Cyberpunk 2077 quest lead says early access wouldn't work for CDPR the way it did for Larian, and the studio prefers 'to have a banging release where everything is as close to perfection as can be' like Phantom Liberty's
Cyberpunk 2077 quest lead says early access wouldn't work for CDPR the way it did for Larian, and the studio prefers 'to have a banging release where everything is as close to perfection as can be' like Phantom Liberty's
Paweł Sasko says CDPR's ambition's don't include a Baldur's Gate 3-style early access period.
Cyberpunk 2077 is good now. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's great. One of the most calamitous launches in videogame history finally made good after a bevy of updates and the meaty Phantom Liberty expansion, a journey that's had some of us at PC Gamer asking if the game was actually just in a kind of warped early access for three years. Given that Baldur's Gate 3, our Game of the Year for 2023, had a long (and formal) early access period, we asked Phantom Liberty quest director Paweł Sasko at GDC if Cyberpunk might have benefited from the same thing.
"Maybe there is a way for AAA [games] to use early access," said Sasko, "but I would be cautious with that, just because there is a very specific situation with Larian here." For instance, it could draw on a pre-existing love for the Baldur's Gate series, whose games were "really big behemoths and important projects in the history of our industry," and pre-existing mechanics from Larian's own Divinity: Original Sin games.
All of which put Larian in a uniquely good spot for BG3's early access period, reckons Sasko, who noted that Larian was "really the first one that was really between this AA to AAA studio," before BG3's full launch catapulted them into "definitely AAA" territory.
"Not all early access games are successful," said Sasko, noting that Larian was "probably the first one really that had this much success with early access." So it shouldn't be taken as read that a similar pre-launch period would be successful for a Cyberpunk game. "I think that might be fairly difficult to recreate for everyone, really."
Instead, Sasko says CDPR's "ambition is to have a banging release, where everything is just as close to perfection as can be… pretty much as we shipped Phantom Liberty," which had a far smoother ride with its release than the Cyberpunk 2077 base game. Instead of an early access period, the studio prefers to leave itself time for "late discovery," a period towards the end of development during which devs can uncover flaws and bugs that are "obscure, and so hard to detect".
.
