Cyberpunk 2 director says CP 2077's catastrophic launch 'crushed' the developers and the subsequent redemption arc was basically 'group therapy'
Cyberpunk 2077's release was described by PC Gamer's online editor Fraser Brown as among "the highest-profile launch disasters in videogame history", and it really was bad times. After years of white-hot hype, CP2077 arrived with major technical issues and bugs across all platforms, with things so bad on PlayStation that Sony took the unprecedented step of removing the game from its store.
CD Projekt Red, beloved and much-garlanded for its Witcher series, found itself in a new position: pilloried from all sides. Given the length of the game's development cycle, many staff had been heads-down on this for years and, regardless of whether the blowback was proportionate, it must have been devastating to be in the eye of the hurricane.
Cyberpunk 2 and Phantom Liberty director Pawel Sasko recently gave an interview to podcast Flow Games (spotted by GR+) in which he goes over this period, and begins by describing the reception as «absolutely crushing» for the development team.
«I know how success feels because I've already shipped games that were really cherished,» says Sasko, who was a quest designer on The Witcher 3. «And then you have members in our team who had never experienced that. For me, that was probably the worst aspect of it, seeing the people in the team crushed by that… we took it really bad in general.»
Nevertheless CDPR decided that it had to not only confront the immediate issues, but eventually get Cyberpunk 2077 to a place where players were much happier. Sasko calls the early patches 1.2 and 1.3 «stepping stones» focused on fixing «a lot» of the technical issues, which were obviously important but not the kind of thing that grabs headlines or changes the wider perception of the game. By the time of 1.5 Sasko was beginning to feel like things were turning a corner, but the audience feedback still came across like the developers were being praised for finishing «seventh in a marathon.»
Oddly enough, Sasko feels that what made the biggest difference was
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