Earlier this week, co-founder of the company CD Projekt Marcin Ivinsky apologized to the audience for the problematic launch of Cyberpunk 2077 and named the reasons for the low quality of the console versions, promising to make every effort to regain the confidence of the players. And today a journalist Bloomberg Jason Schreier released his great material based on interviews with two dozen former and current employees of CD Projekt RED, which says that studio executives have been tricking players for many years by showing fake demos and cutting out various features from Cyberpunk 2077.
Schreier’s interlocutors stated that the studio was too focused on marketing to the detriment of the development process, and this led to dire consequences. Many of the promises of the top, sounded in media interviews, caused surprise among ordinary employees, since they were not discussed with them in any way.
- The game was announced in 2012, but full development did not begin until 2016. Prior to that, the team was focused on The Witcher 3 and the add-ons for it.
- Usually, many studios use the developments of one successful project during the development of the next, but in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 after The Witcher 3, almost everything had to be created from scratch, since fantasy was replaced by cyberpunk. These are completely different ideas, approaches and content of the world. The management also wanted prettier graphics. Radical changes required improvements to the RED Engine throughout the entire production process. One of the employees compared the situation to “a moving train, in front of which you need to have time to lay rails.” He is confident that if CD Projekt RED had better prepared for the development of Cyberpunk 2077, and not tried to do everything at once, many problems would have been avoided.
- Initially, CD Projekt RED planned that Cyberpunk 2077, by analogy with “The Witcher 3”, would be a third-person game. Also, a wall-running system and the ability to fly in cars and shoot while driving were conceived for her.… When Adam Badovsky was appointed head of development at the end of 2016, these and other elements began to be slowly abandoned. He demanded that Cyberpunk 2077 be turned into a first-person game.
- Cyberpunk 2077 has never made a first-person game before, so they’ve had to learn a lot through trial and error. Fundamental gameplay changes and departure from the original concept caused controversy and conflict. Some studio veterans who had a hand in “The Witcher 3” did not agree with Badovsky’s vision and were forced to leave the studio.
- The demo shown in 2018 was “almost completely fake”… As Schreier’s interlocutors explained, he was forced to create in order to delight the audience and the press. It took several months to work on it. Some of the elements shown in that video did not make it into the final game. Ordinary employees considered it a waste of time and resources.
- The staff at CD Projekt RED had to recycle a lot. Some have lost their health and families because of this.… Initially, Ivinsky said that overtime would be optional, but when a person tried to go home early or refused to crunch on a certain day, they answered “Ok, but then your colleagues will have to work even more”, making him feel guilty. All this created tremendous pressure. Former CD Projekt RED programmer on sound, Adrian Yakubyak, said that he worked 13 hours a day and received only $ 700 a month in 2018 as a junior employee (and started in 2015 as a tester with a salary of $ 400).
- At E3 2019, CD Projekt announced that Cyberpunk 2077 will release on April 16, 2023. This caused absolute bewilderment among the staff, since based on the development progress within the studio, they expected that the game would be completed by 2023 – not earlier.
- The management responded by ordering to shrink the city and cut out some of the functions, which should have helped to complete the game on time, but new problems appeared. CD Projekt RED was actively expanding its headquarters with new employees (Cyberpunk 2077 was created with the efforts of 500+ people, and The Witcher 3 – 240), but the process of joining the team was very poorly organized. Since the studio was recruiting people from different countries, the management asked to use English in the meetings, but this request was constantly violated. The Poles spoke Polish, but the foreigners did not understand anything, which made them feel redundant and irritated. These people, as a rule, were also not happy with their salaries, which led to staff turnover.
- The rework and expansion of the studio did not help, and by the end of 2019 the elite realized that Cyberpunk 2077 would have to be transferred again. This time for fall 2023. The new schedule also looked unrealistic, but the management of CD Projekt insisted on the need to release the game before the next generation of consoles.
- In response to reports about the impossibility of completing Cyberpunk 2077 on time and implementing all systems on consoles of the outgoing generation, the bosses claimed that everything would be fine, because CD Projekt RED had previously been able to release the super-successful “The Witcher 3”…
- In March, the already shaky rows of CD Projekt RED were hit by the coronavirus. Employees were transferred to work from home, depriving them of access to devkits. They played new computer builds and worked on their home computers. Problems with communication between departments began. As of October, when it was announced that the game went gold, serious bugs continued to be found in the game, and tests of the console versions indicated their unsatisfactory condition.
- The police system turned out to be very crude, because it was screwed on “at the last moment”… At the same time, the employees did not understand why they were trying to turn the role-playing game into GTA.
Schreier’s interlocutors believe that many bugs and problems of the console versions can be fixed.but dealt a serious blow to the public perception of CD Projekt RED. It also became the first notable studio in history to have a game removed from the PlayStation Store.
Schreier himself recalls that there have been cases in the industry when developers were able to “clean up” after a disaster. The most prominent examples are Final Fantasy XIV and No Man’s Sky, but they were worth years of work and tremendous effort. At the same time, the journalist criticizes the studio’s management, which put the realization of their incredible ambitions on the shoulders of only a few hundred employees and made them crunch endlessly, many of them for a penny salary.
Read also: Unexpectedly: Ghost of Tsushima surpassed The Last of Us Part II in sales for 2023 in the American PS Store…
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