What have The Witcher 4 or "Polaris" team learned from Cyberpunk 2077? Test on console early and avoid crunch

rockpapershotgun.com:

CD Projekt RED's Colin Walder, engineering director for management and audio, has shared a few thoughts on how the Polish developer's next Witcher RPG, codenamed Polaris, will improve on the cataclysmic development of Cyberpunk 2077. There's not a lot to share at this stage, of course, but what there is sounds like a step in the right direction.

Speaking at the Inven Game Conference in Pangyo, South Korea, Walder opened with some reflections on Cyberpunk 2077's notoriously rocky creation, which he summarised as a series of headlong races to hit various milestones (you can't have a "rocky" creation without "milestones", after all - haha, I slay myself). "We had these series of demos, 2018, 2019, the E3 demos, and then the 2020 release," Walder said. "Every time we delivered something, it was intense. It was always like, 'Okay, how are we going to do this?' And then, somehow, we achieved that."

"This isn't just something that happened at CD Projekt," he added. "It's been throughout my whole career." Game development is uneven at the best of times, he noted. "No one can predict everything that's going to happen until it actually happens, and then you can see it, right? Then you can really face it, and hindsight is always better for being able to say, 'Okay, this went wrong because of XYZ, so let's make some changes.'"

So what changes are CD Projekt making with the new Witcher game, whatever it's called? "It's about ensuring we're on top of certain things from the start," Walder explained. "Take consoles, for example; 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. This is a step we