Polish game studio CD Projekt Red announced a sweeping restructuring plan on Tuesday, just months after the disastrous launch of its much-hyped title Cyberpunk 2077 . One of the key goals of the new plan brings “a change in the way [the studio] develops video games,” according to a press release. The changes will allow CD Projekt Red to work on “multiple AAA games and expansions in parallel” starting in 2022.
Single-player RPGs “will remain our priority,” Michał Nowakowski, the studio’s SVP of business development, said in a statement, and you can expect to see more of Cyberpunk and The Witcher . “We also perceive the huge potential of both The Witcher and Cyberpunk , and we want to expand their reach to include new areas, media and content types,” Nowakowski said.
Despite the focus on single player, CD Projekt Red does plan to expand its games’ online capabilities, though the studio wasn’t specific about what those features might be. These online features will be gradually rolled out to CD Projekt Red games, the studio said.
The studio also committed to improving working conditions for its employees. “CD Projekt will remain an inclusive and diverse workplace; however, we also want to emphasize the well-being of our employees and provide them with professional and personal development opportunities,” studio head Adam Badowski said in a statement. CD Projekt Red did not provide further specifics about what changes will be made.
I want to believe they are being truthful, because I’d like to believe they can still be that CDPR from the Witcher 3 days and one big misstep doesn’t mean game over in my opinion. Because in that case I wouldn’t care about BGS anymore because of Fallout 76.
The plan sounds promising, multiple AAA games in parallel. Priority still being singleplayer RPGs, thank God. Does make me wonder what will come of Cyberpunk MP, personally I’d be fine if there isn’t any.
As a CDPR fan, this news has me even more hyped. New Witcher game eventually, they keep working on Cyberpunk 2077 with free DLC and expansions plus The Witcher 3 upgrade. And a second studio!!! Let’s go baby!!! CD Projekt Red!!!
Haven’t played it yet as im waiting for the current generation upgrade but I agree. CDPR is excellent and Cyberpunk 2077 is still better than 90% of games out there despite the game’s issues.
glitches and bugs aside Cyberpunk wasn’t a great game
Visually on PC it looked great and Night City is amazing looking.
But the game felt shallow and bland. From its sidequest stories to character interactons, dialogue NPC’s mission design awful sandbox gameplay and some terrible inventory design choices.
How can you possibly make such a claim. Honestly. You say that Cyberpunk is better than 90% of all other games out there… & yet you haven’t even played the thing. Not even once.
Cyberpunk is not better than 90% of other games. No way. It has a couple of memorable characters & questlines because yes, CDPR is good at that stuff. Overall though? The game remains to this day an unfinished, unpolished, buggy, glitchy mess. It’s nowhere near great.
CDPR fucked up badly with Cyberpunk. I’m glad to hear they’re taking that seriously & making changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. They are capable of so much more. I hope they get back to the level of Witcher 3 once again.
I’m glad to see them make the changes but I can’t say I’m taking any of this at face value. I admire Witcher 3 for what it did in terms of consumer friendliness and value but the game was not for me and strip away all the lies, all the expectations, all the hype, etc. from Cyberpunk, it still felt really underwhelming to me. Like, even with the bug fixes it left a lot to be desired, and now that I’m playing through Yakuza 0 for the first time it is really starting to dawn on me how dead and lifeless Night City feels. I get they aren’t a Rockstar sized company, I truly do, but I think with Cyberpunk they wanted to make something far beyond their capabilities and it showed.
I have played it and I’m not one for ranking games in any definitive way but I have it as one of the best games I’ve played. Its absolutely great in my view. And I think the areas it struggles in are ones that if you play the game, do the main mission and sidequests and whatnot generally you simply don’t notice unless you really want to.
But its all end of the day a matter of opinion. I couldn’t get into the Witcher but its just not my setting.
Trust me, when I was playing through the story and experienced the following, I did not want to notice them:
Getting booted to an external view of my car outside the Moxxies club, instead of the scenes of the first Braindance playing.
Bike crawling to a halt when driving down the side street to meet Takemura for the second time.
Condom icon stuck on screen during a cut-scene with Panama.
Those are just some of the issues I came across in story missions on the Series X. It’s OK to enjoy the game, I had a good time overall, but painting those of us who are critical of aspects of it, as somehow actively looking for faults, isn’t a good look.
Of course it’s totally cool if you’ve actually played the game & think it’s great. I’ve got no issue there at all.
I think that different people have different tolerance levels for things like bugs & glitches. Some things which may not bother me could seem game breaking to you & vice versa. I would argue that Cyberpunk has glaring, obvious problems though. Doesn’t matter how much I personally enjoyed it’s characters & storylines.
I make the claim based on being 100% confident in CDPR. They earned my confidence in regards to Cyberpunk 2077 because of The Witcher III which was my #1 game of the PS4/XBO generation. When I look at visuals, it’s a 10/10. Music soundtrack, voice acting 10/10. Story and characters are 10/10. Gameplay and combat is the weakest aspect at probably an 8/10. Side quests are for the most part excellent.
Are there technical issues? Absolutely. Should CDPR have delayed the game to 2022? Absolutely.
I don’t need to play the game to have confidence in CDPR and Cyberpunk 2077 to where when I do play it, it will be better than 90% of games out there because I know it will be. Now, perhaps for other people, it isn’t or won’t be but for me, I have confidence that when I play Cyberpunk 2077 that it will be better than those 90% of games out there.
Cyberpunk promised the depth of the ocean and it has the depth of a pond in the backyard along with the worst state a game has launched in years to the point that the conversation around it is a joke and nobody cares about it. Its nowhere near better than 90% of games out there man. Like you can enjoy it but hiding the reality of the situation is not good I think.
Commercial hit yeah but the game has been a failure at everything else.
I’m taking a very “wait and see” approach to all of this. CDPR has made one arguably fantastic game (Witcher 3), one game that was pretty good (Witcher 2), and one game that I wanted to love but met ended nowhere near the expectations of what was promised and launched at an inexcusable state (Cyberpunk 2033). While this lip service all sounds great, and I’m glad they’ve picked up another developer, until I actually see that they can manage multiple titles and produce great results… who cares? I mean this is like asking a juggler who has a history of dropping the one shiny ball they have to juggle, now volunteering to be the lead juggler that juggles a dozen balls at a time.
Cyberpunk did change the industry tho. Its gonna make studios terrified of vertical slices and releasing stuff in such states irrelevant of goodwill.
What encompasses a “great game”? The legacy of cyberpunk is that it was a glitch filled mess that overpromised, underdelivered and blatantly lied to its fans about the state of said game.
