The engine itself had less years, that is all, but no, this has been in the works for much longer, everyone knows this.
So, the game got started in its development after TW3 fully finished. That was May 15, 2015 for the initial release, and the final DLC was May 31, 2016. CDPR doesn’t have enough people to split their development between two games. So at MOST, you get about 5 years and change, presuming they left a small group on the DLC works, which I doubt for many reasons, considering the absolute scale of those DLCs and the rate at which they were released, which means at MOST it’s four years and some change.
To put it another way, we’ll take RDR2 into account. Rockstar has what, 2-4K employees working on their game? Took eight years to complete. There’s no way 2077 was being made during the same time as TW3, and if it was, you still have maybe half to a fourth of what Rockstar has, and either the same amount of time or half that time working on this game.
Ultimately, who owns the Cyberpunk franchise, anyway? It isn’t CDPR, so I’ll at least give you that hint. In addition, you also have teams working on the GOTY Edition for TW3 and ports to new systems, etc, which also diverts manpower (no matter how small) from the 2077 project.
In that development time, most of it had to be crafting the city itself, and other assets that would be used within the city. That takes no small amount of time. At least, a year, at most, more than likely half if not two thirds of development time itself. Then comes story and actual gameplay elements, which more than likely the gameplay elements were created before the story, since that takes more precedent when it comes to game development anyway.
Once that’s done, it’s story, then you take time to fix bugs—which depending on the company might end up coming before the story anyways, though there will always be bug fixing and optimisation after the story process.
Then we get into the crux of the issue. Realistically, they had maybe four to five years of work on the game as a whole, with half to a fourth of the size of an actual AAA studio, with the newly added pressure of shareholders and a consumer base that doesn’t want to wait for the game to be completed.
You might want more time on the game, as a developer, but shareholders tell you to release the game, unaware of the actual process and only concerned with the bottom dollar, and absolutely absolved of any fault come release. So when the game is pushed out unfinished and without the proper bugfixing and optimisation needed, you then get this trainwreck of a release, which then causes the shareholders to note the dropping stock and dwindling returns from their investment and ask CDPR what went wrong.
And then you have people trying to assume the game was “too powerful” for current gen, completely sliding the crux of the issue that it’s mostly bugfixes and optimisation needed that makes the game run properly, pointing the blame at hardware they claim is “outdated and underpowered” when games like Ghost of Tsushima and the FF7R also came out the same year with arguably the same if not slightly better graphics and lighting, and both ran perfectly fine on last gen.
Then we get into the issue of it being “clearly made for next gen” when even the highest spec PCs have issues, the next gen consoles can’t handle the game and it’s not because of hardware. It’s because of performance issues related to poor optimisation and not enough time in the oven.
I think I covered everything.