The reorganization behind rescuing Cyberpunk 2077
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CD Projekt Red game director Gabe Amantangelo began his DICE 2024 keynote last week with an anecdote. He said that some months after the game's release, a local cafe staffer in Poland expressed concerns with the rocky launch of Cyberpunk 2077, in which she asked him, "What happened?"
Amantangelo admitted that given the game's turnaround and success, it's something that people can laugh about now.
The game director highlighted some of the pressures the Polish game developer faced regarding the release and post-release of the futuristic RPG.
"If you take it back to my colleagues, [they were] sort of kids out of college," he said. "My first job [was] working on this for four or five years, and you've got the pressures for trauma in the office. But also out of the office, your friends are asking you how are you doing now? That was the setting; there was a lot, in and out of the office. There's a lot of external negativity and trauma overall."
Amantangelo's keynote then turned to the studio, focusing on its staff's motivation and changing its development business operations.Among those points was restructuring how CD Projekt Red worked across its developmental departments. Having identified a significant pain point, Amantangelo said that the next challenge was implementing a pipeline.
"We had different product areas that we split up. We had the narrative area, the gameplay area, the world sandbox, and the arts center," he explained. "We also had other [areas] to deal with specific stuff, and we put a product owner in each one that then would be able to make [decision] calls."
He said that if a department head made a decision that conflicted with another lead's plan, this would create a conflict. Amantangelo explained that the next challenge was implementing a pipeline, allowing department heads to resolve conflicts more effectively during development. The game director says that the resolution was to
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