In what’s certainly not the first instance of CD Projekt RED apologizing for the various launch problems experienced by Cyberpunk 2077 (and likely not the last), the studio has published a new video over on YouTube that goes into much greater detail about how and why events played out as they did.
In a rare show of genuine accountability in the industry, company co-founder Marcin Iwinski prefaces the statement by asking fans not to direct their criticisms at the people responsible for creating Night City, but upper management. Specifically, he explains that it was he, alongside the board of directors, who made the final call to release Cyberpunk 2077 despite its myriad issues, a decision, he admits, was a mistake.
A commendable show of humility, no doubt, but how exactly did such glaring problems go undetected in the first place? Truth be told, we still don’t know. Iwinski claims that initial pre-release testing never yielded results suggesting that crashes and bugs would be frequent, with those that were found believed to be amendable via patches.
As far as discrepancies between PC and console versions go, the obvious gulf between both in terms of hardware meant the team was constantly required to improve in-game streaming tech to ensure last-gen consoles could render everything the player sees on screen at once. These setbacks all indirectly contributed to the staggered release of review code between the platforms, says Iwinski, with staff working until the last minute to improve the day one experience.
Though hardly a scientific measurement of reception, the like to dislike ratio on the video suggests fans are willing to give CDPR a chance to fix their mistakes, even if it’s a process that takes the better part of a year to complete. But tell us, will you be revisiting Cyberpunk 2077 when all’s said and done, or have you already moved on? Let us know in the usual place below!
