Insider info from CDPR - Development timline (TW2 - CP2077)

[Tanawat_Phadunkiat]

How someone can believe this is legit.

Play this game for a while and tell me if Cyberpunk 2077 looks to you like a game made by army of freshly hired amateurs ? becouse apparently everyone talented left the studio. Are you guys for real ? This is top notch triple A game ( just with problematic release ).

Don't even get me started how this "insider" turned CDPR higher ups into nazis.

Looks to me like memento written by frustrated ex fan of the CDPR, who got heart broken with disappointment after CP77 release. Move on.

For other industry you might be right but in video game, especially art team, it can be totally opposite. Many game studios, especially in USA, do this all the time. Terminate contracts with old crews because they don't want to raise salaries, and just keep only their core skeleton crews and recruit newly graduated people for hard labour. Why? Because those newly graduated are actually talented rivalry any experienced artists, because they had learned from the best people in the industry. Many instructors in the university are recently quitted a AAA project or even still are in a project. Those freshly graduated just don't have experience for critical analyze/thinking, problem solving and make the best decisions for the project, which isn't something they were looking for in the first place.

Making a beautiful game isn't that hard nowadays with UE4 and 3D-scan assets. The hardest part is optimization. How to make it run with 60 fps stable and working well with various hardware.

 

[jj284b]

8milion Eur from government is just a droplet into sea... considering how much money development of Cyberpunk cost them... and considering how much CDPR propagated Poland... (till now that is)...

 

[strangerism]

For other industry you might be right but in video game, especially art team, it can be totally opposite. Many game studios, especially in USA, do this all the time. Terminate contracts with old crews because they don't want to raise salaries, and just keep only their core skeleton crews and recruit newly graduated people for hard labour. Why? Because those newly graduated are actually talented rivalry any experienced artists, because they had learned from the best people in the industry. Many instructors in the university are recently quitted a AAA project or even still are in a project. Those freshly graduated just don't have experience for critical analyze/thinking, problem solving and make the best decisions for the project, which isn't something they were looking for in the first place.

Making a beautiful game isn't that hard nowadays with UE4 and 3D-scan assets. The hardest part is optimization. How to make it run with 60 fps stable and working well with various hardware.

I don't think a sane company will let go experienced employee especially those on the tech side, more likely veterans move on because of monetary reasons e.g. better offers. In my experience on big IT companies I saw there that anyone that showed great skills on their job was never let go from the project let alone the company who was managing them. Obviously there is always the case when someone is feed up with the company and moves somewhere else, but the company will always try to exploit as much as it can from somebody skills especially if they are good and niche. For instance, those many times I left companies, I was always offered a counter offer to convince me to stay.

 

[Fedge_123]

Shocking! /end sarcasm

Let's check the boxes ... developers work long 10+ hours per day ... work weekends ... no overtime pay ... cuts to project scope ... high turnover - cut the experienced (expensive) programmers in favor of young (cheap) ambitious talent ... poor project management ... lack of testing ... financial pressure to release prematurely ... releasing software early with known bugs. ... yawn ...

I've been developing software (business applications, not games) for over 20 years, at small start-ups to big multi-national corporations, and this could describe practically every single project I've ever been a part of. There is nothing shocking or unusual about anything that's described here. This is how the sausage is made. The only difference is good companies/people will eventually make it right, bad companies won't - we will see where CDPR ends up ...

 

[Force58]

Reading that just makes me more angry than I was previously. I wish now that I had gotten a refund from MS, but I'll stick it out and wait for the Jan/Feb 2021 updates. In the meantime I've got plenty of other new games to play that actually don't crash or cause me to have headaches on my Xbox One X. I've got some words for CDPR management and their investors who knew what the state of the game was pre-release, but I can't share them for fear of being forum banned.

 

[SidTheUndying]

Rofl

 

[Tanawat_Phadunkiat]

I don't think a sane company will let go experienced employee especially those on the tech side, more likely veterans move on because of monetary reasons e.g. better offers. In my experience on big IT companies I saw there that anyone that showed great skills on their job was never let go from the project let alone the company who was managing them. Obviously there is always the case when someone is feed up with the company and moves somewhere else, but the company will always try to exploit as much as it can from somebody skills especially if they are good and niche. For instance, those many times I left companies, I was always offered a counter offer to convince me to stay.

I know it's that way for almost every other industry but not for video-game, movie and 3D animation. There are role that they absolutely want to keep like lead/specialist/technical art/skilled engineer and programmers but the rest is absolutely expendable. You don't need a bunch of 3D artist prodigy to create table/box/wall textures and other props, which in fact ~70-80% of the game's 3d assets. And as I said, don't underestimate newly graduated artists. Most of them were well trained for their entire of life and have much more experiences than some veterans.

 

[IskrasFemme]

I stop read in: 'reedit'

 

[OuterSpaceDoggo]

Nice fanfic

 

[Guest 4509026]

The whole "Epic Games is spyware" Reddit fiasco taught me (and hopefully everyone else) to never trust The Gamers(tm) on Reddit. People will believe any narrative that re-enforces their biases or preconceived notions. Too many people want this kind of thing to be true, for me to trust it.

I'm no corporate apologist. I am upset CDPR lied through their teeth to all of us and am impatiently waiting for my refund on GoG (Day 4 now). That being said it's important to remember that claims like this on Reddit are unsubstaiated rumors at best and outright fabrications at worst.

 

[Ahmet_Gokalp]

I saw that too. Pretty interesting read. Also a more timelined version of a similar insight was in the 4chan forums, of which link was shared under this very reddit toppic. Sorry too busy to find rn but anyone who is interested can at least know where to look.

 

[strangerism]

I know it's that way for almost every other industry but not for video-game, movie and 3D animation. There are role that they absolutely want to keep like lead/specialist/technical art/skilled engineer and programmers but the rest is absolutely expendable. You don't need a bunch of 3D artist prodigy to create table/box/wall textures and other props, which in fact ~70-80% of the game's 3d assets. And as I said, don't underestimate newly graduated artists. Most of them were well trained for their entire of life and have much more experiences than some veterans.

sure if you mean art department where the concern is on the production side rather than creativity/design one, because you don't want to loose the lead that is responsible of the art direction and mood of the entire project midway through and neither you would if his talent, vision and taste has been in part responsible for your previous successful (if not widely acclaimed) products.

Anyway I just assumed the guy was talking about some lead in the tech department where most of the current problems lie. Infact if we look at the Art production in Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR has definitely upped the stakes in terms of quality and consistency, if they managed to do with just intern then props to them for being able to do so.

Returning at the OP, I still believe that reddit post to be a product of the internet mania of spreading stories for the sake of clamor.

Even if everything turns to be true what conclusion can we take beside the banal ones that are applicable to any kind of project (not just IT or games), that things can be cut, not everything that we whish can be accomplished (even brewing your own beer can turn like piss sometime), shit happens, promises can be broken and expectations should be managed, etc.

At the end of the day they delivered where they always been strong, great story, memorable characters, amazing tech, amazing art direction (just compare this to the art design of a game like ME Andromeda the most blandest sci-fi world), building a completely new and believable futuristic city (architecture, design and style wise) of this size which you can walk like not any other studio has even done before - the master of this so far have been Ubisoft, Rockstar and Massive Entertainment and they have been doing this sort of things for years now. All of them had a template to work with, existing cities, instead of inventing from scratch an entire new thing.

I just feel like even with a crappy, buggy and incomplete game like cyberpunk 2077 is now atm, they still have delivered some sort of grandeur.

I hope they can recover from all this bad press and the kind of shambles they put themselves in - they deserved it though.

 

[TheRealTalidus]

You got to look at the industry you are in and look at it objectively from a career standpoint. Most young kids coming out of college with a goal of working on a gaming title are a dime a dozen. There are always universities pushing out young talent in this space and I am sorry to say it, but, these companies can abuse the large pool of talent to be picky and treat people poorly. There are reasons why you have developers like those who started Star Citizen to go out on their own. There is so much pressure in the gaming industry to produce content to meet the demand, its all about production capacity and volume.

The very industry itself will eventually follow suit like Nike and its off shore manufacturing plants in the Philippines paying low wages and work long hours that the rest of the modern world will scoff at. Low sales price, high demand, consumption oriented, low shelf life, low cost to switch... all of the MBAs looking at this objectively would say this. A school that can bring talent in for free or low cost to the student that has a path to employment within the school will be the future model for gaming development. A business that is more school than it is business. It will be about skilling up fresh new talent with ideas at a low cost and then keeping the crème of the crop and funding student projects that are marketable with the incentive of partnership or commission will keep the model vibrant and productive in high population communities. Would be difficult to compete with a creative machine such as this. I believe this is where the future of work will go in this space.

 

[strangerism]

You got to look at the industry you are in and look at it objectively from a career standpoint. Most young kids coming out of college with a goal of working on a gaming title are a dime a dozen. There are always universities pushing out young talent in this space and I am sorry to say it, but, these companies can abuse the large pool of talent to be picky and treat people poorly. There are reasons why you have developers like those who started Star Citizen to go out on their own. There is so much pressure in the gaming industry to produce content to meet the demand, its all about production capacity and volume.

The very industry itself will eventually follow suit like Nike and its off shore manufacturing plants in the Philippines paying low wages and work long hours that the rest of the modern world will scoff at. Low sales price, high demand, consumption oriented, low shelf life, low cost to switch... all of the MBAs looking at this objectively would say this. A school that can bring talent in for free or low cost to the student that has a path to employment within the school will be the future model for gaming development. A business that is more school than it is business. It will be about skilling up fresh new talent with ideas at a low cost and then keeping the crème of the crop and funding student projects that are marketable with the incentive of partnership or commission will keep the model vibrant and productive in high population communities. Would be difficult to compete with a creative machine such as this. I believe this is where the future of work will go in this space.

very true but hasn't the IT and Services industry adopted already this strategy many years ago?

Also not everything goes this route especially if you want to bring a quality product and production volume output is not a concern. Sure AAA companies with this size seems obliged if they want to stay alive. In the case of CDPR their games, up until now CP2077 included, always had kept that feeling of being a product of the studio artisanship and niche taste rather then being out of some homogenized product chain facility out there

 

[TheRealTalidus]

very true but hasn't the IT and Services industry adopted already this strategy many years ago?

Also not everything goes this route especially if you want to bring a quality product and production volume output is not a concern. Sure AAA companies with this size seems obliged if they want to stay alive. In the case of CDPR their games, up until now CP2077 included, always had kept that feeling of being a product of the studio artisanship and niche taste rather then being out of some homogenized product chain facility out there

Companies that try and go the innovation route end up being loss leaders in the long run. They bear all the costs of the innovation and where all the money is made by mimicking a successful product or service. At some point, the legal system will catch up to the "over promise under deliver" practices of the current environment but, after that, when it matures, we should see more of this. Any software product that doesn't meet its marketed product specifications, is ripe for lawsuits and certainly it will eventually hit the entertainment industry because they are selling products, not experiences.

As far as highly paid artisans? Unless you've been living under a rock, there is no artist that is considered highly paid in comparison to the studio that "created" them. That's the fundamental issue of game developers today. Unless the technology advances so much where single artists can produce a video game, end to end selling it to the consumer, like a musician using a guitar, a DAW and publishing it to iTunes, they will always be at the mercy of the business.

Just as you know with great music, it doesn't always generate tons of revenue. I've heard from artists that should no doubt, be famous and millionaires but, they aren't. Why? They aren't business guru's, they are artists. Excitement in entertainment is mainly generated by whether its popular or not; e.g. marketing. Take League of Legends, total knock off of DOTA but, marketing and the business of the game made it massively popular across the globe. Steam, green-lights games that the community wants yet, Valve raking in the cash on every transaction either way. Creativity is just another resource to be managed and the guys at Valve, even though a crazy successful gaming company back in the 90s, knew that mass producing hits wasn't where the future of gaming was, it was in distribution and since, I do not think they have looked back one bit.

 

[strangerism]

Companies that try and go the innovation route end up being loss leaders in the long run. They bear all the costs of the innovation and where all the money is made by mimicking a successful product or service. At some point, the legal system will catch up to the "over promise under deliver" practices of the current environment but, after that, when it matures, we should see more of this. Any software product that doesn't meet its marketed product specifications, is ripe for lawsuits and certainly it will eventually hit the entertainment industry because they are selling products, not experiences.

As far as highly paid artisans? Unless you've been living under a rock, there is no artist that is considered highly paid in comparison to the studio that "created" them. That's the fundamental issue of game developers today. Unless the technology advances so much where single artists can produce a video game, end to end selling it to the consumer, like a musician using a guitar, a DAW and publishing it to iTunes, they will always be at the mercy of the business.

Just as you know with great music, it doesn't always generate tons of revenue. I've heard from artists that should no doubt, be famous and millionaires but, they aren't. Why? They aren't business guru's, they are artists. Excitement in entertainment is mainly generated by whether its popular or not; e.g. marketing. Take League of Legends, total knock off of DOTA but, marketing and the business of the game made it massively popular across the globe. Steam, green-lights games that the community wants yet, Valve raking in the cash on every transaction either way. Creativity is just another resource to be managed and the guys at Valve, even though a crazy successful gaming company back in the 90s, knew that mass producing hits wasn't where the future of gaming was, it was in distribution and since, I do not think they have looked back one bit.

there are certainly many things which I don't know or I am not aware of and what you said make sense in that respect. Another piece of the puzzle for sure

 

[Tanawat_Phadunkiat]

if they managed to do with just intern then props to them for being able to do so.

Returning at the OP, I still believe that reddit post to be a product of the internet mania of spreading stories for the sake of clamor.

You still don't understand how game developing works. Like if you are building a house, you don't need everyone in your team to be architect or engineer, especially when the majority of the works are hard labour. And I will say again don't underestimate newly graduated artists, a lot of them are professionals right off the bat. Also, new comers didn't have to only be interns, right? Consider how successful Witcher 3 was, it's illogical to assume that they couldn't find any mid-level/senior wanted to join them at all.

For example these were all done by students

 

[strangerism]

You still don't understand how game developing works. Like if you are building a house, you don't need everyone in your team to be architect or engineer, especially when the majority of the works are hard labour. And I will say again don't underestimate newly graduated artists, a lot of them are professionals right off the bat. Also, new comers didn't have to only be interns, right? Consider how successful Witcher 3 was, it's illogical to assume that they couldn't find any mid-level/senior wanted to join them at all.

For example these were all done by students

it was a wrong choice of word, I wrote intern but in reality I meant fresh recruits. Either way, my point was that I do not believe what the reddit post claim that CDPR got rid of some of their best leads to replace them with new recruits just to save some pennies in salary. Especially given that their previous game were so successful. If they got ousted surely there were other reasons to count for.

 

[NevaEilhart]

To me the only thing remotely real about all this (which I consider at best well educated fanfic), is how the decision process of the game has been hurt because of early stage hesitations and a lack of a strong vision. It took them two years of developement at least to make the jump from 3rd to 1st person and back in those days (when the Witcher 3 was gathering all the spotlight) you could come over the CP forums and find people arguing over this very decision.
This same decision made them fall into a rabbit hole where they had to design a whole game around a new perspective, then advertise it properly (because when you have 1st person view, people expect strong shooting mechanics, but CDPR had to balance it with the expectations from their RPG fanbase, all of that with a newly found interest from players all over the world thanks to the Witcher 3).
Eventually all this energy spent in making the jump from 3rd to 1st person ended up with less time for pure development.

Now I'm very hopeful for the future of Cyberpunk : given the looks and general feeling of the game, 1st person was the better choice. Now that they don't have to deal with that choice anymore and that the main assets are there, they can go on improving and building on it.

 

[strangerism]

To me the only thing remotely real about all this (which I consider at best well educated fanfic), is how the decision process of the game has been hurt because of early stage hesitations and a lack of a strong vision. It took them two years of developement at least to make the jump from 3rd to 1st person and back in those days (when the Witcher 3 was gathering all the spotlight) you could come over the CP forums and find people arguing over this very decision.
This same decision made them fall into a rabbit hole where they had to design a whole game around a new perspective, then advertise it properly (because when you have 1st person view, people expect strong shooting mechanics, but CDPR had to balance it with the expectations from their RPG fanbase).
Eventually all this energy spent in making the jump from 3rd to 1st person ended up with less time for pure development.

Now I'm very hopeful for the future of Cyberpunk : given the looks and general feeling of the game, 1st person was the better choice. Now that they don't have to deal with that choice anymore and that the main assets are there, they can go on improving and building on it.

Indeed with the game now in our hands, I can see the 1st person perspective adds quite a lot of immersion to the whole experience (honestly I never had any doubt about this) but also makes this game stand out from the other crowd of well known open world shooter out in the market. So I am quite happy that they make this decision at the end, whatever time it took to reach it the end result justifies it. As you said most of the dev time was probably spent in tech and building expertise on 1st person gameplay prototypes with little time for iterating on the new systems.