Well, we all knew this was coming. Jason Schreier has published his latest “what happened with (insert AAA game disaster here)” article, a deep dive into what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077, interviewing 20 current and former employees about why the game released in the state it was in, and what got lost along the way.

I highly recommend you go read the entire piece over at Bloomberg, though its contents are news itself, hence my covering it here. 

The end result is a lengthy piece with Schreier adding some cut tidbits from it on Twitter after the fact, which I found equally interesting. Some of this isn’t exactly new information, it’s long been known that the bosses of CDPR made the decision to push the game out before it was ready, forcing their workers to crunch long hours to make that happen, but the new report contains details like how the developers figured the game needed at least until 2022 to become fully realized before the 2020 date was thrust upon them.

There are more conflicting bits about how the problems with last-gen consoles were very clear, something CDPR itself has addressed confusingly, saying both that they didn’t encounter the worst bugs on those consoles, while also saying they believed the issues would be fixed by day zero of launch.

In many ways, it’s kind of amazing how much this piece mirrors what happened with Anthem, as Schreier wrote a similar piece about the collapse of that game. That report talked about “BioWare magic,” which involved overworking its staff to fix a mounting pile of problems the bosses believed would work themselves out somehow, and here he has CDPR bosses constantly referring to the fact that they were the studio that made the hallowed Witcher 3, so surely everything would be okay (it wasn’t).

And much like Anthem’s E3 debut turned out to be pretty much entirely fake, as it happens, the famous Cyberpunk 2077 demo from E3 2018 was also mostly fake, which both mislead the press and public, and delayed actual work on the game:

“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.”

This explains the wild differences between that demo and finale release, which you can see in comparison videos all across the internet. It was more like a proof of concept than an actual demo of the game:

For players of the game, I found Schreier’s non-article reveals on Twitter rather interesting, like the fact that yes, the police system in the game is so bad because it was in fact added at the last minute. It’s not bugged, it was just rushed and unfinished. He says that the developers didn’t understand why they were trying to make both a single player RPG and Grand Theft Auto game at the same time, and doing it with a much smaller team than Rockstar.

In conclusion, CDPR will now have to spend months, if not the entire year, fixing the various issues with the game. They are supposed to be releasing “free DLC” in the first half of the year, but that might just be stuff that was unfinished for launch that should have been in the game in the first place, for all we know. Future plans about more robust paid DLCs and a separate multiplayer component of the game are now very, very far off, assuming they’re still happening at all.

This is the same story we’ve heard so many times before, a beloved studio hamstrung by ego and overpromising, and now must work for years to both fix their game and reclaim their reputation. We’ll see what the future holds for Cyberpunk after this. Read the full Bloomberg article here.

I’ve reached out to CDPR for comment and will update if I hear back.

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