During an interesting interview with Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, CD Projekt RED’s Marcin Iwinski confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077’s development was rebooted multiple times before reaching the form we’ve seen for the first time at the E3 2018.
During an interesting interview with Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, CD Projekt RED’s Marcin Iwinski confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077’s development was rebooted multiple times before reaching the form we’ve seen for the first time at the E3 2018.
Iwinski confirmed that but wanted to go beyond the concept of “reboot,” which could apparently look like a bad thing but is indeed something which is natural for a developer to go into when building such a great game.
“Yeah… But first of all, what does it mean to change direction, reboots? It is a creative process which is based on iteration. And if internally people at the studio are not happy with something they’ve been working on, and it takes three months or six months, being an independent developer and a—I really don’t like the word publisher, but we are self-publishing—we have 100% of the fate in our hands,” Iwinski told Kotaku.
“If we don’t like something, we have no problem saying, ‘OK, we have to redo this part.’ It can mean we are throwing away six months of work, and there were bits and pieces happening like that.”
He claims that he knows how “at the very end the only thing that’s important is the quality. So if the quality’s there and we need to iterate for three years, we are lucky enough to be able to afford it first of all, so we have this capability and possibility… Sometimes if you hear something outside it might sound scary but I hope there are no fears anymore.”
A lot of the time spent in pre-production was useful, he mentioned, for things like planning and creating a believable world before the true development of the gameplay systems even began.
The main issue, anyway, was the idea that CD Projekt RED would’ve been able to run the development on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt together with Cyberpunk 2077, something that was impossible very quickly after the first teaser trailer.
“I can tell you about how it really worked out. When we did that, we thought we’d be able to run two projects at the same time,” Iwinski said, pointing at the example of Ubisoft as a publisher which handles a lot of different projects at the same time as a target for the future.
“We would love to have this knowledge, maybe over time… I think it’s also our testament to quality because theoretically, we could have, but then Witcher 3 wouldn’t have been what it was. And again, we thought with expansions, all hands on board, Blood and Wine being 40-50 hours. That’s all thanks to the fact that there was a smaller group working on Cyberpunk. Our initial intention, or bravery, or naivety was, ‘Yeah we’ll pull it off, but hey it’s not working out.’”
Cyberpunk 2077 is still lacking a release window but is aiming for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
