Could it be that the game of the decade (in every sense) - Cyberpunk 2077 - will be released on time or at least show a less sad picture on consoles after so many transfers?
No.
As talented game artists, CD Project Red has long been adept at fanning PR and selling games that have yet to be created. Moreover, the studio regularly steps on the same rake, and this time it was simply not worth waiting for another.
Let's go back in time and find out why with the help of Google and gaming media archives.
What happened at the very beginning?
CD Project Red is not the first to fail a console release. But it was the consoles that have always been a tidbit for the studio, with each release of a new game, the studio strived to capture an ever larger market.
On November 29, 2008, a video was uploaded to the Internet about the console version of the game of the first part of The Witcher, which was originally released only on PC. On December 2, CD Projekt Red officially confirmed that The Witcher will be ported by French firm Widescreen Games to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles and released as The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf. a new engine and many improvements to the original game were planned.
On April 29, 2009, it was announced that production of the game had been halted due to late payments from CD Projekt to the French developers of the console version. CD Projekt CEO Michal Kicinski said payments were delayeddue to the fact that Widescreen games do not meet the development timeline, and also that “a technical failure to implement what was intended creates the risk of losing the planned quality” and that CD Projekt has stopped working with this company.
The next part of the game The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, besides PC, was released only on one Xbox 360 console. However, the ambitions of the studio were constantly growing and the release of the third part of The Witcher was planned for two consoles - PS4, Xbox One. That will later play a cruel joke with them in the form of delays in the release of the third part.
2013-2015 years
On October 3, 2014, in a post on the NeoGAF gaming forum, one anonymous user under the nickname Anaxymenes disagreed that others were praising the yet-to-be-released Witcher 3, arguing that developer CD Projekt Red is artificially whipping up impressions of the upcoming game. He then boasted of some insider knowledge and cautioned against pre-ordering the game, especially on consoles. After the veracity of such biased statements was questioned by other forum participants, the administrator of the NeoGAF forum said that Anaxymenes was able to privately provide some confirmation of his words and insider status.
Specifically Anaxymenes said:
« 3 . PR , , ».
The word "crunch" came into the Russian language from the English word "crunch" - crunch, crackle, creak, colloquially - a crisis, a shortage of something. A crunch is called a rush job: a work situation in which employees have to work more hours per day than they are required under an employment contract to successfully complete urgent tasks on time. As a rule, crunch is a protracted crisis that can last even several months. Employees can show up for work at 10 am and leave after midnight for weeks.
There is no single definition of "crunch" in the gaming industry, but the conventional wisdom is that crunch includes two components: mandatory overtime and a culture that forces employees to work longer or harder than the basic employment agreement stipulates.
These forum gossips now [in 2021] no one would have remembered if then the head of the studio for public relations Michal Platkov-Gilewski had not made a statement in response to them .
We do not comment on rumors, especially when someone speaks out anonymously, because this is just his or her word against ours, "he told GameSpot, and stated that video demonstrations of the game speak for themselves." If you have Any doubts about the quality of Wild Hunt, watch the 35-minute gameplay video we posted a while ago, or check out player reactions to our public previews at Gamescom, San Diego. Comic Con and E3 and decide for yourself.
At the same time, representatives of the studio ignored GameSpot's question about the veracity of assumptions about the large-scale practice of crunching in CDP.
In March 2014, CD Projekt Red pushed back the release date of The Witcher 3 to the February 2015 release date.
At the time, the studio wrote:
We could have released the game by the end of this [2014] year as we originally planned. Yet we came to the conclusion that a few additional months will allow us to achieve the quality that satisfies us, the quality that gamers expect from us.
Transfers and rumors about crunch, in 2021 it sounds painfully familiar ...
The Witcher 3 game was announced in 2013, and it was supposed to be released next year on three PC platforms, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The release date was later moved from the third quarter of 2014 to February 2015. After skipping the planned release date of February 24, The Witcher 3: was finally released worldwide on May 19, 2015.
2017 year
The Witcher 3 was released 2 years ago and has sold nearly 30 million copies. Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development for about 5 years, since 2012, and its release is planned not only on PC and all consoles of the current generation (with several different hardware revisions and different performance), but also the next genes of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S
While CD Project Red is still (or again) shrouded in a romantic veil of financial success and the fluid spirit of indie development, another scandal erupts in the gaming press. A lot of highly critical comments from former CDPR employees have surfaced on the employer review site Glassdoor. The negative ones appeared in the period from 2015 to 2017, and appeared later.
Here snippet of a review for 2015:
The management is useless, there is no one who can really control people. It consists of old employees who work for the company because they invested their time [and were here before anyone else].
Developers are often young and inexperienced. Both factors together provide an absurd amount of crunching. For some, crunching periods lasted more than TWO years. Of course, taking days off was almost impossible.
However, even the best employees may be denied promotion based on far-fetched considerations, while others may be promoted despite non-compliance. This makes the career advancement system meaningless, as it can be cheated without any consequences.
The retention of employees is terrible. It is believed that any employee who is dissatisfied with his position in the company should immediately apply for resignation, and no efforts are made to retain him. This practice leads to the emergence of a large number of non-professional newcomers in all departments.
And here are just some of the headlines for 2017 reviews.
Just read these reviews yourself.
At some point, a wave of negativity and bone washing among the gaming audience reached such a level that CD Projekt Red decided to intervene. Co-founder Marcin Iwinski and studio manager Adam Badovski issued a statement "regarding studio morale."
Full text of the statement
We usually avoid commenting on company reviews in places like Glassdoor, but this time - especially in light of the fact that we haven't talked about Cyberpunk 2077 for a long time and have seen some gamers get worried about the project - we would like to clarify a few points ...
The thesis “this approach to creating games is not for everyone” sounds, as if telling critics: “You don't understand anything, this is not that, this is different!”
In 2015, when we released The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, we had over 200 developers and that was the studio's core team. Since then, we have nearly doubled our workforce and we continue to hire. ” Then the team had just a few developers, but now CDPR will double their number, which should, like a magic pill, solve all the problems.
Cyberpunk 2077 is progressing according to plan, but we're taking our time - in this case, the silence is the price of making a great game.
All is well, lovely marquise!
2019 year
In May 2019, in an interview with Kotaku, Marcin Iwinski stated that the studio wants to take a more "humane" approach to the late stage of development, relying more heavily on the "optional crunch policy".
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Note that CD Projekt is not talking about eliminating crunches altogether, which would be a smarter commitment. And claiming that employees can take time off if they need to is not necessarily true - in a challenging team environment, developers may well feel hidden pressure to keep working, for example, to support their teammates or maintain their own position. in company.
2020 year
On October 9, Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier tweeted an email in which CDPR studio head Adam Badowski apologized to development partners for working overtime.
Schreier point out that while there is nothing scary or criminal about crunching culture itself, it is strange that a company that practices crunching on such a massive scale diligently pretends that such a practice does not exist at all.
On October 27, 2020, former studio temporary outstarwalker wrote a series of tweets about low wages during her participation in the development of The Witcher 3.
So, can I now share that I was making $ 430 a month working on facial animations on The Great Game 3 at “that great company that fully rewards its passionate crunching employees?
, : — . 2014 . , . . , , .
Personality outstarwalker confirmed moderators Reddit. They added her posts to the general discussion of rework at CD Projekt RED. The girl, by the way, runs her own YouTube channel and in one of the videos she told why she left the Polish studio.
At the same time, in 2020, the release of Cyberpunk 2077, which has been in development for seven years, has been postponed three times in total ! Initially, at
E3 2019, the release was scheduled for April 2020. In January 2020, the release was pushed back to September 2020. In September, the game was pushed back to November 19, 2020.
In early October 2020, CD Projekt Red announced that the game was “gold”. This term means that the game was ready to begin certification for consoles, as well as to start the process of printing discs, which should then reach retail stores by the date of the announced release. Nevertheless, the development of the game was in full swing even after the discs were sent to print. For some time now, it has become common practice in the gaming industry to continue working on a game after gold status - for the subsequent release of a "zero-day patch" that will fix any bugs found at the last minute.
But CDPR has taken this practice to the next level. CD Projekt Red admitted that it took longer than expected to complete the zero-day patch, requiring a third release postpone to December 10, 2020 for another “short” 21-day crunch spurt.
Despite all the delays and a zero-day patch on the previous generation consoles, the game turned out to be almost unplayable , and the promised potential of the graphics subsystem was not used on the new generation consoles, which caused a storm of indignation from fans and serious consequences for the studio in the form of several lawsuits.
2021 year
In January, CD Projekt SA CEO Marcin Iwinski publicly brought remorse for the disastrous release of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 in December 2020. He took personal responsibility and asked fans not to blame the team.
In a grim five-minute video message and accompanying blog post, Iwinski admitted that the game “did not meet the quality standards we wanted to meet. I and the entire management are very sorry. "
Postmortem
Anyone who has studied the retrospective of Project RED and its parent company will understand that it could not be otherwise.
Errors in scheduling releases and scaling the studio's developer forces, as well as a constant desire to bite off more than they can chew, have plagued the studio for the past 10 years.
Cyberpunk 2077 began to develop in the era of dominance of old consoles, and by the time development was completed, they reoriented to new ones, but did not abandon support for the old ones.
In case of an unplanned increase in system requirements, computer users can always be advised to update Dicrect X, video card drivers and the video card itself. But with the owner of the console, this number will not work, its insides cannot be upgraded. If support for a particular console is declared by the developer, the game should demonstrate a comfortable level of performance without any tweaks from the outside.
CD Project RED intended to release the game, not counting the PC, at the same time on NINE different consoles configurations, some of which already lacked performance for AAA games in 2020, and some clearly overkill.
This time, the Polish studio tried to crunch a nut that was clearly too tough for her.
