CDPR STAFF KNEW ABOUT BUGS AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES BEFORE CYBERPUNK 2077 LAUNCH

A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier rejected most of Marcin Iwińsk’s claims and suggested that the company knew about bugs and performance issues before launch. The report titled “Inside Cyberpunk 2077’s Disastrous Rollout”, goes into detail about the work culture and how CDPR knowingly pushed for the launch of the game.

Schreier interviewed more than 20 current and ex-CDPR staff, about the implications of COVID-19 restrictions and difficulties with communication and production it caused. While most of the interviewed staff asked for anonymity, one ex-staff, Adrian Jakubiak who worked as Audio Programmer said that “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. I have some friends who lost their families because of this sort of shenanigans.”

The report briefly describes how the company’s mandatory overtime in the lead-up to a game’s release exhausted programmers and forced other coworkers to work extra hours to make up for those not wanting to work overtime. According to the report, troubles started showing up much earlier in Cyberpunk 2077’s development cycle. The company was working on building a new engine at the same time as the game was being built on it.

Former Witcher 3 developers left the project due to frequent clashes with game director Adam Badowski’s vision, who frequently requested big overhauls like changing the camera from third to first-person. Bringing those overhauls wasted precious programming hours and forced the team to re-write several lines of codes on a WIP engine which broke other things.

The employees Schreier interviewed also said that the management struggled to properly manage a team of more than 500 employees which was twice as large as The Witcher 3’s development team. Soon after Schreier’s report went live on Bloomberg, Adam Badowski tweeted out a response rejecting the idea of the fake E3 2018 demo, saying that “it reflects the non-linear process of game development and was labeled as a work in progress and the final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was.”