CD Projekt RED‘s Colin Walder has revealed that the team morale took a “significant hit” for the Cyberpunk 2077 developer following the game’s troubled launch back in December 2020.
Speaking with Invenglobal at the Inven Game Conference recently, Walder, who has worked on the likes of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5 throughout his 15-year-plus career in the industry, commented:
This approach we had, the way we were working production-wise, creating demos, and moving towards an agile mindset and workflow – it’s about ensuring we’re on top of certain things from the start. Take consoles, for example; we need to make sure they’re functioning from the get-go. For our next project, Polaris [part of a new trilogy of games in CDPR’s Witcher series], we’re already running our demos and internal reviews on the console from the very beginning.
This is a step we only took later in Cyberpunk’s development.
Regarding other tools or strategies for maintaining morale post-release, especially after the difficulties we faced – it was indeed a challenge. The crucial thing was to acknowledge what happened. We had to admit that the outcome wasn’t what we’d hoped for and that we were determined to change things.
For instance, when a deadline is looming, instead of reverting to crunch, we might say, ‘Let’s adjust the schedule,’ or, ‘Let’s approach this differently.’ Once this becomes a repeated behaviour – once the team sees a genuine effort to prevent crunch – that’s when trust and morale start to rebuild.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now available for PS5, PS4, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. The original console version of the game suffered from various issues that were later patched throughout 2021, although the native PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions improved things considerably.
More recently, Cyberpunk 2077 update 2.01 added a number of enhancements to overall gameplay, including vehicular combat and revamped police system, which coincided with the release of the expansion Phantom Liberty.
[Source – Eurogamer]