After more than a month on the market, CD Projekt Red's co-founder Marcin Iwinski took to YouTube, apologizing for the state of their latest game, Cyberpunk 2077. The team also laid out a roadmap giving players an idea as to when they can expect updates and fixes coming to the game this year.
The studio's co-founder, in a new video, detailed some behind-the-scenes look in the studio around the launch, trying to describe the studio's process leading up the messy launch, taking ownership for the state of their game when it hit shelves on December 10th of last year.
"When I started CD Projekt 25 years ago, one of its founding principles was honest and direct communication with gamers," Iwinski says via the new video on the game's YouTube. "When CD PROJEKT RED, the game-development part of CD PROJEKT was born, it added something important to that principle: the ambition to make the best games in the world. It became our mission and something that guided us up until now. Based on that legacy of genuine and honest communication, you’ve trusted us and pre-ordered our game, and despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet. I, and the entire leadership team, are deeply sorry for this and this video is me publicly owning up to that. Please don't fault any of our teams for what happened. They all are incredibly talented and hard working. Myself and the board are the final decision makers and it was our call to release the game. Although, believe me, we never ever intended for anything like this to happen. I assure you that we will do our best to regain your trust."
Iwinksi mentions that while they set out to create their magnum opus across the breadth of hardware available to them.
"Cyberpunk 2077 is huge in scope, and I’m not only talking about quests or things you see at first glance, I’m talking about a multitude of custom objects, interacting systems and mechanics."
Iwinski goes on to state that they team made this harder on themselves by wanting to "make the game look epic on PCs and then by adjusting it to consoles - especially old-gens." However, this caused problems that the co-founder of CD Projekt Red says did not appear in their internal testing.
"Every change and improvement needed to be tested and, as it turned out, our testing did not show a big part of the issues you experienced while playing the game. As we got closer to the final release, we saw significant improvements each and every day, and we really believed we’d deliver in the final day zero update."
Iwinski also touches on the review embargo and timing, though doesn't really address the controversy surrounding the topic, specifically how CD Projekt Red restricted those who agreed to the early embargo from showing any of their own footage in video reviews. He does touch on review timing for console copy, stating that when the team did start sending console code on December 8th - after the PC reviews were live - it was later than they originally planned due to iterating on the Day Zero update for launch. Iwinski mentions working from home and the Covid-19 pandemic that rocked the world in 2020, stating that "a lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email. And we took that hit, too."
Iwinski also talks about the roadmap for what players can expect in 2021 from the studio, namely console players looking for the fixes the team has promised.
The roadmap published itself is, not surprisingly, devoid of actual hard dates, rather simply providing a small window into when players can kind of expect to see the updates. CDPR has already stated that Patch 1.1 and 1.2 for consoles should be coming this month and the next, but the team has also pushed back the batch of free DLCs planned for this year. Owners of the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles will be waiting even longer now for Cyberpunk 2077 to fully take advantage of the system, as the expected next-gen console update has been pushed to the "second half of 2021."
The Cyberpunk 2077 website has also been updated with a new FAQ section diving into a few of the many questions tossed around by gamers and critics alike since the game's unacceptable launch late last year. From the old-gen console versions being absolute train wrecks for some players, triggering seizures in at least one game reviewer, PC version's save files causing issues for those who dove into crafting , to the developers themselves questioning leadership over the launch, CDPR has its work cut out for them to gain back the trust of gamers themselves as they navigate 2021.
