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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
So based on this video, Marcin Iwiński confirms that Cyberpunk 2077 [at the time, it was referred to as "Cyberpunk game/RPG"] was in development prior to 2012 - since this CD Projekt Red Summer Conference took place May 30th, 2012. Here is his quote from the beginning of the video:
Marcin Iwiński said:
"Until not so long ago, we only had one team; but I'm really pleased to announce that since quite some time, we have a second team and I'm talking about it for the first time today - and the second team is based on Witcher dev veterans, so these are really seasoned developers. The guys who were working on The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 - actually they have been working quite a few years - if you gather all the nights they spent at the office working on this, it would be a few real-time years that they have spent on this project - they are really seasoned developer's and they're working on a new, AAA RPG. So I suppose you'd like to find out about what RPG it is [...] a Cyberpunk game; but not just a regular Cyberpunk game, on "The" Cyberpunk game - that's really important to stress."
All of that is at the very beginning of the video and it's a very entertaining watch and might be new to many of you:
 

Potterson

Member
Oct 28, 2017
6,408
Yup. I remember visiting their studio for Witcher 3 hands-on and there was a studio tour and they've said they have a "secret project" on upper floor and no one could go there.
 

Deleted member 47654

user requested account closure
Banned
Sep 10, 2018
2,612
User banned (3 days): Trolling. Thread derail.
Bb-But Star Citizen!! 8 years!! SCAM!!

LOL, hope this help some haters to understand. But i doubt it.
 

Rocketz

Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,906
Metro Detroit
I mean the Title Reveal trailer came out 10/12/12 so of course they were working on it for a little bit before that.

 

Maligna

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,806
Canada
I've been waiting for this thing for soooo long. I was already going nuts. This delay feels bad, man. :(
 
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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
Yup. I remember visiting their studio for Witcher 3 hands-on and there was a studio tour and they've said they have a "secret project" on upper floor and no one could go there.
It would have been so cool if you could have gotten to see it in it's early stages. I imagine what they had then when you took the studio tour and what we will play are vastly different.
I mean the Title Reveal trailer came out 10/12/12 so of course they were working on it for a little bit before that.


Yeah I don't know if they had the title already set in stone when they announced that they were working on it at that Summer Conference in May of 2012. They were probably batting around several titles and settled on Cyberpunk 2077.
 

MattyG

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,031
Bb-But Star Citizen!! 8 years!! SCAM!!

LOL, hope this help some haters to understand. But i doubt it.
Lol what, what does this have to do with anything? People are skeptical of SC because they've been actively collecting tons of money for in game items for years with no end in sight
 

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,401
It would have been so cool if you could have gotten to see it in it's early stages. I imagine what they had then when you took the studio tour and what we will play are vastly different.

Yeah I don't know if they had the title already set in stone when they announced that they were working on it at that Summer Conference in May of 2012. They were probably batting around several titles and settled on Cyberpunk 2077.


They made an adaptation of Cyberpunk 2020. The title was settled the moment they convinced the license holder to let them use his property. All they did was push the year out far enough so it isn't laughable.
 
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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
Great, the delay put this game completely off my radar. Ill care again in 8 months
It's just weird to me that they're pushing it past Summer to September because they feel that Summer isn't a beneficial time to release a game. The game has been done and fully playable for over 2 months now and all that is left is bug fixing, polishing and tweaking. They should really release it July 7th, 2020 [20/7/7] as a lot of people have been saying for a while now, because not only does it give them time to finish, it gives them a release window all their own and like a summer blockbuster movie, there's lots of money to be made for them breaking precedent and releasing a AAA title during the summer time.
 

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,401
Bb-But Star Citizen!! 8 years!! SCAM!!

LOL, hope this help some haters to understand. But i doubt it.

I think you know that the long dev time is not what most people find off about Star Citizen.
To be fair too many people do complain about the long development time and don't mention anything else.


But not one thread that was created by an OP complained about that.




Every single OP complained about their continual fleecing of their community, feature creep, putting the project at risk by taking out loans which is doubly annoying because now they are legally obligated to cover the debts of those loans but are not obligated to deliver a finished product to their crowdfunding backers, to the blatant nepotism, to the reputation Chris Roberts has among game developers and the oldest press members as always being late, etc.


RSI has a lot of underlying structural issues that are publicly visible that should concern any backer.
 
Jan 15, 2018
840
I'd imagine they were prototyping ideas back then, as opposed to active development. Didn't they say that the big point of the teaser was to attract talent to come work on the game?
 
Nov 8, 2017
6,312
Stockholm, Sweden
I'm fine with the delay as long as the game benefits from it, but yeah it sure has been in development for a while now.

Bb-But Star Citizen!! 8 years!! SCAM!!

LOL, hope this help some haters to understand. But i doubt it.

One company has been nickel and diming their player base with in game ships for thousands of dollars without any end in sight, the other one released one highly critically acclaimed game during that time period and has a new game releasing in nine months, guess which one is which?
 
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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
I'd imagine they were prototyping ideas back then, as opposed to active development. Didn't they say that the big point of the teaser was to attract talent to come work on the game?
Oh absolutely! They used it as a springboard to get more people to come assist with the project - many hands make light work, after all.

As for it being in active development, Marcin Iwiński specifically states this in the 2012 video:
Marcin Iwiński said:
"Actually they have been working quite a few years - if you gather all the nights they spent at the office working on this, it would be a few real-time years that they have spent on this project."
 

Asbsand

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
9,901
Denmark
I think there's likely more than one Cyberpunk here, really. I know the original game director left in early 2018. The early E3 demos had a style and a voice that left people with bad tastes in their mouth (Just narratively). Sebastian Stepien was also a very high-up guy on Witcher 2 which had a much more cynical script than Witcher 3 did as well. I can't obviously confirm anything, and i have no insider knowledge so don't get it mixed, but I've always suspected the project was going one way, and then due to concerns with the reactions to some of its first public showings they started questioning Stepien's direction for the project, and he left the company soon after. I think there's multiple soft-reboots under this long development cycle.
 

Jessie

Member
Oct 27, 2017
9,921
I'm not feeling this game yet. I'm sure it's great, but the marketing isn't doing it for me. But I'm sure it's robust and worthy of 8 years development and everything. They just haven't convinced me yet.
 

Crossing Eden

Member
Oct 26, 2017
53,295
This is a bit misleading, the game was definitely in the pipeline for a long time but there's a difference, as it's highly likely that the engine, team, tools, etc. they're using to mark Cyberpunk weren't even properly created yet. 👀

Huge, ambitious AAA titles sometimes take huge AAA development time👍
That poster is just saying what I said in a much more snarky and sarcastic manner...FFV13 had a skeleton crew that barely got any prototypes off the ground until it was nearly cancelled in 2012 and development was rebooted and the team was reshuffled as the game was rebranded into FFXV.
 

Heid

Member
Jan 7, 2018
1,807
I mean in what capacity? Pre-production? Concept art and gameplay loop blocking stage...? Yeah probably?

Details from that vid tell me they were in the high concept stage and loads of stuff had to be cut down to be practical when they actually started building the game.
 
Jun 1, 2018
4,523
Bb-But Star Citizen!! 8 years!! SCAM!!

LOL, hope this help some haters to understand. But i doubt it.
People will still come into the star citizen threads and shitpost and driveby. Yet I have been telling them for years that CIG is actually also making two games (Star Citizen MMORPG and Squadron 42 Singleplayer game).

You never see those shitposts in Cyberpunk 2077 threads.
 
Jun 1, 2018
4,523
I'm fine with the delay as long as the game benefits from it, but yeah it sure has been in development for a while now.



One company has been nickel and diming their player base with in game ships for thousands of dollars without any end in sight, the other one released one highly critically acclaimed game during that time period and has a new game releasing in nine months, guess which one is which?
That is another uninformed driveby post. They have public roadmaps and are releasing updates every quarter.

also they had to built 5 studios around the world from SCRATCH. cd projekt red already had employees and a studio when they started development
 

elenarie

Game Developer
Verified
Jun 10, 2018
9,794
It won't be too long until games average 10 years, I suspect. Just insane.
You're not getting that from studios in countries with good pay. Especially not AAA studios. The costs of doing business would be too high.

What you may end up with is a small core team belonging to the core studio, with most of the work outsourced to low average pay countries.
 
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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
Doesn't help they probably started from the ground up multiple times.
Not necessarily from the ground up:
Marcin Iwiński 6/18/2018 said:
Yeah... But first of all, what does it mean to change direction, reboots? It is a creative process which is based on iteration. And if internally people at the studio are not happy with something they've been working on, and it takes three months or six months, being an independent developer and a—I really don't like the word publisher, but we are self-publishing—we have 100% of the fate in our hands. If we don't like something, we have no problem saying, 'OK, we have to redo this part.' It can mean we are throwing away six months of work, and there were bits and pieces happening like that.

If you look at it from a developer perspective, if someone's working on a certain level and he spends six months and thinks it's great, and then there's a decision to maybe change the direction, as I mentioned, people are unhappy. So there were different things visible on the outside. But that's just a part. At the end of the day, the days of real trial are these E3s, or Gamescoms, or the first time you reveal something because that's when we see hey, does it work, or maybe it doesn't work.

At the very end the only thing that's important is the quality. So if the quality's there and we need to iterate three years, we are lucky enough to be able to afford it first of all, so we have this capability and possibility... Sometimes if you hear something outside it might sound scary but I hope there are no fears anymore.
 

LabRat

Member
Mar 16, 2018
4,229
in development as in a couple story guys and concept artists were brainstorming about what a cyberpunk game could look like. i followed the games development very closely since 2012 and i remember there were interviews were they said they are testing prototypes for the new dialogue system and doing engine work in ~2013/2014. didn't we have this one insider who said the game almost got completly rebooted anyways in 2016? it's pretty obvious they went in a different direction because the game looks nothing like the 2012 teaser trailer plus the game changed game directors.
 

MrWindUpBird

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
3,686
To those of you trying to compare this to Star Citizen, there's a big difference here. Star Citizen has had their entire development team working on the game/modules. Cyberpunk 2077 from everything we have heard didn't start full on active development until after Blood and Wine shipped.
 
Nov 8, 2017
6,312
Stockholm, Sweden
That is another uninformed driveby post. They have public roadmaps and are releasing updates every quarter.

also they had to built 5 studios around the world from SCRATCH. cd projekt red already had employees and a studio when they started development

I actually kickstarted star citizen (which i regret) i am well ware of the roadmaps, but you can't really blame people who aren't familiar with it to think the game seems a bit fishy.

You never see those shitposts in Cyberpunk 2077 threads.

Cd projekt have actually released games, two of them critically acclaimed, they have proven themselves very capable, cloud imperium still has a lot to prove.
 

Firefly

Member
Jul 10, 2018
8,619
This is a bit misleading, the game was definitely in the pipeline for a long time but there's a difference, as it's highly likely that the engine, team, tools, etc. they're using to mark Cyberpunk weren't even properly created yet. 👀
Yeah "active" development is not the way to describe it when it was teased.
 

Dazraell

The Fallen
Oct 28, 2017
1,843
Poland
It wasn't the same Cyberpunk we will have in September, though. Yes, the game was in development since 2012, but it was in prototyping phase for years. As far as I'm aware, they had a smaller team that was working on it. Most of people at CDPR were working on The Witcher 3, which was their major project at that time. I remember reading somewhere that CD Projekt decided to completely reboot CP2077 in 2016 after releasing Blood and Wine.
 

Deleted member 46489

User requested account closure
Banned
Aug 7, 2018
1,979
It's just weird to me that they're pushing it past Summer to September because they feel that Summer isn't a beneficial time to release a game. The game has been done and fully playable for over 2 months now and all that is left is bug fixing, polishing and tweaking. They should really release it July 7th, 2020 [20/7/7] as a lot of people have been saying for a while now, because not only does it give them time to finish, it gives them a release window all their own and like a summer blockbuster movie, there's lots of money to be made for them breaking precedent and releasing a AAA title during the summer time.
Dude, they're pushing it to September because they NEED the time. The entire studio will crunch for this entire year to be able to release the game in September. What makes you think it's remotely possible for them to hit a July release date? Are you arguing for even worse crunch?

Also, a game being "fully playable" doesn't mean what you think it does. God of War was fully playable from start to finish on Dec 22, 2016. The game came out one and a half years later on April 20, 2018. Fully playable doesn't mean that all the art, mechanics, music etc. are done. It simply means some version of the game is playable from start to end, with placeholder assets in spots where the final assets are still being worked on.
 
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Black Chamber

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,811
United States
This is a bit misleading, the game was definitely in the pipeline for a long time but there's a difference, as it's highly likely that the engine, team, tools, etc. they're using to mark Cyberpunk weren't even properly created yet.
That doesn't mean that the game was in full development the whole time or that they didn't reboot development.
in development as in a couple story guys and concept artists were brainstorming about what a cyberpunk game could look like. i followed the games development very closely since 2012 and i remember there were interviews were they said they are testing prototypes for the new dialogue system and doing engine work in ~2013/2014. didn't we have this one insider who said the game almost got completly rebooted anyways in 2016? it's pretty obvious they went in a different direction because the game looks nothing like the 2012 teaser trailer plus the game changed game directors.
A lot of factors play into a game's development and a lot of things can change during the course of a game's development. Regardless of which, the project was started a couple of years prior to 2012 as Marcin Iwiński says in this video. What exactly was being done by this team? Nobody outside of CD Projekt Red knows; but if these "seasoned developers" were working "a few real-time years" on whatever it was - it had to be more than just concept art, previsualization and scripting.

Also they knew they would need to hire more people to expedite the project. I'm sure whatever they were working on initially is not going to look remotely the same as what we are going to play; but active development means that they were working on it in some capacity and this video proves that it was a few years prior to the announcement in 2012.
 
Oct 26, 2017
7,981
Does anyone know what he means by 'real time years'? I assume it doesn't mean actual years as he mentions working nights in relation to it.