That’s according to a new exposé based on interviews with more than 20 CD Projekt Red employees, who describe “a development process marred by unchecked ambition, poor planning and technical shortcomings” and “a company that focused on marketing at the expense of development”.
Published over the weekend by Bloomberg, the report is an unprecedented account of Cyberpunk 2077’s messy production and chaotic launch that reveals – much like BioWare’s Anthem – a management culture of unrealistic expectations and constant interference. The game’s engine, for example, was developed simultaneously with the actual game, resulting in production delays. And although the game was announced in 2012, employees tell Bloomberg that “full development” was only started in 2016 when studio boss Adam Badowski took over.
For the next year, everything was changing, including fundamental elements like the game-play perspective. Top staff who had worked on The Witcher 3 had strong opinions on how Cyberpunk should be made, which clashed with Badowski and lead to the eventual departure of several top developers.
By E3 2018, the game wasn’t even playable. But that didn’t stop CD Projekt Red from debuting a mega-hyped demo at the show.
Much of CD Projekt’s focus, according to several people who worked on Cyberpunk 2077, was on impressing the outside world. A slice of gameplay was showcased at E3, the industry’s main trade event, in 2018. It showed the main character embarking on a mission, giving players a grand tour of the seedy, crime-ridden Night City.
Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game.
I guess we know now why it wasn’t released to the public.
Bloomberg also cites concerns over the game’s 2020 launch date, which employees had assumed to be in 2022, and the technical difficulty of developing Cyberpunk 2077 for last-gen consoles – concerns which were ignored by management. And that’s before the COVID-19 pandemic emptied the studio’s Warsaw office, with everybody working from home.
Without access to the office’s console development kits, most developers would play builds of the game on their home computers, so it wasn’t clear to everyone how Cyberpunk might run on PS4 and Xbox One. External tests, however, showed clear performance issues.
In a video released last week, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwinski apologised for the game’s disastrous launch, explaining that “despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet”. It seems now that, whatever those intentions, this was totally inevitable.