Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier’s recent insider report, “Inside Cyberpunk 2077‘s Disastrous Rollout,” touched upon many factors which contributed to the game’s controversial launch, some of which were already well-documented — like the game being nearly unplayable due to glitches and bugs and its release in a nearly unfinished state (with incomplete game systems like NPCs’ glaring lack of AI and perplexing law enforcement implementation), as well as new revelations such as the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo at the E3 2018 convention being entirely faked and much of the CDPR development staff openly admitting that they knew the game wouldn’t be ready for release in 2020.
Adam Badowski, CDPR Head of Studio, took to Twitter on Saturday to address the major points presented in Schreier’s Bloomberg report, which you can read below.
“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.”
Badowski: It’s hard for a trade show game demo not to be a test of vision or vertical slice two years before the game ships, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake. Compare the demo with the game. Look at the Dumdum scene or the car chase, or the many other things. What the people reading your article may not know is that games are not made in a linear fashion and start looking like the final product only a few months before launch. If you look at that demo now, it’s different yes, but that’s what the “work in progress” watermark is for. Our final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was.
As for ‘missing’ features, that’s part of the creation process. Features come and go as we see if they work or not. Also, car ambushes exist in the final game almost verbatim to what we showed in the demo. And if we get a bit more granular about our release, the vision we presented in this demo evolved into something that got multiple 9/10s and 10/10s on PC from many renown gaming outlets in the world.
As for the old-gen consoles, yes that is another case, but we’ve owned up to that and are working super hard to eliminate bugs (on PC, too —we know that’s not a perfect version either) and we are proud of Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and artistic vision. This all is not what I’d call disastrous.
“Most of the CD PROJEKT RED staff knew and openly said it wouldn’t be ready for release in 2020.”
Badowski: You’ve talked with 20 people, some being ex employees, only 1 of whom is not anonymous. I wouldn’t call that ‘most’ of the over 500-people staff openly said what you claim.
“A few non-Polish staffers shared stories about coworkers using Polish in front of them, which violated company rules. Made them feel ostracized, they said… were their coworkers talking shit about them?”
Badowski: Everyone here speaks English during meetings, every company-wide email and announcement is in English — all that is mandatory. Rule of thumb is to switch to English when there’s a person not speaking a given language in a casual conversation.
It is, however, pretty normal for Germans speaking German, Poles speaking Polish, Spaniards speaking Spanish etc. (there are 44 nationalities at the studio, you get the point) when there’s no one else around. We are working in a multicultural environment.
If the question is if it’s hard to move to another country, sometimes culture, and work and live there, then the answer is yes. But that’s universal to every company all over the world, and we’re doing what we can to ease that transition.
CD Projekt Red
Despite all the criticism and controversy surrounding Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch, the game was top seller on Steam for seven straight weeks. CDPR has also been adamant in stating that their main objective is to ameliorate the game in a way that will bring it in line with the original expectations of fans and critics alike through hotfixes and patches. The Polish developers put out a roadmap of planned Cyberpunk 2077 updates, as well as another apology for the state of the game’s release from CDPR co-founder Marcin Iwinski.
CDPR plans to release free Cyberpunk 2077 DLC content in the future, but only when the main game has been amended.
“We’re still planning on releasing free DLC for the game, just like with The Witcher 3,” CDPR said. “However, we have decided that our priority is working on the most important fixes and updates. We will be releasing free DLC afterwards — we’ll have more to say about that in the coming months.”
What do you think of the CDPR head of studio’s response to Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg article? Let us know in the comments.
Be sure to check out Jason Schreier’s Bloomberg article on Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch if you haven’t already.
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