Game news Cyberpunk 2077: What if the state of the game at launch wasn’t entirely due to CD Projekt?
Published on 06/27/2022 at 14:47
Launched in December 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 hit a wall. Driven by a wait of several years and a very aggressive communication campaign, CD Projekt’s game was eagerly awaited. Yet when it comes out, the title is full of bugs, lacks some of the promised features, and suffers the anger of players, especially on console.
A rescue of more than a year
The title then experienced more than a year of updates, sometimes very important, the studio apologized several times, allowed players to be reimbursed, and even reorganized its teams to avoid experiencing a new rout. At the end of last year, and then with the release of update 1.5, player reviews skyrocketed and, if Cyberpunk 2077 is still not the expected revolution, it has become the very good game that the developers hoped to offer players.
The path of the game is not over, since an expansion is under development. Upon release, several surveys pointed to CD Projekt’s management of development, but it would seem that other, external reasons at least accentuated the game’s problems. CD Projekt had mentioned quality assurance issues, but did not detail these malfunctions. A new investigation, relayed by the Upper Echelon Gamers YouTube channel, and spotted by Forbes, recounts in more than 70 pages the problems linked to Quantic Lab, the studio in charge of quality assurance for Cyberpunk 2077. Among the data that emerges from this very long interview, we find:
- Quantic Lab exaggerated the size of the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 to get the contract and keep it
- Quantic Lab claimed that the team was made up of senior managers, but they were more juniors with less than six months of quality assurance experience.
- Quantic Lab had a daily rate of reported bugs, which caused CDPR to receive thousands of relatively useless bug reports from testers, which was very time consuming and resulted in no detection or prioritization serious, game-changing issues.
For the moment, CD Projekt and Quantic Lab have not reacted to the situation or to this 72-page investigation.