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The studio behind Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red, has already outlined a timeline for fixing the game over the next year and has apologized for its unfinished feel. But a new in-depth report from Bloomberg, based on interviews with more than 20 current and former employees, suggests that the state of the game at launch was anything but a surprise.
While the game was originally announced in 2012, a year before the release of the PS4 and Xbox One, and three years before The Witcher 3’s debut, the company wouldn’t start working on it properly until “late 2016.” At that point, sources for the report say that CD Projekt Red “essentially hit the reset button” changing the game from third-person to first-person perspective, among other things.
It also didn’t help that the company was apparently trying to build the engine and the game simultaneously – something akin to “trying to drive a train while the tracks are laid out in front of you at the same time,” according to a team member. .
The E3 trailer that wowed the world in 2018 was “almost completely bogus,” the report adds, which is why features like car ambushes were on the demo but absent from the final product.
The report is full of interesting details, but overall it paints a picture of an overworked and over-ambitious studio working with faith that things would be fine due to the success of The Witcher 3. While the problems were certainly seen aggravated by the pandemic and the need to work remotely (access to console development kits was limited, meaning that horrendous performance issues on next-gen consoles weren’t as obvious as they would be from another way), it seems this was just one piece of a larger dysfunctional puzzle.
When the game’s initial release date of April 16, 2020 was announced, sources at Bloomberg claim they knew it was only a matter of time before it was delayed, some creating memes and placing bets on when the inevitable would happen.
Since publication, game director Adam Badowski has responded to some of the report’s elements on Twitter.
I have read your article and your tweets, thanks for reading. I have some thoughts. https://t.co/T3qACdrnwM pic.twitter.com/wuzy5lXoqQJanuary 16, 2021
In particular, he disagrees with the idea that the E3 demo was “bogus”, arguing that it is simply a reflection of the nonlinear way games are played, while suggesting that a sample of 20 employees (some of them former employees, and mostly anonymous) does not necessarily reflect the sentiments of the team as a whole. That is possibly true, although to be clear, anonymous sources are unlikely to be a problem – speaking on condition of anonymity is often the only way sources will be honest, given the potential risk to your career otherwise.
In any case, the Cyberpunk 2077 journey remains unfinished, and the team has committed to two bigger patches, multiple smaller updates and improvements, free DLC, and free next-gen console updates before the year is out. Hopefully, in time, the game everyone was hoping to see will emerge from controversy as a classic that will stand the test of time.
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