Open your news feed on gaming today, and you’ll no doubt be greeted with headline after headline featuring Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt RED’s ambitious sci-fi RPG, which takes place in the fictional Night City, has consistently charted top of ‘most anticipated’ lists since it was originally announced almost eight years ago. With so much hype surrounding it, the developer’s first major title since The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt back in 2015 arguably never had a cat in hell’s chance of universally living up to expectations – an all too familiar outcome for many long-awaited releases.
The primary criticism here, however, isn’t in the realms of subjectivity, but rather has to do with the indisputably broken state in which Cyberpunk was rolled out to the masses. Disappointing performance, frequent bugs and outright game-breaking glitches have been widely reported ever since launch, leading to a monsoon of negativity on social media and other public platforms.
Having issued an apology to customers earlier this week, the studio has since opted to hold a conference call with investors to further address the disquiet as well as provide answers to how the current situation came to be. One fascinating response comes from joint-CEO and co-founder Michal Nowakowski, who reveals that the team “underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues” and “ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles.”
Furthermore, Nowakowski admits that the company “definitely did not spend enough time looking at [performance]” though stops short of saying the outcome was a result of external or internal pressures to meet deadlines. Nothing particularly surprising here, then, and for now, at least, console owners have little option other than to wait for promised patches to roll out over the next few weeks.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now available for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC, with Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions due to arrive early next year. Watch this space for more details.
