Let me quote myself:
And they still won't work properly 4 months after the game was released.
As you can see, I was referring to the release of the patch 1.2 in the (not so distant, I hope) future.
Okay, fair. I admit that I lumped you in with a larger social media trend that I've seen where people are complaining about the state of the game and saying it's been 4 months, which may have been unfair on my part.
You are referring to Jason Schreier as a credible source. He wrote that around two weeks of development time were lost. Not a month.
CD Projekt Ransomware Hack Severely Disrupts Work on Cyberpunk Updates
Well, let me quote you this time:
the way some gamers are rounding this up to [...] is actually kinda funny to me.
The hack occurred on February 9th, and the article was written on the 24th - two weeks and one day after the attack. The only thing you can glean from the Bloomberg article is that employees still weren't back to work when the article was written, which is confirmed by the wording of the article:
"As a result of the ransomware attack, which was disclosed on Feb. 9, most of its employees have been locked out of their workstations for the past two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter."
Also, further down:
"As a result, employees remain unable to log onto the company’s virtual private network [. . .]"
Emphasis mine. As per the article itself, this isn't really a 'gotchya' moment regarding my one month estimate, as the article was written before employees went back to work.
How, then, are we able to determine that a month of work was lost? The announcement for the delay was published on February 24th (the second half of February), and the new date was pushed back to the second half of March. Furthermore, in 3 days it will have been exactly one month since the delay was announced, and the patch is not here, yet.
Therefore, unless you have additional inside information regarding how long employees were unable to work as a result of the security breach, one month seems like a fairly accurate assessment of how long the patch was delayed for. The exact amount of time may be longer or shorter based on information I don't have access to.
They need to rewrite huge parts of the engine. And I am not certain if it is possible now. The game was already released: it's very probable that calibrating or rewriting such a huge part of the code would alter some values and information that are included in the saved games (files).
There is, of course, the possibility that any number of the game's broken systems are now core issues with the game, and toying with the coding would corrupt save files. In that case, the developers should honestly just communicate that to us at this point. Even Studio Wildcard eventually came out and fessed up to the fact that a number of prominent issues with
ARK: Survival Evolved had become core problems, and Wildcard is pretty much one of the worst publishers in the industry.
Remember: this game has to work properly on PS4. And they are struggling to make it happen even with the current state of all AI systems. Refining them and making more sophisticates seems to be beyond their level of ability right now. I keep my fingers crossed, but I am not expecting much any more.
Of course, but also remember that patch 1.1 and patch 1.2 were supposedly to address the state of the game on consoles first and foremost.
Your more pessimistic outlook seems to revolve around the idea that they cannot patch these interconnected systems and that they most likely are core issues that can't be tampered with, based (at least partly) on the fact that they haven't even been able to address the performance of the game on consoles yet. My point of view is simply to hold out and see exactly what patch 1.2 does for the game before I start to share yours.
The Lead Gameplay Designer and Technical Design Coordinator are quoted in this blog post as saying that the patch is an important step in addressing Cyberpunk's police behavior. This is fairly vague but it does at the very least imply that there is more to come. Even if police car chases do end up being a pipe dream given the game's launch state, then it seems the developers will at least attempt to make the system feel less tacked-on.
All we can do is wait and see what comes, though.