In a video on Twitter and a Q&A posted on the company’s website, CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński apologized for the state Cyberpunk 2077 launched in on consoles, shared a road map for updates to the game coming in the future, and said the studio would deliver these fixes “without any obligatory overtime.”
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Here’s the full video:
In it, Iwiński tries to address many of the criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 since its December 10 release, many of which have revolved around extremely poor performance on PS4 and Xbox One and the fact that the company seemingly tried to hide this version of the game from reviewers prior to release, despite the studio routinely downplaying concerns about how the game played on those platforms.
“Every extra day that we worked on the day zero update brought visible improvement [to the console version]—that’s why we started sending console review keys on the 8th December, which was later than we had originally planned,” Iwiński says. (In Kotaku’s case, a review code for console wasn’t received until December 9, the same day the game became playable in some regions.)
In trying to explain the gap in quality between the PC and console versions, Iwiński cites issues with trying to scale the game down to meet the restrictions of the older hardware. “We made it even more difficult for ourselves by first wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles—especially old-gens,” Iwiński says. “That was our core assumption. And things did not look super difficult at first, while we knew the hardware gap, ultimately, time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task.”
The CD Projekt Red join-CEO also shared the current timeline for Cyberpunk 2077's future fixes and updates. The next major patch is set to drop sometime in the next 10 days, while a second, larger patch is due in “the weeks after.” These fixes will delay the game’s first set of free DLC, which will now come sometime later in the year. The game’s next-gen upgrade for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S has also been pushed back from the first half of 2021 into the second half o the year.
In the Q&A, but not the video, CD Projekt Red says it won’t crunch to get these updates out. “The team is working to bring relevant fixes to the game without any obligatory overtime,” the studio writes. “Avoiding crunch on all of our future projects is one of our top priorities.” That aspirational language is much less definitive than the promises the studio made originally not to crunch during Cyberpunk 2077's initial development, promises it was revealed to have gone back on when Bloomberg reported in September of last year that developers on the game would be required to work six-day weeks up until it launched.