Cyberpunk 2077 team morale took "significant hit" following release, developer says

John Elden Ring

The Thread Maker
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5 Jul 2022
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United States
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After Cyberpunk 2077's much anticipated release in 2020 failed to live up to expectations, the team's morale took a "significant hit".

That's according to Colin Walder, an engineering director at CD Projekt Red with over 15 years of experience in the games industry, who previously worked on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Rockstar titles Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5. Walder recently spoke to invenglobal at the Inven Game Conference in South Korea, where he discussed lessons learned from Cyberpunk 2077.

"This approach we had, the way we were working production-wise, creating demos, and moving towards an agile mindset and workflow - it's about ensuring we're on top of certain things from the start," Walder said. "Take consoles, for example; we need to make sure they're functioning from the get-go. For our next project, Polaris [part of a new trilogy of games in CDPR's Witcher series], we're already running our demos and internal reviews on the console from the very beginning."

Walder admitted: "This is a step we only took later in Cyberpunk's development."
 

Swolf712

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29 Jun 2022
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Wisconsin, USA
Releasing in that state, I'm not surprised.

What's sad is that management were the ones who really needed to feel the heat., given they were running around liking posts about how "all games release broken so Cyberpunk is getting unfair treatment" or insulting people critical of the game. Then later liking the "Cyberpunk was NEVER bad/ALWAYS good" post wave after the anime dropped and people had collective memory loss for some reason.