Cyberpunk Boss Apologises For Broken Game, Urges Fans Not To ‘Blame Teams’

The co-founder of the studio behind Cyberpunk 2077 has apologised for how broken the game was upon launch, asking gamers not to blame the development teams. 

The CD Projekt Red title hit consoles and PC back in December last year, after years of anticipation and a number of delays. After brief critical praise, the full extent of its buggy nature started to emerge from videos and testimony online; on old-generation consoles, it was often unplayable.

Triple AAA games often have day-one patches and a series of glitches at the point of release – it’s just the way it is. However, Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t fit for purpose, especially on earlier consoles, even provoking a class-action lawsuit and removal from the PlayStation Store indefinitely.

Check out a clip from the apology below: 

Marcin Iwiński, the studio’s co-founder, appeared in a video posted to the game’s Twitter account, offering a personal explanation for the events leading up to its release.

He said, ‘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 that.’

Iwiński continued, ‘Please don’t fault any of our teams for what happened. They are all incredibly talented and hard-working. Myself and the board are the final decision-makers and it was our call to release the game. Although, believe me, we never, ever intended for anything like this to happen. I assure you we’ll do our best to regain your trust.’

He discussed the game’s scale, illustrating the difficulty with ‘the multitude of custom objects, interacting systems, and mechanics… in the game, everything is not stretched out over flat terrain where we can make things less taxing hardware-wise, but condensed in one big city and in a relatively loading-free environment’.

The co-founder said, ‘On its own, this is a challenge, but we made it even more difficult for ourselves by wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles, especially old-gens. That was our core assumption.’

Iwiński added, ‘Since the city is so packed and the bandwith of [old-gen] is what it is, it constantly challenged us. 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.’

He later said, ‘This all happened while working from home with all the challenges resulting from the COVID-related restrictions. A lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email. And we took that hit too.’

As for incoming updates, the studio explained, ‘We are focused on fixing the bugs and crashes players are experiencing across every platform. You can expect more in the way of patches – both small and large – to be released regularly. The first update will drop in the next 10 days, and it will be followed by a larger, more significant update, in the weeks after.’

For next-gen players, a free update for PS5 and Xbox Series X will be made available in the second half of 2021.