A hot potato: It's no secret that while Cyberpunk 2077 received mostly positive reviews on PC, the Xbox One and PS4 versions were heavily criticized for the slew of problems specific to the platforms. Now, CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwiński has released a video apologizing for the state of the game on the last-gen machines while explaining what went wrong.
"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 this," said Iwiński.
As most people speculated, it appears that CD Projekt Red bit off more than it could chew when bringing a game as ambitious as Cyberpunk 2077 to old-gen consoles. Iwiński cites the "multitude of custom objects, interacting systems, and mechanics" all packed into a city with almost no loading times as a challenge for the the PS4/Xbox One X and their limited bandwidth.
"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 are experiencing while playing the game [on last-gen hardware]. As we got closer to the final release, we saw significant improvements each and every day, and we really believed we would deliver in the final day zero update."
Developing Cyberpunk 2077, which was delayed three times, was made more problematic by Covid-19 and having to work from home. "A lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email. And we took that hit too," explained Iwiński.
The video does raise some questions. Iwiński claims that CDPR's testing didn't show many of the problems experienced by players, which seems surprising given how many there are, as does the belief that it could fix all these issues via a day-one patch.
In addition to the apology, the video reveals Cyberpunk 2077's roadmap. The free DLC is coming, but the priority right now is to keep patching the game. The v1.1 patch lands in the next 10 days while the v1.2 patch arrives a few weeks later. The shifting focus means the PS5/XBSX versions have been pushed back to sometime during the second half of 2021.
According to Valve's stats, Cyberpunk 2077 has lost 79 percent of its Steam players since launch, three times faster than The Witcher 3. It'll be interesting to see if the patches and DLC draw back lapsed players.