Cyberpunk 2077 is the work of a much larger team than The Witcher 3, but employees claim that the studio did a poor job of organising communication between departments too often, the expanded headcount simply caused confusion. Another was to develop a new version of CD Projekt's REDengine alongside the game. One critical early misstep was to dismiss concerns about the challenges of delivering all this on PS4 and Xbox One, which even in 2016 were no match for dedicated gaming PCs. It's a game that invites serious and holistic reflection about how games of this stature are made, sold and played. But ultimately that is to consumers' advantage, inasmuch as it makes the limitations of its business model and creative culture impossible to ignore. As the studio's first non-Witcher project, and an RPG shooter based on a venerated '80s tabletop game to boot, it was always going to attract an extraordinary level of attention. CD Projekt's widely beloved The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was itself the product of a workplace culture that co-founder Marcin Iwinski has called insufficiently "humane".Ĭyberpunk 2077 just happens to be the specimen caught with its pants down, the strains of its creation only too apparent in its abundance of bugs and glitches.
Mismanagement, crunch, discrimination, issues around representation and questionable marketing tactics are endemic in big-budget game development. The unfortunate truth is that there is nothing unique about this game's circumstances. The second factor to keep in mind is that while Cyberpunk 2077's creation appears to have been especially blighted – whether you're talking about the transphobia of its marketing or the studio's culture of overwork – its notoriety is as much a question of visibility as anything. The danger is that the story of its redemption will eventually eclipse the lessons of its failures. As things stand today, it remains a game with many strengths, and CD Projekt has money to burn fixing up its weaknesses.
Given enough patching and expressions of regret, Cyberpunk 2077 may eventually even be deemed a success, a late-flowering Early Access title in all but name, similar to Fallout 76 and No Man's Sky. From the perspective of CD Projekt's management, the worst is arguably in the past now.
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