“We knew we were in deep trouble.”
Preparations ramped up for the pending “re-reveal” that summer.
beep
The promise was clear: a rich adaptation of a tabletop cult-hit.
In fact that wasquite literally the promiseCD Projekt Red made.
And as The Witcher 3 arrived, with unanimous acclaim, that promise began to look quite special.
What followed was one of the most disastrous launches in video games.
An extended period of crunch.
But fast forward four more years to today, and that moment almost feels like ancient history.
Cyberpunk 2077, and its critically acclaimed expansionPhantom Liberty, have sold tens of millions of copies.
There are few complaints about performance or bugs.
There’s a popular Netflix anime, Edgerunners, and another show,recently teased, on the way.
Cyberpunk 2077 has risen from the dead.
This is the story of what happened, and how CD Projekt Red brought it back to life.
It took until June 2016 for development to really begin in earnest.
Less a show of pride, it seems to me, and more a point of resilience.
RED Engine 4 “was written almost from zero,” Sasko says.
But it’s not something we had planned."
Sorry to all those offended by one of the responses sent out from our account earlier.
Harming anyone was never our intention.
It combined with the controversies to create an unprecedented amount of pre-release noise.
More pertinently to the fate of the game itself, that noise fed back into the team.
“I’ve never, ever experienced this level of hype around a game,” Grabowski says.
It did nothing to slow down the momentum.
The hype was enough to stretch the studio on the communications side.
And that meant additional workload," Grabowski continues.
Delays added to that again.
“It was really easy to get caught up in the hype,” Momot says.
I think we felt that excitement, internally, as well.
“Sure there were some concerns,” he adds.
“As usual with every project that we have, there are obviously those reality-checkers, right?
Like, ‘Will we be able to deliver, is it really going to happen?’
But it was exciting.”
What happened next has been well documented.
At first, Cyberpunk 2077’s hype spilled over into the initial moments of its release.
Marcin Momot describes a period of initial positivity, as the game first went live.
The next closest at the time wasFallout 4, in 2015, with less than half that figure.
That was heartwarming."
There was already talk of bugs filtering back, he says, but this wasn’t unexpected.
He’s not wrong.
“I was thinking: we’re gonna fix it.”
At the time, the engine team’s task was vast.
“The game was massive,” he says.
“Massive amount of content.
(I/O refers to the reading and writing input and output of information to and from a drive.)
Yet the team remained steadfastly confident they’d sort the issue in time.
It was the same with The Witcher 3 - super focused, still working on the project.”
Then came that pandemic, and at each moment the magic fix remained just slightly out of reach.
But to their dismay, still no solution came.
“Until the end, we were fighting, fighting, fighting, and then, yeah.
What happened, happened,” he says, with some detectable frustration.
And those remaining issues were much bigger than anyone at CD Projekt Red had realised.
The moment was “really heartbreaking,” he continues.
Or they hadn’t shipped a game that was broadly acclaimed as a huge success.
These are big games - sometimes 12 years, you know, depending on where you are.
I think that was the hardest part.
I wanted them to be part of that success."
It’s bound to leave a mark on you."
Momot describes his feelings then as “devastated.
Because it’s like: okay, everyone is bashing you.
The hits are coming from all angles.
What can you do?
That’s the feeling I had.”
The backdrop at the time was the Christmas period, as Covid continued to rage.
“Lots of festivities.
Home Alone is on the TV.
And you’re feeling like crap inside.
And I definitely wouldn’t want to go back to that place.
It was not a pretty place.
And it was really, personally, hitting, you know, my soul.
It doesn’t make you feel happy.”
That’s not to say he didn’t understand the reasons for it, he adds.
“We did wrong and you have to own up to it and make changes based on that.”
It was difficult for him, he says, “because you feel personally responsible.
So for sure not great.”
We tried to say that very, very, very early on."
“They were just burned.
Some people decided to leave.
Some people stayed for a little bit, and decided to leave later on.”
A lot of people stayed through."
Company-wide inquiries will also naturally have an effect on refining the narrative.
Nevertheless, each response I get seems clearly tinged with personal experience.
There is “no one answer,” as I’m told time and time again.
Still, there are several issues combined that continue to come up.
“This is the number one issue,” Tremblay says.
“Number one issue for all the funny bugs that you saw, it’s usually this.”
This was mostly because of the game’s size, and what it let you do.
Everything is actually streamed - you go in the elevator, there is no fake loading.
The whole system is always running, it’s the same seamless system for everything."
There were other issues, however, that contributed nearly as much.
“What do you prefer?”
“We prefer not to hard crash.”
And so: many, many T-poses.
just, just, just, we need to reproduce this internally."
It’s an unusual title and an unusual role.
“That’s fair, that’s a nice assessment.
But I’m also thinking Uhura.
You know, the communications officer.
The character might’ve been wrong, but I was on the money with pinning her as a Trekkie.
So we were preparing… but then it hits, and people get to work.”
“It was literally, ‘Oh there’s this AVX crash, what do we do?’
Okay, so I talked to programmers: ‘Do we reply to players to just confirm it?
Do we need to write something about it?’
Of course like everyone in the company, it was very emotional for us, and difficult.
It calls back to the issues Tremblay cited above: “it’s the question of complexity.
The number of possibilities is so big.”
Likewise, its where the studio leadership pins a major portion of the struggles.
But Covid’s impact was undeniable.
Of human interactions, and very intangible small things happening.
For some matters, it’s actually tricky…
I think a lot was lost there.
More than we probably thought at a given moment in time.”
Meetings became “super awkward,” Tremblay says, recounting the early-pandemic teleconferencing woes many experienced.
Certain people began “dominating” calls because the natural flow of in-person interruptions didn’t arise.
Some people lacked cameras, adding to the confusion.
“You had no idea if they were there, like ‘Hey David, are you there?
[long pause] ‘Oh yeah I’m here’.
“It takes the whole night to download anything,” Tremblay says.
The team tried streaming the game to their homes instead.
Other issues, though, were directly of the studios own making.
All fall under what Nowakowski describes to me plainly as “the way we developed games”.
“Well come on, we want to have the best product we can for the machine.”
Another was communication, an issue exacerbated by Covid and, notably, the studio’s rapid growth.
“All layered over with actual continuous growth of the studio,” he continues.
In a way it was a consequence of this natural growth.
Sasko gives another example.
“We were using ‘waterfall’,” he explains, naming a specific kind of development methodology.
“In short, waterfall is when you just make one thing after another.
But issues arise when working at scale, Sasko continues.
You think that everyone’s kind of on the same page with you and you start creating silos.”
This was the case on Cyberpunk 2077, even as internal reviews tracked each team’s progress.
“We had a review focused on gameplay.
A review focused on narrative.
Review focused on art.
A review focused on music.”
Lessons and progress from each one rarely overlapped.
The second was sheer exhaustion.
“The team was really, really tired,” Nowakowski says.
“You could almost feel that people just wanted some sort of closure.
It turned out that, because we didn’t, it was probably even harder.
And we didn’t realise we were in so much trouble, I think, most importantly.
Altogether, it made for a damaging cocktail that couldn’t be unstirred.
Eventually, CD Projekt Red had at last realised what the problems were.
Exhausted and crestfallen, the team took time to reset over Christmas and New Year.
One of CD Projekt Red’s key solutions to its biggest technical problem came from bin bags.
The downside is it’s much more complicated to trace a solution when something goes wrong.
The strike teams effectively tested out another broader solution to the studio’s issues.
Eventually, Tremblay and the team found a solution to the streaming issues.
After a lot of work optimising as best it could, the team had to start getting creative.
Then, “‘Okay, no one’s panicking, therefore no one’s actually realising.'”
Enter the bin bags.
Well, we reduced the quality a little bit, and I think it was acceptable.”
Meanwhile, the company began the process of figuring out how to work together properly.
Sarah Grummer mentions “coaches”, who came in to look at working practices.
There’s an environment artist, concept artist, VFX, cinematic animator, QA.
There’s like 22 disciplines, I think that we had at the end in that one pod.”
Console versions “working super late” are now “unacceptable,” Tremblay adds.
The process is applied across all of the studio’s upcoming games.
If one platform isn’t working, the team stops until it gets it right.
Lastly, there was one big decision left to make: the dropping of the previous generation of consoles.
“We simply couldn’t deliver the vision we wanted to on the PS4,” he continues.
“That’s the reality of it.
We had to either focus, or try and potentially fail with the past gens as well.
And we didn’t want to repeat that.
With that final admission, it seemed like CD Projekt Red had finally come to understand its limits.
In doing so, it might have saved itself.
“We have to face it and learn from it,” Nowakowski says.
All of this sounds simple on paper.
In some senses it is.
“It sounds a bit stupid,” Sarah Grummer admits to me.
“It’s like, ‘Why didn’t you do this before?!’
If you look at this, it’s such a natural thing to do!
Why did we not see this before?”
The actual act of switching over took time.
And yet the difference in results couldn’t have been more clear.
For a while, sentiment remained steadfastly the same.
The studio had to wait until it had something to back up the noise.
The show-don’t-tell approach was no doubt the right one, but it required time.
Positivity was boosted again by patch 1.6 and the release of Netflix’s tie-in Edgerunners anime.
“That was a huge turnaround for us,” Momot says.
People are thinking the game is good, they’re seeing our commitment and things that are improving.”
The difference was just as profound for CD Projekt Red’s developers.
“Now we have much more collaboration across different areas.”
“All the problems we had were gone,” Tremblay says.
Getting it running smoothly “took us something like six months, which is crazy, crazy fast.”
But after releasing the Series X and S versions, the S only ran at 30fps.
“But people were like, ‘Why?
Why is it not 60fps?!
And we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah why?!’
So we just went okay, let’s try.”
Soon enough it worked well enough to release a patch with the higher frame rate option to the public.
It’s “a very different sense of pride that you have for this,” she says.
“I don’t know how to express it, but it’s amazing.
Both are amazing, it’s just very different, feeling-wise.”
When it’s put to her that it might feel more earned, she agrees.
Now I did it!’.
That’s incredibly gratifying."
Every developer I spoke to at CD Projekt Red was unanimously happier with the new way of working.
“But it was definitely not mass scale,” he emphasises.
“And I don’t think it was a reason for any major complaints within the company either.
I would not, however, say it was zero.”
And that’s something that, to be honest, we’ve probably lost forever.
Is that good or bad?
I don’t know, but it’s a fact."
Some, naturally, will probably never be fully convinced, as Nowakowski says.
But that’s unfortunately the price we have to pay for what happened.
“There’s nothing we can say to convince anyone,” he adds.
“There’s just a moment when we need to show up.”
Karolina Niewęgłowska, meanwhile, has a typically logical suggestion.
“But in the end, people have to judge for themselves.”
Her suggestion is simple enough.
There will be reviews.
I’m sure people like you will help with that.
If someone is unsure, then they can wait and see.
Maybe then they can decide to jump in."
