It was supposed to be acclaimed developer CD Projekt Red’s finest hour, but the recent launch of “Cyberpunk 2077” was marred by game-breaking bugs, crashes and problematic performance on anything other than PC.
Hotfixes have been flying thick and fast, as have explanations and refunds, but that didn’t stop the digital version of the game being pulled from the PlayStation store. Even with the good reviews for the PC version, it was one of the most controversial game launches of recent years – up there with the loot box scandal of “Star Wars: Battlefront II” and the initial disappointment of the eventually impressive “No Man’s Sky”.
Now, the company has made its most public apology yet with co-founder Marcin Iwinski taking to Twitter to offer a video offering his perspective on what happened during the game’s development cycle and why it arrived in such a broken state.
One part of the video identifies the in-game streaming system as the “main culprit” of problems for the game and a priority for them to resolve. They also indicate they are working with Sony to bring Cyberpunk 2077 back to the PlayStation Store as soon as possible.
There’s also a FAQ explaining more about the lack of initial quality, saying: “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.”
The core assumption was it would be easy to build the top of the line PC version first, then scale down for older machines and consoles as they knew the hardware gap. However “time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task.”
A roadmap of updates has been released with two patches coming – one in ten days, the other more significant and later. Then there’s free DLC in the spring, the proper PS5 & Xbox Series X versions of the game in the late Summer/Fall, and “multiple updates and improvements” right through until 2022.
Dear gamers,
Below, you’ll find CD PROJEKT’s co-founder’s personal explanation of what the days leading up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 looked like, sharing the studio’s perspective on what happened with the game on old-generation consoles. pic.twitter.com/XjdCKizewq— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) January 13, 2021
