You are wrong if you think Cyberpunk 2077 was 8 years in development

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You can say that the game was in development for 8 years.

It was in pre-production since maybe 2012 or even 2011. Pre-production is when you decide what you want to do and in what direction the project should go. You create your first concepts and make reasearch. Then those concepts get thrown away and new ones are made and before you notice, it's 2016 and you start working on the project.

It certainly was in development for 8 years but the real game building began in 2016. I think nobody questions it.
 
Regardless a product was still release unfinished. 8 years, 4 years. What we know and what we got is what matters. No excuses.
 
Yeah, makes no difference. In the 2018 "ingame-demo" there was something like "Work in progress. LOOK may change".
The look is 95% the same...
 
It's like saying a building a building starts when they lay the foundation. That's starts years ago when the engineers start designing the building, then they bring in the massive workforce to build the building.
Construction is developement. Plan design is preprod.
 
No. The "demo" was a visual concept. And not in game. Don't call it a demo than. A demo is a piece of the actual game. This was them building only what we saw in the visual concept. Than they recreated it in the actual game. Cut what they couldn't/didn't want to do etc. This is why you finalize what you want in game. And see what is actually possible. Before the public sees it.
It's literally the same with The Witcher 3. They had vertical slices from 2014 that were either entirely cut or heavily revisioned from the retail version. Features like the triple bolt crossbow, real-time Griffin blood trail, the Crookback bog herbalist, and Dikstra's quest structure and dialogue, even a whole Ciri ice skating section that's not shown in the demos was said to be in the game at one point.


This whole section is not in the actual game

So were chunks of this demo

Dunno if you know this but this is how most game "demos" work. They show vertical slices of the unfinished product for the press and build around it after, hence all the "downgrades" and "revisions". Ubisoft and EA are notoriously obvious for this but even GoW PS4, Horizon Zero: Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, even Spiderman Ps4 practiced this. They show demos on the E3 floors that are still being heavily revisioned or had stuff entirely cut in the final product. Really not the best habit from our perspective but that's just how the industry work.

Heavily revisioned

Not in the actual product as far I can remember


CP2077 is a severe case of poor management that didn't pull everything off in time. I won't defend them from it. But the process is still no different from the industry norm. It's just about how they pull it off in the end.
 
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I agree the game was from my understanding in story board development for 3 years, and production for 4. But it's very interesting that prior to release *everyone* was talking about how great this game sould be since it had been in development for 7 years and they were taking time with delays to avoid those massive day 1 patches.
 
2012:

Then around 2015/16 a new director went in (can't find the new, if anyone can help), threw everything in the trashcan, restarted the whole game (hence the first hack, when CDPR told that it didn't matter, cause it was "old obsolete piece of work".

They most likely started building the game very late, which is why beside the main core or the game (a few sellers, two prostitute just to say they have some, and quests) the whole game feels empty.

As a Cyberpunk fan, sure I loved the game, but yeah...
Lots of false promise, false advertising and CDPR looked like clown, when people would have been less agressive had they played a less secretive card...

They kept thing secret, acting as if they worked on it, when in fact not much was done, they finally rushed their way until that apocalyptic release...

I doubt they can fix the mess now.
 
2012:

Then around 2015/16 a new director went in (can't find the new, if anyone can help), threw everything in the trashcan, restarted the whole game (hence the first hack, when CDPR told that it didn't matter, cause it was "old obsolete piece of work".

They most likely started building the game very late, which is why beside the main core or the game (a few sellers, two prostitute just to say they have some, and quests) the whole game feels empty.

As a Cyberpunk fan, sure I loved the game, but yeah...
Lots of false promise, false advertising and CDPR looked like clown, when people would have been less agressive had they played a less secretive card...

They kept thing secret, acting as if they worked on it, when in fact not much was done, they finally rushed their way until that apocalyptic release...

I doubt they can fix the mess now.
Adam Badowski took over the game 2015/2016, and basically the project was rebooted. Also several senior devs left CDPR around that time due to disagreements over the direction of Cyberpunk.
 

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Frankly I'm amazed they managed to put into the game the amount they did in just four years and in that environment.
Agreed, I tried to think that all of the work was completely new for most of the devs working on that engine - from 3rd person to 1st; from woods and small cities (mostly) to a huge, complex state-sized city; from swords and magic to guns and hacking; from torches to all kinds of electric lights; computers and TVs had to be added, and so on and so on.
I'm in no way have knowledge about how engines work or games are made, but it's fucking mindblowing - the amount of work had to be done.

Back to the topic: the credits show A LOT of 3rd party companies involved in different tasks, so "500" staff is definitely not the definitive number.
 
Well it was clear as the sun the directives were the ones that made the mess. Even the attitude of Cd Projekt Red was completely different at the time the project were under the old directors.

There was more transparency more communication and the will to create a RPG in the Cyberpunk universe.

Wayback machine offers old blog posts Cd Projekt did at the time talking about everything.

Then the new directors went in and sneaky changed everything ignoring everything said before and forced a total overhaul of the systems of the game.

The game was not even meant to be first person.

And in fact we can see the final result.

I would like to meet the old team the one that left for disagreement and offer her a big hug.
 
i saw someone say they had a soft reboot 2018 when they brought keanu reeves in... all the games that get soft reboots seem to abandon core audience for mass appeal, very sad
 
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