Cyberpunk 2077 Devs Reportedly Working 6-Day Weeks To Finish The Game

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It cannot just be that, can it?

I'd imagine it's exactly that.

Pure, driven passion to give the player the best experience, to not have the launch mired by bugs that the gaming community latch onto to cause a s$!tstorm.

After all the hard work, they want it polished as much as possible. I believe it anyway.
 
I can't imagine it being anything else. 7 weeks to launch, nothing means more than releasing a product that is as polished as possible.

I understand the logic, but is it really worthy while:
-The game will just be 6 days less buggy. It's not like it will be bug free (no game will ever be, even less Day One) nor like it would be near unplayable (6 days on 6 weeks are still 85% of the same debugging time for the Day One patch).
-Being the reason of the crunch, that means CDprojekt could have boasted creating an AAA game without any crunch at all instead (and what it implies for employees + good PR). Wouldn't it have been better?
 
but is it really worthy while:

YES! If it weren't worth while they would not do it. They're not doing this because "HEY it's going to be good publicity" or "Our employees are going to love us for this" It's "This NEEDS to be done because we can't push back the release date again"
Even 1 bug can be game breaking to a player. If you want to make this game the "Gold Standard" you can't be like Bethesda and throw a game out with game breaking bugs crashing on you right and left or leaving you stuck in a dungeon needing to start all over again. They need to outshine the industry which does include the removal of ALL game breaking bugs and most of the annoying bugs.

Also note they not only have to spend time fixing the game, but testing the game too. This all takes time a lot of time.
 
Wouldn't it have been better?

I feel like the good PR would reach only a small group of hardcore gamers - people who actively read gaming press, forums etc. I dare to assume this is still a minority.

The "ordinary" gamers - people who just buy games to play them, without going deeper into such abstract matters as crunch and company policies - will care more if the product is/feels finished or not. And if they can play it without bugs, especially game breaking ones.
 
I understand the logic, but is it really worthy while:
-The game will just be 6 days less buggy. It's not like it will be bug free (no game will ever be, even less Day One) nor like it would be near unplayable (6 days on 6 weeks are still 85% of the same debugging time for the Day One patch).
-Being the reason of the crunch, that means CDprojekt could have boasted creating an AAA game without any crunch at all instead (and what it implies for employees + good PR). Wouldn't it have been better?

Firs of all, you still need to provide a source for why you think CDPR could ever boast about doing no crunch, when they'd stated the opposite on several occasions. Your whole argument here seems to hinge on that being true, and it's simply not the case. "We only did some crunch" doesn't really seem like it'd generate great PR, to be honest...

But anyway, think of it this way: you've worked 5+ years on a project and all your eggs are in that basket - you'd really, really like it to succeed, to put it lightly. You are aware that you're bound to have let some issues slip through, since testing everything thoroughly on all sorts of setups and with all sorts of prerequisites is impossible. In fact, you have a growning backlog of bugs (not show-stoppers, but still bugs) that you haven't had enough time to address, possibly QA has caught a few nastier ones even after code freeze.

It seems clear to me you'd want to minimize risk by taking every extra second (let alone extra days) you can in order to ensure things are as smooth as possible.

On the other hand, you can't just introduce mandatory crunch throughout the whole development process for many different reasons (employee well-being, PR, loss of productivity etc.) so you want to strike a balance.

But nah, you're probably right - it's all just a giant conspiracy and there's some sinister reason behind the extra hours :p
 
I understand the logic, but is it really worthy while:
-The game will just be 6 days less buggy. It's not like it will be bug free (no game will ever be, even less Day One) nor like it would be near unplayable (6 days on 6 weeks are still 85% of the same debugging time for the Day One patch).
-Being the reason of the crunch, that means CDprojekt could have boasted creating an AAA game without any crunch at all instead (and what it implies for employees + good PR). Wouldn't it have been better?

Short answer, I don't know. To every question posed in your post. In fact, without trying to sound harsh, this entire issue feels like a "none of my business" type of deal. It seems to me the issue itself is between CDPR and it's employees. If the employees feel like they're being worked to death or treated unfairly they can, I don't know, take action to correct it. Mandatory practices, contracts, whatever be damned. You always have a choice.

There are too many unknowns involved here. Unknowns you'd need inside knowledge about to fully grasp. The people internal to the situation would know this information. People external to it are guessing. Playing the social outrage card based on guessing is unlikely to be productive.

None of this is to say the issue itself isn't a real one. As a certain problematic stand-up comedian once said, most of the greatest achievements of humanity came about via immeasurable human suffering :) (paraphrasing). And, I honestly think just about everything humanity does could be done in half the time if you stripped out the inefficiencies. The proverbial carbon unit problem. But again, what good is throwing a fit over a forum/blog post/clickbait article going to achieve?
 
A facebook post by one of the most experienced(and vocal) Polish game developers Adrian Chmielarz, google translated from Polish(but it's mostly ok translation).

"Missing a game's release date is a management fuckup, not the artists, programmers, and others working on the game."
Yup, among others, such in-depth texts, undoubtedly resulting from many years of experience (reading Kotaku, I think), fall in connection with the crunch scandal in CDPR.

Meanwhile, the truth is so banal that crunch is a complicated phenomenon and not black and white at all. I can't give a better example than the fact that I know people from CDPR who crunch, quit, and tell about the company things that make hair stand on their heads, but also those who crunch longer, but still work in it highly satisfied and will not move on.

Where does the crunch come from?

Home-grown activists and bleeding hearts have a simple answer: capitalist vampires under economic coercion squeeze the spirit out of hard-working workers, treating them as easily interchangeable gears.

And somehow no one wonders how it can pay off in a time when ten other companies are fighting for every reasonable programmer or graphic and when every scratch on the company's image causes problems that are translatable to the cash register.

So where is the crunch REALLY coming from?

In my opinion, for four reasons.

The first is obvious, human errors. Widely understood incompetence applies to every person and every profession, so there is no reason to believe that it does not apply to management or project managers.

What is not obvious, and it should be, is that workers are also incompetent. For some reason, we assume that menagos and bossos will screw up as much as possible, but all employees don't take cigarette breaks, browse Reddit or Facebook, don't gossip for half an hour about Marynia's ass, and always stick to their own deadlines.

Someone conscious will say at this point that it's okay, but it is the job of project managers to take into account all of the above and plan accordingly, but for me it is hypocrisy. "Everyone can be incompetent and others suffer, Note: Not applicable to PMs."

The second reason is that game development is a creative area. Hence the curse of ignorance of the iteration numbers.
Simple example: Game Awards are approaching, which is one of the best opportunities to advertise (which helps sales, which helps profit, which helps bonuses). We want a trailer. What is the guarantee that the soundtrack proposed by the musician will be "this" right away? None. And maybe this will be the first version, or maybe it will be the twentieth approach.
And so with everything that is an act of creation. How many times have you corrected your own Facebook post, your own tweet or email? Sometimes not at all, and sometimes probably red since editing.

The third reason is that we work in the innovation business. Despite the fact that the industry has existed for several decades, we are constantly introducing something new. Even when we release a sequel to the game, players will not forgive if it is the same but in a different skin (though apparently not for FIFY, lol). New designs, new worlds, new technologies that either have to be invented or handled, equipment that is constantly changing, etc. etc.
As innovation is a derivative of creativity, and here also it is not known "how long it will take".

Reason number four is that players want more and more for less and less. Reviews like "I give a minus, because after the first 200 hours there is nothing to do" is not a meme, but reality. Good luck to anyone who releases a single-use, 8-hour single player game for $ 60 - and it was the salt of the earth 10-15 years ago.

The average completion time (and at the same time the median) of the first, legendary God of War is 9 hours. Anyone seriously imagines that this would pass in the present day?

And meanwhile, not only are these types of games longer, but also prettier and more playful. In Painkiller we were able to make a character and its animations in a few days, in Witchfire there is a firecracker as we do in two months.
And now, all these four things - human error, the terra incognita of creativity and innovation, and the pressure of the market - bring you into a collision with the SHIT HAPPENS deadline.

Okay, where are these deadlines from?

Well, the game is not a lonely island. There are not many opportunities for more effective than usual advertising in the year, it is even worse with the release date of the game so as not to hit the oxygen-sucking competition. Budgets and financial stocks are also not made of rubber, and they can undermine even the most careful plans and projects.
Crunch, with the exception of rare, short, several-day cufflinks is evil. Well, as you know, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.

However, if someone has the illusion that something will change dramatically here, let it immediately get out of the head. It has not changed in film and television, and these are much simpler, linear, much older and experienced businesses. It won't change in games either, as long as the project is ambitious enough. The presentation of Unreal Engine 5 may have made the players excited, but believe me, the studios are now doing what they will have to equal ...

So if someone cannot live with it, or gamedev is not for him, or maybe he or she does not work in a company known for crunchy and working on a relatively innovative, mega-ambitious project. "It is what it is" and no spells or dreams will change anything here, because there will always be someone nearby who will not heed the calls to march when he wants to run, and the eyes of the world are only on him.

Of course, not being able to achieve an ideal does not mean that we should not pursue it. I try to run, with lesser or better success, a crunch-free studio, in which a cigarette and chats about Marynia's ass are a natural, desirable element of the landscape. Well, and that's why we've been rocking the game for our fifth year ... 😅

This long argument, which barely "caresses the epidermis of phenomena" anyway, was meant to serve only one thing. Contrary to armchair activists, crunch is rarely cynical, Badowski has no night cream made of the blood of employees, and he is a little more "guilty" than the heartless kulaks. "It's complicated" - just that, and so much.
 
I love this line
"Home-grown activists and bleeding hearts have a simple answer: capitalist vampires under economic coercion squeeze the spirit out of hard-working workers, treating them as easily interchangeable gears.

And somehow no one wonders how it can pay off in a time when ten other companies are fighting for every reasonable programmer or graphic and when every scratch on the company's image causes problems that are translatable to the cash register. "

Amen brother Amen.
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This I disagree with him on

"Reason number four is that players want more and more for less and less. Reviews like "I give a minus, because after the first 200 hours there is nothing to do" is not a meme, but reality. Good luck to anyone who releases a single-use, 8-hour single player game for $ 60 - and it was the salt of the earth 10-15 years ago.

The average completion time (and at the same time the median) of the first, legendary God of War is 9 hours. Anyone seriously imagines that this would pass in the present day? "

I wouldn't tolerate an 8 hour God of War game, because it's a lame game. However, I'm sure God of War fans would love it.
If I spend over 100 hours in a game that means I was willing to trade several days of doing other things to play the game. Which means it was a good game as my time is very valuable to me. Now if a game had 100 hours of good content and then starts up with some SJW garbage. That would tick me off. That doesn't usually happen though when it does it's normally from the on-set. However, outside of that I wouldn't have anything to complain about. It took me years to finish persona 3 I still haven't finished the elder scrolls oblivion. There's a lot more i'd like to do in Skyrim. I never finished Lost Odyssey. All are games I've put a significant number of hours into.
 
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The first is obvious, human errors. Widely understood incompetence applies to every person and every profession, so there is no reason to believe that it does not apply to management or project managers.

What is not obvious, and it should be, is that workers are also incompetent. For some reason, we assume that menagos and bossos will screw up as much as possible, but all employees don't take cigarette breaks, browse Reddit or Facebook, don't gossip for half an hour about Marynia's ass, and always stick to their own deadlines.

Someone conscious will say at this point that it's okay, but it is the job of project managers to take into account all of the above and plan accordingly, but for me it is hypocrisy. "Everyone can be incompetent and others suffer, Note: Not applicable to PMs."

To me that remains the main point. Choosing how wide is the margin of error is one of the big part about planning things.
If your margin of error is too short at first it's not a problem, as it's all about trials and errors after all.
If your margin of error is always too short, then it is a problem that should be corrected by extending your "$hit happens" % in the planning, but if that % doesn't grow up each time the planning fail in a project, then you becomes responsible for it.

The other reason why I see responsibilities is how, at first, margin of error are made:
It's natural to choose a margin of error by considering consequences, as the direst the consequences, the bigger the margin of error will be.
But seeing dev' being constantly crunched for every AAA (not just CDprojekt's ones) tend to makes me thinks that crunch isn't considered a really dire consequence, and that if it was considered a really dire consequence then the margin of error would be wildly bigger.

I just hope CDprojekt's dev' will never die from it like what have been seen in my country (not in video games development) and that people wait there is numerous death before finally begins to think something is abnormal and react to it.
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Firs of all, you still need to provide a source for why you think CDPR could ever boast about doing no crunch, when they'd stated the opposite on several occasions. Your whole argument here seems to hinge on that being true, and it's simply not the case. "We only did some crunch" doesn't really seem like it'd generate great PR, to be honest...

Not what I wrote in what you quote.
I just said that if they didn't do that 6 day crunch , then it would have made great PR.
If they did that then they could have boast about it.
Understand?

And it's perfectly normal that ""We only did some crunch" doesn't generate good PR. You never get good PR for only lessening an evil, you get it for avoiding it entirely.

But nah, you're probably right - it's all just a giant conspiracy and there's some sinister reason behind the extra hours :p

Straw man fallacy...:coolstory:
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The "ordinary" gamers - people who just buy games to play them, without going deeper into such abstract matters as crunch and company policies - will care more if the product is/feels finished or not. And if they can play it without bugs, especially game breaking ones.

Ordinary gamers only discovers bugs by running into them too, after having already brought the game.
And why should game breaking bug should be especially corrected in the 15% crunch time window? Why not in the 85% of debugging work time before it or the time which comes too late anyway after game release?
 
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Because it's inefficient to try and fix bugs when you still tinkering with features. You'll debug something only to have the code rewritten and undo all of your polish. Then you have to debug again.
 
A facebook post by one of the most experienced(and vocal) Polish game developers Adrian Chmielarz, google translated from Polish(but it's mostly ok translation).

Thanks, great to hear such a detailed description of all the ins and outs, especially with the piece by piece breakdown.
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But seeing dev' being constantly crunched for every AAA (not just CDprojekt's ones) tend to makes me thinks that crunch isn't considered a really dire consequence

Keeping the subject to CDPR, the mandatory overtime on this game was substantially less than TW3 it seems. By a large margin.

So I doubt they think it isn't a problem and it seems they have improved. So that must make you pleased, no?

I just hope CDprojekt's dev' will never die from it

Seriously?

And it's perfectly normal that ""We only did some crunch" doesn't generate good PR. You never get good PR for only lessening an evil,

Never? Never get good PR for marked improvements? Seems unfair, imho.

Straw man fallacy...:coolstory:

I know English isn't your first language so I'll just point out that what @ReptilePZ wrote isn't what I would consider a strawman.

They weren't restructuring key points in your argument in order to make it seem absurd, just to have an easy job of knocking it down.

It was more akin to cheeky sarcasm - possibly suggesting they felt you were being a tad dramatic :)

Edit: Apologies to Reptile if they feel I'm out of turn by butting in.
 
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Keeping the subject to CDPR, the mandatory overtime on this game was substantially less than TW3 it seems. By a large margin.
So I doubt they think it isn't a problem and it seems they have improved. So that must make you pleased, no?

I'm pleased by the (big) step in the right direction, yes.
Still, cutting the little finger instead of the entire arm still hurt, even more if you consider it was not the only choice.

Seriously?

To be precise, in my country they didn't (and still don't) die from exhaustion, but from suicide, and that can happens in any environment were you are pressured to work overtime.

Never? Never get good PR for marked improvements? Seems unfair, imho.

Would you congratulate a former bank robber to have turned into a simple pickpocket?
It's would be a marked improvement, yet you would probably thinks pickpocketing is still bad and should not be rewarded.
 
Would you congratulate a former bank robber to have turned into a simple pickpocket?
It's would be a marked improvement, yet you would probably thinks pickpocketing is still bad and should not be rewarded.

Now THAT'S pretty much a, as you like to say, strawman fallacy :coolstory:

You take my argument, exaggerate my points by way of analogy to the level of criminality and then act like what I'm saying is roughly the same.
 
Now THAT'S pretty much a, as you like to say, strawman fallacy :coolstory:

You take my argument, exaggerate my points by way of analogy to the level of criminality and then act like what I'm saying is roughly the same.
Like I said he's just trying to provoke people. He doesn't actually care about the reality.
 
Not what I wrote in what you quote.
I just said that if they didn't do that 6 day crunch , then it would have made great PR.
If they did that then they could have boast about it.
Understand?

And it's perfectly normal that ""We only did some crunch" doesn't generate good PR. You never get good PR for only lessening an evil, you get it for avoiding it entirely.

I understood your point, but perhaps I should have been clearer when making mine: CDPR could not claim that there was no crunch involved in the making of CP2077 even without this mandatory crunch period, for the simple reason that devs had already been crunching even before then. The news isn't that there's crunch, this was already known and was already happening- the actual news is that CDPR is making it mandatory for the last stretch of dev time.

And so the whole point about sacrificing good PR in favour of just 6 extra days of work is moot to begin with.

Straw man fallacy...:coolstory:

 
I imagine posting this here would be a bit like sticking my finger in a running fan, but still:


*Sigh*, and someone here has to post and discuss this dammit! We all a bunch of selfish gits and the rabid fanboys detractors would claim we were, if it weren't mentioned at least once in these forums.

Sure, CDPR makes wonderful games that don't wrestle you for your wallet at every turn with lootboxes, microtransactions and live services. However, I still had "doesn't crunch employees" high up on the ticket of what I'd like my ideal developer to do. I can't help but make this thread, just to mourn if even a little, that CDPR doesn't quite manage to escape ALL of the gaming industry's muck and blemishes.

Can we at least agree here that in an ideal world - fully realizing that it isn't - that we would all like the little guys at CDPR not spending 6-day weeks to get us our toys? And can we agree that this is something to strive for, that CDPR has failed, and that it should do better the next time?

I'm oversimplifying and disregarding the financial situation, but I'm in odds between rather having another 2 month delay, or people getting crunched. I can wait another 60 days you know!

And I don't want to hear head-of-studio John Mamai coming in this time to come up with excuses. That the other studios like Rockstar are even worse. That's LOWERING the bar for a company we'd all like to hold in high regard.



Slightly better, but still... *sigh*, if only in recognition of us CDPR not living up to better standards - realistic or not.
I can certainly wait another 60 days as well. I've seen a few posts where folks are saying the employees have no leg to stand on and it should be "known" that working crunch is "just part of the job they signed up for". No, it is not, and shouldn't be. Unfortunately, and sadly though, it has become the norm with most AAA game companies and is why we have such poorly released games now.

With each new release I say to myself over and over again, "did anybody from the company actually playtest this"? Marvel Avengers is a recent classic example of a "games as a service" model that just does not work. Releasing a half-assed game and then justifying it by saying you have a platform where you can just update it whenever you feel like it doesn't cut it. It's a slap in the face to the consumer. Putting employees through a crunch time scenario just to hit a date is bad enough, when you add onto that the state of most games at release, it just doubles the bad perception.
 
A facebook post by one of the most experienced(and vocal) Polish game developers Adrian Chmielarz, google translated from Polish(but it's mostly ok translation).
"Even when we release a sequel to the game, players will not forgive if it is the same but in a different skin (though apparently not for FIFY, lol)."
I assume he means FIFA, lmao! Marynia's ass must be legendary to hold up the development like it is.

For real, though. He lays out all the facts and puts to bed the armchair activism people seem to take up at the notion of overtime. Good to see it.
 
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