Original text from 07:30:
Jason Schreier reaffirmed his reputation as probably the most important gaming journalist of our time, when he managed, under the promise of anonymity, to obtain detailed testimonies from twenty current and former employees of the CD Projekt RED, so that with their help he told another of the raw stories about the painful development of the expected game. If you’ve read his past specials about games like Anthem or Mafia III, or his book Blood, sweat and pixels, then you have a very good idea of what elements these stories combine (especially in the case of Antem) with the story of the development and release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Although the game was announced in 2012, proper work began on it only in 2016 (after the completion of The Sorcerer 3), when studio director Adam Badowski largely “reset” the project. Until then, the game was supposed to be, among other things, from a third-person perspective. As in the development stories of other ambitious games, incompatible egos subsequently clashed here, with some leading developers imagining the story and gameplay differently than Badowski. There were resignations and departures, the basic building blocks of the game and its technology changed. In addition to changing the perspective on your own eyes, running on the walls or flying cars, for example, have been removed.
As with other ambitious games, incompatible egos clashed here.
At the same time, there was a huge emphasis on marketing and presentation of the game (especially “playable” E3 demos), which bit valuable time from the development of the game itself (this is undoubtedly known to the developers of such Kingdom Come: Deliverance, who did not have much choice because about their first game and something they just had to get the attention of the market). According to Jason, the E3 2018 Cyberpunk demo was largely “fake” and many of the systems on display in the game did not actually work. Police are just one of the things that came into being very late, while some developers confusedly asked management why their game should be both RPG and GTA at the same time, when they have only a fraction of the size of a team compared to Rockstar (GTA authors). At the same time, the executives mentioned Rockstar’s games as the target bar for quality.
The emphasis on marketing and presentations bit valuable time from the development of the game itself.
As it was a significantly different game from The Sorcerer, much of the technology was radically redesigned or even completely rebuilt from scratch. Every developer will confirm to you that this is exactly the worst-case scenario for the development of a large and complex game: at 2K Czech, we compared it to the production of a camera during the development of Mafia II, with which we are also trying to make a film. The developers from CDPR liken it to driving an unstoppably running train, but in front of which you also have to put tracks. When developers asked executives how to build the Cyberpunk 2077 in the same amount of time as the Sorcerers, when it’s a new IP and largely a new technology, the answer was strong reassurance.we will solve it on the fly„. The ego of some people in the company was completely out of the real world after the success of The Sorcerer 3. The creators of Anthem once relied on “The Magic of Bioware”, a kind of false certainty that with enough effort, everything will eventually be “somehow” managed, as in their previous games. CDPR had a similar situation at this stage.
Much of the technology has been radically redesigned.
Meanwhile, experienced developers in the studio watched with apprehension as the spinning marketing carousel and promised release date. When they objected to management that this simply could not be achieved, one of the arguments against their concerns was “when we’ve mastered Sorcerer 3, we can do this„. At the same time, developers were stepped up by pressure from management and colleagues to do more overtime – for some developers, this meant “optional” 13-hour shifts five days in a row and “if you want to go home, that colleague must stay here instead of you„. Unfortunately, we can easily imagine other things, but it is still overwhelming to read how some of their families have broken up due to their brutal work commitment. You may think that everyone had a choice, and so on, but anyone who has ever been in a similar situation knows how difficult it can be to get off such a train, especially when the management constantly promises you that you have the hardest time almost and that the reward will be worth it. Or if you really care about the game itself, from the heart.
“If we’ve mastered Sorcerer 3, we can do that, too.”
It is important to realize that CDPR is not really such a huge company (although at one time it was the most valuable company on the stock market in Poland). In Cyberpunk’s headlines, you’ll find about 500 developer names, which may seem massive, but in reality rival rulers of the open world game genre (Rockstar or Ubisoft) operate with teams that are several times larger, spread across many studios around the world and numbering thousands of developers. In addition, the CDPR was handled by about 240 developers, so part of Cyberpunk’s “birth” was the brutal growth of the team. Anyone who has experienced something like this knows very well that it is not time to teach all these new people properly and all the processes and coordination of the team gradually fall into more and more chaos. Veterans who came to help with the game from other studies could not believe “free-for-all” uncoordinated project management. One example for all: when someone needed a new shader, they just made it themselves. Without finding out if such a shader happened to be in the game – there was no process or tool in the studio for a similar check.
CDPR is not really such a huge company.
To make matters worse, many reinforcements have been recruited from abroad, because in Poland (as well as in the Czech Republic) it is of course not possible to find hundreds of high-quality developers at the flick of a finger. This resulted in some unpleasant incidents – the company ordered to conduct all meetings in English, but not everyone followed it (I know from practice that this often does not happen so deliberately, as simply because not all domestic veterans are in it with the English good enough). As a result, some foreign team members felt pushed or even slandered right in their presence. Not only the pace of work, but also the emotions in the studio were very demanding for many. The expats were often those who voluntarily resigned during development (although this may have meant extra complications with moving for them).
Some foreign members of the team felt pushed aside.
One of the practical implications of last year’s arrival of covid and quarantine was that developers (including testers) had to start working from home. However, for security reasons, they were not allowed to take development and test versions of the consoles with them, so they worked and tested on their PC stations. To some extent, this really made it impossible to identify problems with the console versions in full from the beginning, but external tests (probably at Sony and Microsoft) then clearly highlighted the problems.
Developers (including testers) had to start working from home.
The developers took it to some extent with foresight, because according to their estimates, due to the quarantine, the development slowed down so much that the game still could not be completed and come out before 2022. However, the company’s management saw it differently. Their goal was to “sell the game twice”, once in the first half of 2020 on the old console and a second time in the second half of 2020 on the new console (but always planned to provide the owners of the original version with a free upgrade). To the already existing problems with teamwork, a “barrier” of video conferencing and emails was added instead of meetings and classic face-to-face collaboration: a lot of other information and team dynamics fell victim to this.
The goal was to “sell the game twice”.
According to Jason, developers are sure that most technical errors or graphics problems in the game will be fixed. But there was not a word about possible improvements to the gameplay or the design itself. If you are one of those who were disappointed by the game on this site, you probably can’t expect it to miraculously turn into the game you imagined. On the other hand, things like character abilities or arsenals are likely to be balanced and tuned. In the gaming industry, there are stories of titles that, after an embarrassing start, managed to rise to the top of the genre – for all of them we can name Final Fantasy XIV, Destiny or No Man všechnys Sky (which also does not have a dizzyingly large development team). But as can be seen (survey on Zing, worldwide sales games), the peculiar game world of Cyberpunk with a flood of interesting details, unique characters and bigger and smaller stories has climbed to the top for many players, even with their birth problems. We will see when Sony recognizes it as sufficiently repaired and returns it to its online store. The value of CDPR shares has risen recently declaration the management of the studio began to pick up again.
CDPR’s management refused to provide answers or interviews with managers for Jason’s questions.
But because Jason talked about their reactions he asked, it is possible that apologetic video was a reaction / preparation to his article.
Update 21:00:
The director of the CDPR studio, Adam Badowski, a while ago responded on Twitter for an article. Among other things, he wrote:
“It is difficult for a demo game at the fair two years before its release, so that it is not a vision test or a vertical cross-section. This is also why it has been labeled “work in progress”. But that doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Compare this demo with the resulting game. The finished game looks and plays better than this demo. Missing features are a normal part of the development process, game features come and go, according to the results of our testing. As a result, our game won many nines and dozens from respected PC media from around the world. Old consoles are a different story, but we’ve acknowledged that and are working hard to fix it. We are at Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and we are proud of our artistic vision.
The article mentions that most developers knew about the impossibility of a release date in 2020. You spoke to 20 people, some no longer work with us, only one of them is not anonymous. I would not say that most of our 500 employees had the opinion you attribute to them.
Everyone here speaks English during the meetings, and every email sent en masse to the entire company is in English – we are required to do so. It is customary to switch to English whenever a colleague of another nationality is present, even during a non-work conversation. But it is normal for Germans to speak German, Poles to speak Polish, Spaniards to speak Spanish, and so on when no one is around. We are a multinational studio, we have 44 nationalities in the team. Yes, it’s hard to move and work in another country, or even another culture, but we’re doing what we can to make it easier for our employees. “
Jason thanked for the addition and recalled that the request for an official interview before the publication of the article was rejected.
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