if that ends up being the case.

I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth however, and people will eventually come to terms with it.

But don't hate me for being right! I'm actually on your side, I still run Windows 7 on my PC. I don't LIKE to be right, it just happens. :)

Sort of a built-in bootloader, but more like a BIOS-lite that doesn't do anything except let you
override which drive gets booted. It's actually a feature of the BIOS, so Win10 won't overwrite it. Look at the messages next time you reboot and see if there is a key to select boot device, like F8 or F12.

Really, really bad marketing there.

Adding goodies to the brim into the physical box? Making a great game instead of just some base repeatable grind to which additional DLC and microtransactions can be added? Giving out a free Collector's Edition to some random guy who shouted "You're awesome"?

What do you think this is, the good old days when videogames were good and had lots of feelies and gamers actually were as much admired by developers as vice versa?

But the wrath of the gamers is coming in already. They preorder all of your copies so you will not be able to make enough to fill all the demand! Let that be a lesson for your mindset being so 25 years ago!

I notice one of the "goodies" for pre=ordering is a discount in the CDPR Merch store, which is useless for anyone outside of Europe since they don't ship outside of it. Kind of a weird thing to offer when a good portion of users won't be able to make use of it.

TBH, They are offering other stuff. Just think it as US owners got posters, digital stuff & booklets, while EU ones get same thing, but with another extra. Except EU only extra is lame.

Yeah, I hear you, considering most of the stuff is out of stock anyways. I'm probably going to end up getting it for console, I know I know, since apparently PC users aren't cool enough to get real collector's editions.

Are the extras out yet?

If not I am going to wait a bit

If memory serves, if you owned previous Witcher games when Witcher 2 was ready to be purchased, you got a discount here on GOG. This time it's a useless merchandise store discount and the price of the base game seems higher. What am I missing?