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GameAddict411

Member
Oct 26, 2017
8,513
With the first gameplay trailer, people on forums already pointed out that this game must be targeting next gen. It looked a head and shoulders above anything else on XB1/PS4. The whole story just reads of persistent overambition and disorganization.

They should have delayed into 2022 to launch exclusively on the new consoles and PC. Release a polished $10 prologue in 2021 to whet fans' appetite and maintain funds.

Just imagine what it could have been without the shackles of a 5400 rpm HDD and a Jaguar CPU
I agree. It would have been a current gen exclusive. Also the cut content would have probably made it. With much better level of polish. I am currently still playing the game. I actually had an overall a good experience. but there is this nagging feeling that the game just had so much potential to be better then what it is now. What a shame.
 
Oct 25, 2017
7,318
The end of the article took me by surprise, I was waiting for it to go into stuff that we hadn't already heard or assumed.
 

Conditional-Pancakes

The GIFs of Us
Member
Jun 25, 2020
10,826
the wilderness
That's actually a pretty good article. Lots of details.

Studio head Adam Badowski took over as director, demanding overhauls to Cyberpunk's gameplay and story. For the next year, everything was changing, including fundamental elements like the game-play perspective. Top staff who had worked on The Witcher 3 had strong opinions on how Cyberpunk should be made, which clashed with Badowski and lead to the eventual departure of several top developers.
Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077's ambition and scale. What they didn't know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn't yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game.
"There were times when I would crunch up to 13 hours a day — a little bit over that was my record probably — and I would do five days a week working like that," said Jakubiak, the former audio programmer, adding that he quit the company after getting married. "I have some friends who lost their families because of these sort of shenanigans."
The overtime didn't make development of the game any faster. At E3 in June 2019, CD Projekt announced that the game would come out on April 16, 2020. Fans were elated, but internally, some members of the team could only scratch their heads, wondering how they could possibly finish the game by then. One person said they thought the date was a joke. Based on the team's progress, they expected the game to be ready in 2022. Developers created memes about the game getting delayed, making bets on when it would happen.
There were also cultural barriers brought about by hiring expats from the U.S. and Western Europe. The studio mandated everyone speak English during meetings with non-Polish speakers, but not everyone followed the rules.
As the launch date drew closer, everyone at the studio knew the game was in rough shape and needed more time, according to several people familiar with the development. Chunks of dialogue were missing. Some actions didn't work properly. When management announced in October that the game had "gone gold" — that it was ready to be pressed to discs — there were still major bugs being discovered. The game was delayed another three weeks as exhausted programmers scrambled to fix as much as they could.
 

Le Dude

Member
May 16, 2018
4,709
USA
Wait guys, the article got delayed, it's light on content . . . It's a metaphor for the game, just wait for the full content to be patched in. Only thing it's missing are bugs (typos).
 

entremet

You wouldn't toast a NES cartridge
Member
Oct 26, 2017
59,991
Yeah, like no offense to Jason and it is well written and interesting, but it's pretty much just a reiteration of what was already known?

EDIT: And are we still trying to keep Cyberpunk threads to a minimum, if so since this doesn't have any real news shouldn't it just be discussed in the OT?
Would would this have to with the OT at all, though. OT is a gaming thread. This about the studio.
 

Aangster

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,616
lol....
I mean I get it when companies sometimes make "fake" trailers to hide story and gameplay details. But to do a fake demo, wasting months.....
Just wow. Talk about misleading and lying to everyone. Fans, media, customers, etc.

Demos being made just for E3 showcases are more common than you think. These things will easily break the moment a player moves outside of the designated play script. Halo 2, Watch Dogs at 2013 (the revelation on what it actually was running on hinted by Digital Foundry is yet to be revealed), and Anthem's 2017 E3 demo are great examples that come to mind.

In regards to the article content, I mean what kind of juicy revelations are we really expecting? The actual cut content can be inferred from datamining, this is just classic project mismanagement from CDPR's leadership team with Adam Badowski looking incredibly stupid.
 

Serene

Community Resettler
Member
Oct 25, 2017
52,522
I also think the comparison Jason makes to NMS and FFXIV are kind of disingenuous without the explanation of what makes a narrative RPG different from those games and why "turning it around" is a significantly different proposition.
 

Hella

Member
Oct 27, 2017
23,397
Was a good read, but I also thought this was gonna be a much bigger, deeper dive into the state and development Cyberpunk. Feels kinda like a truncated version of one because it hits all the same points, but is a lot more brief overall.


In any case, I love that he managed to get the tiny trees bug mentioned in the article.


It's so wild.
I also think the comparison Jason makes to NMS and FFXIV are kind of disingenuous without the explanation of what makes a narrative RPG different from those games and why "turning it around" is a significantly different proposition.
It's a game the company can't afford to have fail, so in that sense I think the comparison works. I don't see it happening, personally, but if an MMO like FFXIV can do it without even shutting down it's not fair of me to say it's impossible.

...It just takes good management.
 

defaltoption

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
11,483
Austin
Good read but I definitely expected a longer deeper article. Though the story isn't over so it's likely to only be the beginning of a story like this.
 

samred

Amico fun conversationalist
Member
Nov 4, 2017
2,584
Seattle, WA


Also, as someone who attended and reported on that E3 2018 behind-closed-doors demo... I'm steamed yet completely unsurprised. This may be a last-straw jolt for at least a few members of the press when it comes to publisher promises about non-playable demos.
 
Oct 25, 2017
11,264
WOW
CD Projekt announced that the game would come out on April 16, 2020. Fans were elated, but internally, some members of the team could only scratch their heads, wondering how they could possibly finish the game by then. One person said they thought the date was a joke. Based on the team's progress, they expected the game to be ready in 2022. Developers created memes about the game getting delayed, making bets on when it would happen.
 

HardRojo

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
26,096
Peru
Are E3 demos ever not fake?
You got quite a few, actually. Off the top of my head you got Skyward Sword, which failed live, then Uncharted 4, which also failed live and to an extent I'd say God of War because it represented the game we got and Cory Barlog played it live.
Ah, there was TLoU too back in 2012 I believe, it was played live too.
 

MarcoGorgar

Member
Oct 27, 2017
886
Rio de Janeiro
"Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077's ambition and scale. What they didn't know was that the demo was almost entirely fake. CD Projekt hadn't yet finalized and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product. Developers said they felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone toward making the game. "


Full development didnt start until 2016?!

WOW, just WOW.

Its Anthem plus Bioware magic again.
 

Viale

▲ Legend ▲
Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,614
Right. Has Jason written bigger pieces like the Anthem one for Bloomberg?

It's certainly possible that he's encouraged to go more high level now considering Bloomberg appeals to a different audience. The example about the shader in his tweet for instance would have been an interesting story to share, which I presume was cut because the target audience may not care as much about that maybe?

Wonder if I'll have to mostly wait for his next book to get more of the deep dives I like from him.
 

bsigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
22,542
Just kinda reads like everything we already knew. It was a poorly managed title with too big of an ambition that CDPR couldn't reign in and now they're suffering because of it.
 

JEH

Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,210
funnily enough this article seems unfinished and pushed out the door early.
 

fr0st

Member
Oct 28, 2017
4,485
Great article but it feels like we already know a lot of this or were speculating that these were happening
 

IIFloodyII

Member
Oct 26, 2017
23,954
Only thing that really jumped out as new was they don't know what it'll take for Sony to put it back on the store. Most of this was known already wasn't it? By Jason's articles or maybe some of it was just rumored and I'm blurring it.
 

Adam Tyner

Member
Oct 25, 2017
915
Has Jason written bigger pieces like the Anthem one for Bloomberg?
Not that I can recall. And I think that has to be the core of the issue. At Kotaku, he was writing for an audience of rabid gamers who love getting deep in the weeds. Bloomberg has a different audience, which I'm sure is part of the reason why his voice reads so differently now.
 

Septy

Prophet of Truth
Member
Nov 29, 2017
4,081
United States
You got quite a few, actually. Off the top of my head you got Skyward Sword, which failed live, then Uncharted 4, which also failed live and to an extent I'd say God of War because it represented the game we got and Cory Barlog played it live.
Ah, there was TLoU too back in 2012 I believe, it was played live too.


Ha forgot about that. People really thought it was running on a PS4.
 

metsallica

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
11,691
You got quite a few, actually. Off the top of my head you got Skyward Sword, which failed live, then Uncharted 4, which also failed live and to an extent I'd say God of War because it represented the game we got and Cory Barlog played it live.
Ah, there was TLoU too back in 2012 I believe, it was played live too.
I think you're using fake differently here. They're often a vertical slice, or something that has to be played specifically lest it come tumbling down like a house of cards. Extremely common for E3, whether the demo is public or behind closed doors. The Cyberpunk demo was playable. And playable doesn't just mean "by the press."
 

Prompto

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,982
Wow at that whole demo being essentially fake. Assuming E3 is back next year, games media should probably stop with "Best of E3" awards unless they actually play a game hands on for a significant amount of time
 

Deleted member 11976

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
7,585
The "we can do massive, fully-featured urbanized open world games — we did the witcher!" bit is hilarious. (This is me paraphrasing.) You need thousands of developers and more than 8 years to do that. Nothing really new in this article but I expect he's got enough material for several more in-depth pieces if he spoke to over 20 CDPR sources.