Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, referring to 20 current and former employees of CD Projekt, told what exactly led to, to put it mildly, the problematic launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
The ambitious action role-playing movie was announced back in 2012, but the studio got down to work only at the end of 2016. At the same time, the game underwent a major reboot, including a change in perspective (from third person to first).
At the helm of this incarnation of Cyberpunk 2077 was the head of CD Projekt Adam Badowski - many key employees did not agree with the direction of the project's development chosen by the new leader and left the studio.
CD Projekt has given too much attention, according to some Cyberpunk 2077 developers, to impressing outsiders. The worst manifestation of this urge was the 48-minute clip shown in the summer of 2018.
That demo is almost completely fake: the gameplay systems were not ready (hence so many cut features like ambushes on cars). Employees believe that the months it took to create the presentation should have been spent on development.
In addition, CD Projekt aimed to develop the technology behind Cyberpunk 2077 in parallel with the game itself. As one of the team members put it, it's like driving a train in front of which rails are simultaneously laid out.
Former CD Projekt sound programmer Adrian Jakubiak recalled how at one of the meetings his colleague asked the question whether the company will cope with such a technically complex project in the same time frame that it took to create The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ... Someone said: "We will understand as we go along".
The problem of unrealistic timelines plagued CD Projekt throughout the production of Cyberpunk 2077. At E3 2019, it was announced that the game would be released on April 16, 2020 - fans were ecstatic, but the staff could only scratch their heads.
The fact is that judging by the progress of the team at that time, Cyberpunk 2077 would have been completed by 2022 (!). The developers even started joking and arguing about when the project would be postponed, but the management ruled out this scenario.
The plan was to release Cyberpunk 2077 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One prior to the announcement of the new consoles from Sony and Microsoft, and then tackle next-generation versions that would go free to owners of the game on older consoles.
At the same time, the engineers realized that PS4 and Xbox One would not cope properly with such a complex game as Cyberpunk 2077. The management dismissed concerns, citing the success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
By the end of 2019, the authorities still realized that the transfer could not be avoided, and in mid-January 2020 postponed the release of Cyberpunk 2077 from April to September. Two months later, the world was rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic, and employees had to work from home.
In a post-release apology video, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski stated that remote mode has complicated many of the processes that were normally taken for granted. The premiere, meanwhile, has moved to November.
Along with access to office devkits, the developers lost the opportunity to test the game on PS4 and Xbox One, but external tests revealed obvious performance problems.
In the same video, Ivinsky mentioned that testing Cyberpunk 2077 did not show many flaws that console players will face. Employees do not agree with this statement: the main problems were identified, but there was not enough time to fix them.
When it was announced in early October that Cyberpunk 2077 was going gold, the game was still regularly found with serious bugs: the project was in bad shape and took longer to develop.
The team still got an additional head start - at the end of October, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was postponed for another three weeks, until December 10. Exhausted programmers struggled to fix as much as possible.
More than a dozen employees also admitted that they worked overtime all this time (even before the September announcement ), although they were not formally coerced by any of their managers or colleagues.
“I used to work 13 hours a day - a little more than my record, probably - five days a week. Some of my friends lost their families because of this nonsense,” Yakubyak said.
When Cyberpunk 2077 finally made it to release on December 10, it turned out to be full of bugs of varying severity and almost unplayable on consoles of the past generation.
The developers are confident that bugs and graphical issues will be fixed, but it may not be so easy to regain the trust of fans. However, the industry knows such examples ( No Man's Sky, Final Fantasy XIV).
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