CD Projekt Red’s co-founder Marcin Iwiński addressed openly and honestly the gaming community explaining what happened to the studio that led to the release of Cyberpunk 2077 in such a bad shape and why they launched the game unfinished anyway. Marcin also revealed a Cyberpunk 2077 roadmap for the game’s next updates and patches throughout 2021. The Free DLC program is still in place and the promised Next-Gen consoles update will also be delivered, although with what seems to be a delay than what was originally announced and planned for. Let’s get into details!
Please note this article contains news information and citation from Marcin’s speech mixed with my analysis and personal viewpoints and opinions on several topics.
Late last night on January 13 (interesting date, hmm) CD Projekt’s co-founder and joint owner gave an honest speech in a video published by all official channels of the company.
Marcin’s speech and apology to the community
In that video Marcin talked about the state of Cyberpunk 2077, what the studio’s plans are for the game going forward and revealed a few details of what caused this weird, unpleasant and stressful situation that CDPR created on their own and put themselves in following the game’s release and the many technical and gameplay bugs the game had on day 1 ,despite the giant Day 1 Patch.
On the game’s official website cyberpunk.net we see a large flashing yellow banner with two simple words “our commitment”. So many journalists and content creators poured an incredible amount of negativity on the devs’ heads after the bad launch. CD Projekt Red had to come out and attempt to distance themselves from the other companies, who lead the bad and negative charges – EA, Bethesda and Ubisoft to name just a few. Of course, they never mentioned any of these names. But the idea behind the message was clear – we are not like the rest. We want to earn back your respect.
“When I started CD Projekt 25 years ago one of its founding principles was honest and direct communication with gamers.” – Marcin stated in the very beginning of his speech.
The studio that actually develops the games we love and play is CD Projekt Red. When it was created, “it added something important to that principle” – Marcin explained – “the ambition to make the best games in the world”.
This statement is still true for Cyberpunk 2077. The game’s world is incredibly detailed and it’s not true to realize how much attention the world designers pay to every little thing in Night City.
CD Projekt Red’s commitment to gamers remains unchanged, but their reputation is now seriously shaken up. Why?
Of course, silly things like police behavior and NPC’s reactions are not something to be proud of. In fact there is a clearly visible and drastic difference between the truly polished elements and the ones that were rushed to meet the deadline.
Years ago, in the game’s first teaser trailer and following interviews, CD Projekt Red kept insisting that the game will be released “when it’s ready”. Well, what changed in 2020 to force them to break this promise?
The game was ready for PC at least two months before the release date and even though it was not as polished as we hoped it would be, I think it was in a better shape than the launch version of The Witcher 3.
“I think that time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task” – Marcin’s honesty is refreshing and even though I still like this company and believe in them, I cannot close my eyes to the disastrous state they released the game for consoles.
I personally didn’t have nearly as many issues and bugs on my first playthrough (noticed a lot more on the second and third, weird, huh). After about 240 hours of playtime at this point, the game has crashed on me less than five times. I remember three, but want to round it up for convenience and to make sure I am not forgetting something.
Marcin accepted full responsibility and admitted that it was the board that made the decision to push the game. Why? To please the investors? Most likely. That is the widely popular opinion anyway. Marcin could never openly admit it, of course and he didn’t fully explain why they made this decision in his message.
I cannot stop thinking that it might have partially been our fault – “we” as in the gaming community. Remember the absurd death threats after the last delay? Remember the controversy and mockery the studio had to go through after delaying the game for 21 days? Nobody could tell what exactly can be done in three weeks time and why did they do it. It make little to no sense to me either.
Marcin said that they managed to fix a lot of the issues the game had on the older consoles in this time and brought it to a much more tolerable state. What the hell was the state of the game when it became Gold then? How much more broken could it have been on PS4 and Xbox One?
Marcin owned up to that by admitting that it was the board’s decision. “Please don’t fault any of our teams for what happened.” And a moment later he added that “it was our call to release the game”.
How many giant gaming companies you know that have done this? They messed up bad, but instead of laying low until the big patches start rolling and then pretend nothing bad happened, the head of the company came out to admit their own mistake and apologize.
In the middle of his speech Marcin turned it a little bit into a defensive reaction and his explanations sounded like excuses. I don’t think this is his intention. I have listened him talk in interviews for years and I think he is a good and straight-up guy.
Cyberpunk 2077 was designed and developed for PC first and later ported to consoles. As a PC gamer myself I absolutely admire and support that tradition. Because it really is a tradition for this studio. I think it’s always better to develop for the strongest platform and later port it to the more limited ones in terms of hardware and performance. But let’s not start a war now on “which platform is the best”. It’s not the topic of this article :)))
The devs underestimated the amount of time and effort they will require to ensure the game performs well on consoles and more specifically on the old generation. They failed at that. Badly. And Marcin owned up to their mistake.
I struggle to understand how can he say that they did not expect this to happen. Who tested their game during development? What kind of a QA was responsible for allowing this product to be released to consoles when it is so clearly unfinished and broken.
The incredibly limiting situation that “working from home” put most of us for the better part of 2020, was a big reason why CDPR could not deliver on their promises and their own expectations: “This all happened while working from home […] a lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email.”
So, if that was the case, why not push the game’s release for 2021? And here I go back to one of my earlier paragraphs in this article – the incredible pressure from the gaming community, the insane mockery they received for delaying the game a third time and last, but certainly not least – the demand from the investors who care more about profit than positive game reviews.
Launching the game in a bad state as they did, did not fix that for them. In fact the amount of mockery skyrocketed since December 10th. Then what? The investors’ demands. Those known and unknown entities that always drive the gaming world forward. Sadly, often to a cliff.
Pressure to release within the promised time frame was met, but quality was not. And as a result of that we now hear reports that CD Projekt Red has to deal with investors filing a class action suit against the studio for not delivering on the promises they made for the game’s quality and features that were teased and previewed during development.
Cyberpunk 2077 Roadmap for 2021
What is the future of Cyberpunk 2077 and what is confirmed as coming in 2021?
As you probably know, CD Projekt Red released three quick hotfixes before the Christmas Holiday. Updates 1.04, 1.05 and 1.06 all brought important and in some cases vital fixes mostly for the consoles versions, but the overall state of the game was improved on PCs as well.
Marcin shared a roadmap with the studio’s plans for the year 2021. As we know from previous announcements, there are two major patches coming in the first months of 2021.
CDPR’s ultimate goal right now is to fix the bugs and crashes before anything else. Bigger and smaller patches will be scattered throughout the year.
Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.1 is set to release within ten days, Marcin said. This gives them a deadline of January 23rd according to him. It will be the smaller one.
Patch 1.2 is expected to arrive in February, but Marcin did not announce that firmly. It will be coming “in the following weeks”. According to the “scale” of the roadmap image you see below, a target release date for end of February seems to be an accurate assumption. 1.2 will be much bigger in scope and will tackle more problems than the 1.1tone.
Beyond these two patches, there will be a long period during the months leading up to the next Christmas in which CD Projekt Red aims to deliver more updates, the Free DLCs packages and also release the promised Free Next-Gen Console update.
There’s still little to no info on what the contents of the Free DLCs will be, but based on what we got with The Witcher 3, I would expect these to be new iconic and legendary items, more armor sets and outfits and possibly some character skins.
Perhaps some of the DLCs will bring some new jobs for V to do while waiting for the first expansion to be released. I would not be surprised if one of the DLCs is a New Game Plus (NG+) mode. Cyberpunk 2077 has a severe limit of the amount of Attribute Points you can earn and use durign the course of the game and NG+ will unlock a huge amount of new builds and options to explore and experiment with. Most players never even filled their Cyberware slots in their first playthrough because of the stats requirements many of them have.
I firmly believe that fixing the silly Night City NPCs behavior and the ridiculous police mechanic will be part of the patches in between, not delivered as “free DLC”. It just wouldn’t be in CD Projekt Red’s style.
I somehow secretly hope that one of these DLCs will unlock the “deleted” 3rd person cinematics that the studio obviously couldn’t deliver for launch and masked their removal behind a decision to only allow you to play through 1st person, because of the immersion factor.
To be honest for me the immersion is completely broken because of the first-person cinematics. Especially where it was obvious that there was supposed to be a custom third-person animation in place instead of the awkward thing we got in the final game. Had I not known about these and not seen some of them during the promotional pre-release materials, I might have been OK with everything being in first-person.
According to the graphical presentation of the roadmap, we see that the DLCs are scheduled to start arriving some time around end of April or perhaps more realistically May. Marcin did state again that the studio will focus on fixing the bugs before releasing the DLCs.
Most likely the DLCs will be released in waves and not all together. Again – we have no information on that yet. It’s based on my previous experience and the graphical presentation of the roadmap.
The Free Next-Gen Console Update was expected in early 2021. Marcin confirmed that it is still set to be released in 2021, but is currently aiming for a second half of the year release window.
Beyond Cyberpunk 2077 and future plans
“Beyond Cyberpunk, we have many plans for the future, which we will share more about when we are ready.” – Marcin said. I admire that they are not covering up the mess with the launch of the game by talking about flashy and shiny things to come in the future.
Everybody is allowed to make mistakes. It’s important that they learn from them. CD Projekt Red made their first major mistake – releasing Cyberpunk 2077 at least three of four months before it was really ready.
The studio learned from that mistake and are not willing to talk about upcoming projects. You have probably heard of The Witcher 4 rumors. If not, then at least you know about the upcoming Cyberpunk Online experience for sure.
If they wanted to, they could have thrown a whole bunch of colorful announcements and statements to cover up the mess. Instead they did this. And not “they” as a faceless corporation (ha, I play too much Cyberpunk!), but the co-founder and co-owner himself stood in front of a camera and took it all upon himself.
There is no word at all about the online version of Cyberpunk 2077 in Marcin’s speech. None at all. The studio shared that this will be a separate project and will happen after Cyberpunk 2077 is released. No dates, no commitments, nothing has been officially revealed since then.
Not long ago some data mined info revealed bits and pieces of this upcoming online version, but nothing really worth talking about yet really. It seems it’s still way too early to talk about anything beyond rumors and expectations.
Cyberpunk 2077 will have two full expansions and we also know nothing about them at this point. They are also missing from the 2021 roadmap. This means that we should limit our expectations in terms of new content for the game this year. Unless the DLCs are actually offering new jobs, which is very possible indeed.
On the official site of the game CD Projekt Red also released this short statement just before the video with Marcin:
Dear gamers,
We are committed to fixing bugs and crashes and will continue to work and improve the game via future updates to make sure you are enjoying the game regardless of the platform.
We will use this space to inform you about the progress being made on Cyberpunk 2077’s further development, including information about updates and improvements, free DLCs, and more.
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.
Thank you
CD PROJEKT RED
You can hear and see Marcin Iwiński’s full message in the attached video below:
