A new report investigating what went wrong with the implementation of Cyberpunk 2077 points to the confidence of CD Projekt Red as a key issue, and reveals that ‘full development’ of the game – announced in 2012 – only started in 2016.
Jason Schreier van Bloomberg interviewed more than 20 current and former CD Project staff, and found that game development was plagued by unrealistic deadlines and technical issues. The company “press the reset button” on the game in 2016, but a demo of Cyberpunk 2077 showed “almost completely false” at E3 in 2018, according to the report. The development also suffered from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with PC-version programmers and console-version testers working separately.
In the months leading up to the launch of the 10th of December, there were reports of Project Red staff working long, arduous hours to meet the launch dates. Almost immediately after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, console gamers have experienced widespread bugs, frame rate issues, and other issues. Within a week of launch, Sony pulled out Cyberpunk from the PlayStation Store and offered refunds. One investor is suing CD Project Red over the launch, and earlier this week the computer version of the game was on sale for almost half the original price.
Project Red co-founder Marcin Iwinski issued a mea culpa for the sloppy release, saying that despite the generally positive reception for the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077, the console version of the game “did not meet the quality we wanted.” The company plans to launch the first major update of the game within the next week.
According to Bloomberg, CD Project Red was still focused The Witcher 3 when Cyberpunk was announced in 2012. Managers of the company apparently believed that they could repeat the success it had with the game in development Cyberpunk. And in a detail that is not the final amendment of the Bloomberg story, Schreier tweeted that the game has changed significantly since it was first announced; until 2016, he says, it was a third-person game.