I saw some comments on the updates to the game/expansions seemingly taking a lot of time to develop and I think it's worth remembering that RED Engine was originally not an open world engine and had none of the tools to support this. The Witcher 3 was a learning experience for a lot of the developers, many of whom left after The Witcher 3 was done, and the result is the foundation for what the Cyberpunk team has/had to work with - jerry-rigged tools, likely undocumented, put together in a rush to try and combat shortcomings with the rushed development process.
Here is an example form a GDC talk on some of the tools created for The Witcher 3:
It's really cool to see how passionate the team is, coming up with interesting solutions on the go to the problems they've faced during development, but there are also a lot of red flags in this presentation. Mainly:
- Rushed development, with QA tools only being put in place mid-production as the team discovers they need a lot of optimisation with no data on problem areas.
- Seemingly no QA team involvement at any stage of the process. The focus is on adding things as quickly as possible, then cleaning it up after the fact. In the Q&A section he even mentions that there were no testers involved in the optimisation process and it was up to artists writing their own SQL statements...
- Lack of real-time feedback on optimisation work. Mention of needing to wait for a weekly report before you find out how the process went.
- Tools created by people with no prior knowledge in the skillset required to create them. While the dev dedication is admirable, it does highlight the lack of organisation on the project.
Now, imagine rushing through development on a second title, with this sort of tooling as your foundation, trying to support 5+ platforms, all while a pandemic is going on, and I think it is easy to understand why there may be issues in terms of delivery time and quality.
It seems clear to me that CDPR either need to completely refactor their engine and the tools around it, which would take a very long time and effort, or they need a different, proven solution with lots of support and a big talent pool - they seem to have opted for the latter.
Back to the original topic - I still don't understand the comparisons with NMS and the like, or these expectations of long-term support for a single player RPG. It makes me think people thought this would be the next GTA Online and I just don't get why that is.