In June the Cyberpunk 2077 release date was delayed by two months to November 19, and now we’re getting pushed back again. This makes for the Cyberpunk 2077 third delay to hit gamers in the face.
And because it’s what we all expect, that three-week delay is going to see a brain-numbing and soul-destroying amount of crunch. Unless we hear otherwise, and no I don’t trust CD PROJEKT execs on this, it’s safe to assume the developers and other team are going through hell. After all, this is the company that dismissed initial criticism of crunch by saying that it was all OK because they were paying overtime in accordance with the law. All to excuse a period of mandatory crunch. And all after the studio promised they wouldn’t do that at all.
The reason for this is made clear in their announcement, which can be seen below. When speaking about the announcement that that game had “gone gold” the developer was candid that they underestimated the time they would need to prep the inevitable day one patch. The studio blames much of the delay on the amount of work it takes to develop and debug nine versions of the game. It’s almost like they should have taken on fewer versions across a longer timescale or something.
“On the contrary, this is the time where many improvements are being made that wi then be distributed via the day 0 patch. This is the time period we undercalculated,” says the announcement. The developer even openly admits that these 21 days are going to be hell, saying that they’re “aware it might seem unrealistic when someone says that 21 days can make any difference in such a massive and complex game, but they really do.” Translating the double-talk all but guarantees that they’re going to pile on a huge amount of work in those days.
And we can also infer that this will be the case by the way CDPR revealed the news according to reporter Jason Schreier, “All of them found out at the same time we did – CDPR sent an internal email simultaneously with the public tweet,” likely referring to reports from internal sources. So it suggests that this was all very sudden and the developer wanted to keep it under wraps from staff to avoid pushback. Could it be that Cyberpunk 2077 failed console-mandated compliance and now has to rush to patch the big issues?
The reaction to this announcement has been predictably sour. Gamers are just not happy with the whole situation, nor should they be. Several fans have already taken to social media to announce that they’re fed up with waiting. And it’s pretty silly that the games industry still operates like this in 2020. Coercing and pressuring employees to work insane hours to ship half-finished games for big executive paychecks is a pretty poor way to do things. It’s almost like this game is living in the corporate hellscape it wants to depict in real-time.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now releasing on December 10, 2020, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. A Google Stadia port is also currently in the works.
