CD Projekt Red Co-founder Posts Video Apologizing For Myriad ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Issues

CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwinski has apologized in a video posted to Twitter and the company’s website about Cyberpunk 2077‘s numerous bugs in its console release and about the intense crunch the development team for the game faced through its development.

Dear gamers,
Below, you’ll find CD PROJEKT’s co-founder’s personal explanation of what the days leading up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 looked like, sharing the studio’s perspective on what happened with the game on old-generation consoles. pic.twitter.com/XjdCKizewq

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) January 13, 2021

In the video, Iwinski apologizes for the massive quality gap between the PC and console releases, blaming the issues on trying to scale the game down to meet restrictions of console hardware. “We made it even more difficult for ourselves by first wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles–especially old-gens,” he says. “That was our core assumption. And things did not look super difficult at first, while we knew the hardware gap, ultimately, time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task.”

After giving updates on the console version’s patch schedule—a major patch is expected in the next ten days and a second one “weeks after”—Iwinski assures players that he wishes to maintain CD Projekt Red’s style of open communication with its player base and will continue to work to make Cyberpunk 2077 enjoyable on all platforms.

That work, according to Iwinski in a Q&A posted on the company’s website, will not involve crunch. CD Projekt Red has been hounded by questions about the extreme crunch it put developers through to finish the game throughout its development cycle. In the Q&A, Iwinski says, “The team is working to bring relevant fixes to the game without any obligatory overtime. Avoiding crunch on all of our future projects is one of our top priorities.”

The language does not necessarily guarantee that there won’t be crunch employed to get the myriad updates to the game out, unlike its promise at the start of development to avoid crunch, which was proven false in September of last year.

The Q&A also states that CD Projekt Red is working to get the game back on the PlayStation store and that it is issuing refunds to players who asked for it as promised.