As Phantom Liberty cements Cyberpunk 2077's comeback, CDPR gets candid about its horrible launch: "We repeated a lot of mistakes we got away with on Witcher 3"

gamesradar.com:

Between a glowing Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty review wave and free, foundational changes in the 2.0 update, CDPR has finally made good on its troubled RPG's years-old promises.

In a newly released 75-minute documentary from Ard Media, multiple CD Projekt Red leads discuss Cyberpunk 2077's long comeback arc, particularly the disastrous launch that started it. The most enduring and damning moment of the launch is still probably Sony's decision to not only refund unhappy buyers, but totally remove the game from the PlayStation Store, such was the game's disrepair.  

"When you're very high, the fall is very painful," says quest director Paweł Sasko. "For me Phantom Liberty is the final word that we can say, and we can show basically what we want it to be, what we actually really wanted players to feel, what we wanted to give them, what the game was supposed to be." 

"I can try to explain what went wrong," he says elsewhere in the documentary. "I don't think one person has a complete, comprehensive view of everything that went wrong. One thing was that we just had too little time."

Studio head Adam Badowski admits that "from a distance we knew that we should spend more time polishing the tech of the game, give more time to the team, because the team is great." 

Level designer Miles Tost compares the project to The Witcher 3, which left CDPR riding high as an RPG powerhouse. "It's not like with The Witcher, where we did the third part," he says. "This was the first Cyberpunk game. It wasn't long before we wound up in the situation – together with developing the new IP and the story and how it was supposed to be – where we really couldn't find out for a long time how the game was supposed to work. What is Cyberpunk 2077,