Winners and Losers: Disney proves Baby Yoda wasn’t a fluke while Cyberpunk has teething pains

The year may be coming to a close but that hasn’t stopped the world of shiny things one iota.

Over the last week we’ve seen huge releases ranging from the launch of AMD’s uber-expensive Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card to the appearance of Apple’s hotly anticipated AirPods Max over ear headphones.

But for us here at Trusted Towers there have once again been two very clear winners and losers in the world of tech over the last seven days.

Winner: Disney Plus

Disney Plus was the perfect remedy for the original lockdown. It offered access to all Disney’s classic movies, the entire back catalogue of The Simpsons and its premiere new series, and The Mandalorian, which wowed users and created one of 2020’s biggest icons, Baby Yoda.

But a few months on with little else to do, many of us have managed to blitz through everything worth watching on Disney Plus. Aware of this, the clever folks at Disney this week announced a wealth of new shows and movies that’ll all be added to the service in the not too distant future.

Highlights include several spin-off series from The Mandalorian, a cool new show about Marvel’s Loki and a Pixar original movie where former Captain America Chris Evans play Buzz Lightyear. Yes you read that right.

The wealth of big names in the new shows looks set to make Disney Plus one of the premier streaming services for top quality content in 2021, earning it a place as this week’s tech winner.

Loser: Console gamers playing Cyberpunk 2077

Loser section by Games Editor Jade King

Our loser this week is the console versions of Cyberpunk 2077. While the epic RPG from CD Projekt Red runs wonderfully on PC and next-gen platforms such as PS5 and Xbox Series X, older consoles present a very bleak picture.

The PS4 and Xbox One fail to hit a Full HD resolution, with performance almost constantly failing to reach a consistent 30 frames per second. They simply aren’t powerful enough to handle a world such as Night City, and that’s with severe visual compromises being made to the entire experience.

Enhanced consoles such as PS4 Pro and Xbox One X fare somewhat better, but still frequently drop below their target performance metric and don’t output the 4K image many consumers will be hoping for. This simply isn’t an optimal way to play the game.

It’s a bleak picture, made even worse by the fact that CD Projekt Red purposefully prevented press from covering the console versions ahead of release.

Because of this, we weren’t able to provide a definitive picture of the console versions until just a day before general release, by which time many players would have already paid for the game and were primed to receive it. This feels dishonest, asking millions of users to purchase a game sight unseen, not knowing what the finished product would be like.

At the time of writing, it’s honestly worth waiting for a substantial update for the previous-gen console versions or holding out until native versions of the game for PS5 and Xbox Series X arrive. Next-gen consoles are more than capable of handling Cyberpunk 2077, but they can only go so far with backward compatibility before hitting a technical ceiling that needs manual intervention to shift.