The delay of the hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 has been met with a mix of disdain, disappointment and general unease. There have been a handful of rumors in response to the delay, mostly centering on why the game was delayed. The two reasons are pretty simple, but often controversial. There have been claims that Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed because it ran too poorly on various current-gen platforms.
The other major rumor is similar, but there’s a key difference. The other set of rumors says that the developer made the call to push the release to closer to the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. This change would give the company more time to polish the next-gen ports of the RPG. CD Projekt Red has now countered these rumors. Of course porting to next-gen has not been confirmed, and is purely assumed at this point.
Members of the game industry have also supported this idea. Cory Barlog, God of War director, posted the following, “EVERY game runs badly until you optimize for the hardware in the final push before gold.” CD Projekt Red also addressed the rumors in their own forums. Their response comes from one of the staff members responsible for QA, and their statements are pretty clear.
“Cory Barlog hit the nail on the head. Of course we’re optimizing for the Xbox One, and for the Playstation, and for the PC, because that’s what you do in the last stretches of game development. While the game is made, lots of things are unoptimized, because they’re all in flux, changing, and still not finished.”
“So simple answers like ‘They delayed the game because of X’ might make for a good rumor, but don’t hold a lot of truth. There’s always many reasons. Among them, and I can speak for myself, simply fixing bugs, so the game is as polished as possible. No hidden agendas, just working on making the game better.”
Senior quest designer Philipp Weber also weighed in saying, “Cory Barlog hit the nail on the head. Of course we’re optimizing for the XBox One, and for the Playstation, and for the PC, because that’s what you do in the last stretches of game development.” So all in all, whether the game is delayed for one reason or many, it seems like we are just going to have to wait and see how the final product turns out.
Cyberpunk 2077 is due out on September 17, 2020 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
