A box with Sony PlayStation 4 Cyberpunk 2077 Collector’s Edition on the counter.
Alexander Sayganov | Images SOUP | LightRocket via Getty Images
LONDON – Cyberpunk 2077 developers are pushing back the release of new game content to focus on fixing bugs and bugs.
Polish game developer and publisher CD Projekt released the highly anticipated SF epic last month. It was the target of fierce criticism for launching what many fans and critics saw as an unfinished game.
Cyberpunk was one of the most popular high-budget video games of 2020. But it was affected by a lot of bugs and performance drops on older consoles, such as Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One.
CD Projekt sought to please the fans with the promise of refunds and improvements to the game. But that hasn’t stopped Sony from removing Cyberpunk from the digital PlayStation Store, a move that many industry analysts have said is unprecedented for a triple-A title.
Marcin Iwiński, co-founder of CD Projekt, apologized in a video posted on the game’s YouTube channel on Wednesday.
“Despite good reviews on the PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet,” Iwiński said. “I and the entire management team are very sorry for this, and this video is my public possession so far.”
“Please do not blame any of our teams for what happened,” he added. “Everyone is incredibly talented and they work hard.
“The council and I are the final decision makers and we were called to launch the game. Although, believe me, I never intended that to happen. “
Iwiński explained that many of the game’s problems with older hardware resulted from his big ambitions on the PC. Cyberpunk has a “huge dimension,” he said, wrapping a “multitude of custom objects, systems and mechanics that interact” in a “big city and in a relatively uncharged environment.”
“We made it even more difficult for ourselves to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjust it to consoles, especially old gens,” such as the PS4 and Xbox One, he added.
Iwiński said that CD Projekt’s planned release of free downloadable content, or DLC, to accompany the main game, will be delayed as developers compete for many bugs and crashes that players have experienced.
“We decided to focus on the most important fixes and updates first and we will release the DLCs later,” said CD Projekt co-founder.
He added that versions of the game for the latest Sony and Microsoft consoles will be released in the second half of the year. Players can now play PS4 and Xbox One versions of Cyberpunk on the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X systems.
Shares of CD Projekt rose 2% on Thursday morning. The shareholder price of the game has dropped by about 38% since Cyberpunk was released on December 10th.
“We take this situation very seriously and are working hard to correct it,” Iwiński said on Wednesday. “Our company’s guidelines are still essential to what we do, we still want to make amazing games and have open communication with you our players.”
In addition to the controversy over the wrong launch of Cyberpunk, CD Projekt has also faced accusations of “crunch culture”, a common problem in the gaming industry, which sees developers working long hours to finish a game on time. Cyberpunk was postponed three times before launch.
“The team is working to make relevant corrections to the game without mandatory extensions”, CD Projekt Red add Red here? he said in a news update on Wednesday. “Avoiding the crisis of all our future projects is one of our top priorities.”