Dev says CD Projekt morale 'took a significant hit' after Cyberpunk's launch, but it won't repeat mistakes with the next Witcher

pcgamer.com:

This is the year of Cyberpunk 2077's about-face. Between the game's wide-ranging 2.0 update and its slick Phantom Liberty expansion pack, most onlookers now agree that the game is—if not the awe-inspiring masterwork it was hyped up to be prior to release—pretty good. But over at CD Projekt, the game's disastrous launch still looms large in devs' memories, and they're keen to avoid a repeat performance.

So says Colin Walder, CD Projekt Red engineering director, in a chat with InvenGlobal. Walder told the outlet that morale at CDPR «took a significant hit» following Cyberpunk 2077's unhappy release. «Maintaining morale post-release,» said Walder, recalling the widespread disappointment of fans when they finally got their hands on the game in its early days, «was indeed a challenge». But hey, he says the studio's learned its lessons, and you—and CDP's devs—can expect a better launch for the next Witcher game, currently codenamed Polaris.

Walder says CDP now makes sure it's «on top of certain things from the start,» pointing specifically at the studio's development for consoles. «We need to make sure they're functioning from the get-go. For our next project, Polaris, we're already running our demos and internal reviews on the console from the very beginning.» That's something the studio only started paying attention to «later in Cyberpunk's development,» said Walder, which probably contributed to the game's terrible performance on console and its wholesale removal from the PlayStation store.

That might not sound enormously relevant to you and me here on PC Gamer dot com, but what's good for the goose is good for the gander, and a more robust development pipeline for CDP's future games should—at least in theory—work out