Making excuses that the team had “underestimated” the difficulty of developing the game for previous-gen consoles, studio co-founder Marcin Iwinski has reiterated CD Projekt Red’s commitment to resolving Cyberpunk 2077’s problems with multiple updates over the next month or so.
In a five-minute video published on Twitter and the game’s website, Iwinski explains that “despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet”, including a megamix of low-res graphics, wobbly frame rates, texture pop, glitches, crashes, and much more. Less than two weeks subsequent to its 10 December launch, the game was removed from the PlayStation Store, and the studio is now the subject of an investigation by a Polish consumer agency and a class action lawsuit in the US.
In a FAQ, CD Projekt Red cites the game engine’s complex streaming system as the most egregious source of issues between PC and console versions.
Cyberpunk 2077 is huge in scope, it features a multitude of custom objects, interacting systems and mechanics. In the game, everything is not stretched out over flat terrain where we can make things less taxing hardware-wise, but condensed in one big city and in a relatively loading-free environment. We made it even more difficult for ourselves by first wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles — especially old-gens. That was our core assumption. And things did not look super difficult at first, while we knew the hardware gap, ultimately, time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task.
The main culprit was having to constantly improve our in-game streaming system for old-gen consoles. Streaming is responsible for “feeding” the engine with what you see on screen, as well as the game mechanics. Since the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of old-gen consoles is what it is, this is something that constantly challenged us.
According to the same FAQ, an update is expected to drop “in the next 10 days”, with a “larger, more significant update in the weeks after”. As a result of this focus on updates, however, plans for free DLC and the next-gen console update have been pushed back. Boo.
Despite Cyberpunk 2077’s wobbles, I’ve actually had some funs with the game but stopped playing it over the holidays because I wanted to wait for the next-gen update that was supposed to launch about now, but isn’t. Sucks to be me.