In a video released by CD Projekt Red today, Polish game developer co-founder Marcin Iwiński has made a public apology for the weaker PS4 and Xbox One performance of Cyberpunk 2077, as well as explaining some of the difficulties leading up to the game’s launch.
Opening, referring to Project Red’s policy of being honest with its customers, Iwiński says he and the entire management team are “deeply sorry” how the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the game “did not meet the quality standard. [CDPR] would like to meet “.
Furthermore, he asks viewers not to blame the development teams for what happened, but instead states that the blame should be borne by Iwiński himself and the board, whose final decision was to release the game in its current state.
Dear players, Below you will find CD PROJEKT̵
7;s co – founders’ personal explanation of what the days leading up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 looked like, as they shared the studio’s perspective on what happened to the game on old generation consoles. pic.twitter.com/XjdCKizewq January 13, 2021
Iwiński goes on to mention a few of the hardware and technical roadblocks that the team encountered in later stages of development, mentioning in particular their misleading approach to “wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adapting it” for consoles – especially old gens “and underestimation of the hardware gap.
The co-founder then moves on to the company’s future plans and commitment to address the issue – “our ultimate goal is to correct the bugs and crashes that players experience across platforms, please expect major and minor patches on a regular basis”.
To that end, Iwiński presents a roadmap for next year showing CDPR’s plans to roll out patches 1.1 and 1.2 in the coming weeks before launching a series of updates, enhancements, free DLC content and a free next-generation console upgrade in the second half of 2021.
This means that the free DLC, which seemed to drop early in the year, might be kept a little longer to prioritize more critical patches for game fixation.
For more details on the progress made with Cyberpunk 2077’s further development, including information on updates and enhancements, free DLCs and more, visit https://t.co/vfY3xxCM1G pic.twitter.com/6U28q8pcVHJanuary 13, 2021
Balance between delays and expectations
Not least thanks to the widespread recognition and success of CDPR’s former AAA title, The Witcher 3, which was a huge amount of hype surrounding the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which was first announced to the world in May 2012 with a teaser trailer that arrived in January 2013.
This expectation from society combined with the studio’s big vision of the scope of the game and its open nature created enormous pressure during development, and staff worked overtime towards the end of the cycle as the game experienced several delays.
With the game in the pipeline for such a long time, and more release windows being pushed back, the dev company had to weigh the loss of community support it would receive to further delay the title release (especially given the timing of the launch of the next generation console ) and polishing the game to an acceptable standard.
Now given the offer of full refund of certain versions of the game and the mixed critical reception, it may have ultimately paid off for CDPR to delay the release of Cyberpunk 2077 even more until some time in 2021.
