Cyberpunk 2077 Developers Believed the 2020 Release Date Was a Joke

Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the biggest, if not the biggest, launch of 2020 in terms of videogames.

After several delays, the game released on December 10, 2020 but we now know it needed a few more months to fix some of its problems.

A new report sheds some light on what was on the mind of developers in the months prior.

Developers foresaw the disaster

Jason Schreier published a new report over on Bloomberg revealing a few more details on the development process leading to launch, based on his interviews with a couple of the development team members.

When the game's release date was announced, there were a good amount of people questioning that. One of them even asked during a meeting how could they be able to finish a more ambitious game with the same development time frame as The Witcher 3.

The report suggest problems started to come up after the studio focused on the development for this title in late 2016.

There was a lead change, the game's story and gameplay directions changed constantly, and people coming from The Witcher 3 had different opinions with the ones already working on the title at the time.

Crunch didn't help

While the game was being develop, we knew crunch was present in CDPR work culture and the company even acknowledged it.

The report details that although Marcin Iwinski told his staff that overtime was not mandatory, everyone felt pressure to do it by their coworkers or inmediate bosses.

"There were times when I would crunch up to 13 hours a day — a little bit over that was my record probably — and I would do five days a week working like that," revealed Adrian Jakubiak, a former audio programmer for the studio.

Having a bigger developer team didn't help to the cause. The game's credit shows that at least 500 people worked on the game, a few more compared to the 240 in-house members for The Witcher 3.

Update 1.1

The healing process for the game is under way, with update 1.1 being the next big patch coming to the game.

This one is set to launch soon and it will feature a lot of bug fixes, especially for last-gen consoles.

If you want to read everything about this, head over here.