CD Projekt Red Not Giving Up on Cyberpunk 2077

It’s hardly news at this point to say that Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t the record-smashing success people thought it would be. While the bugs and the performance issues were obviously a problem (especially on the console version), even when those were stripped away, people found the story lacking, not especially deep, and not nearly as inclusive or clever as it thought it was. It’s proven to be such a controversial game, in fact, that CD Projekt Red is being sued, and has even canceled the multiplayer game that was supposed to come out on its heels.

And yet, it seems they have every intention of turning it around, because instead of cutting their losses and moving on, CD Projekt Red president and joint CEO Adam Kiciński told Reuters the other day that they were going to be working on Cyberpunk 2077 for “the long haul”.
 

“I don’t see an option to shelve Cyberpunk 2077. We are convinced that we can bring the game to such a state that we can be proud of it and therefore successfully sell it for years to come.”

This will require more than just bug fixes, of course: content-wise, people have had a lot of gripes with Cyberpunk 2077, as we discussed in the first paragraph. Fortunately, in this digital age, it’s more than possible to basically re-write a game from the ground up, even remotely. Just see what Hello Games did with No Man’s Sky: granted, that was an easier sell, as No Man’s Sky was always pitched as a live-service kind of game, whereas Cyberpunk 2077 is a strictly single-player experience. But there’s no price you can put on reputation, and CD Projekt Red certainly has a lot of work to do if they want to repair theirs.

Currently, they’re trying to ensure that the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of Cyberpunk 2077, which is set to come out in the second half of 2021, enjoy a better launch than the last-gen launches did. After that — who knows?

But their work is certainly cut out for them.