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Cyberpunk 2077 delayed to September 17
- Thread starter BAD
- Start date
I said a couple weeks ago in the poll thread that this game would ship as soon as it's ready to ship, you don't spend 7 years working your butt off as a developer to then turn around and release a game that needs 6 months of polish. Also, that 7 year figure ... hey so , games go through multiple phases of production and the first one can sometimes take the longest because it'll have the fewest amount of people working on it.
The initial teaser for CP2077 was in early January of 2013, Witcher 3 hadn't even really been unveiled yet by that point but it was under development for a couple years (just assuming they went to work shortly after finishing up witcher 2 anyway). Witcher 3 didn't end up shipping until May of 2016 and it received 2 giant DLC packs , one came out 5 months after launch while the main game received substantial performance /QOL fixes. The second DLC came a further 7 months after that (about a year after the games initial launch) and again, the entire time more patches and fixes were being applied to the main game including a mild overhaul of the engine itself to improve rendering quality in blood and wine.
So , put more simply , CDPR was putting a TON of it's manpower into witcher 3 from at least some point late 2011 (witcher 2 came out almost 4 years prior to witcher 3) all the way until the middle of 2016. Only Around June of that year were the full resources of the studio brought over to put Cyberpunk 2077 into full production. "but pachinko" you say "that first trailer in 2013, what was that?" that was a proof of concept. They'd negotiated the license and had a few artists whip up a concept of something that *could* be a videogame version of the pen and paper game. More conceptual work and perhaps even many vague ideas about characters and probably a few scriptments for a vague story ... this stuff would have been slowly created for most of 2013 but as Witcher 3's scope grew so too did it's demands. Even though I imagine CDPR was hiring a ton of staff to help grow the studio into a place that could functionally build 2 games at once, witcher 3's grand scheme was growing with it. By the time 2014 rolled around I can see the place being a madhouse of many many people toiling away to build witcher 3 into the huge game we all know and love.... people that were too busy to help with cyberpunk and so... you can easily see that very little work was likely accomplished in 2014.... 2015 and probably a bit of 2016 even. The conceptual/pre-production was likely hammered down into a core idea - "cyberpunk 2077 will be *this* and here's the story we'll tell and here's what we have to build to make it work" - The studio was growing even larger that year (I recall people mentioning plenty of job opportunities, specifically for cyberpunk development). It's safe to say that "real" production began in earnest as early as June of 2016 then.
Fast forward 2 years, we get an E3 reveal trailer and a much hyped eventually shared full gameplay demonstration. So another thing about game development phases , is you've got your pre-concept/concept stuff followed by a pre-production phase... then full production where the code is written, assets beging to be produced and a combination of code an assets are used to actually make a function videogame. It can take a LONG time even with a lot of labor to turn this into even a vertical slice that's playable which also works. I'll cite 2018's God of War as an example, for those who watched the documentary "raising kratos" might know - the infamous E3 2016 trailer that opened sony's E3 presser ? that was literally ALL of god of war on that stage in that 10 minute playable demo. They hadn't built the rest of the game yet, it would end up taking them close to 2 years to do so. Why I bring that up is , well, once the production phase is underway hardcore, you've got a milestone moment like having a playable build up and running finally. E3 2018 was for Cyberpunk 2077 was E3 2016 was for god of war. That demo represented the only truly playable slice of the game that worked at that point. Certainly in both cases art assets and objects were still being built and it's not as though the game was frozen... it's just that ... an initial playable slice of god of war represented almost 3 years of hard work and then they had 18 months to make 30 hours as good as that 10 minutes. In CDPR's case , given their pedigree they had to turn that 45 minute slice into .... well who knows ? 90 hours ? the sky is kind of the limit there. You'll notice there was no kind of release date presented with that "night city" trailer and the game play footage only came out a couple months later with plenty of water marks warning of differences in the final product. Fast forward another year and after a positive reception for months the team has toiled away building out the full game, but it's still not ready. Rumors I've read here on era say they'd planned to attempt a fall/winter release in 2019 but by the time they came up with a new trailer it was apparent that couldn't happen so they just tacked 6 months on and hoped for the best. Thus we got our April release date, I really feel like they took a look at what was finished by the end of 2018 and thought along the lines of "so if the next 6 months goes as good as the last 6 , we'll be at X level of completion by Y date ... and need at least 3 months to clean the game up which puts us at Z date so let's plan a release 30 days after that" . It's all vague estimating that far out , but they wanted to get the ball rolling and start taking some pre-order cash in and well oh boy did it work, especially with the Keannu reveal.
So now here we are , 6 months after that reveal ; barely on the other side of the first real delay announcement. It really sounds like the content side of the games creation went about as well as they'd hoped but there were simply too many bugs and perhaps unplanned scenarios to account for depending on how people want to play through the game. Instead of 90 days of cleanup (which is roughly what they'd have to land the game in April as intended) , they'll need 180 days of cleanup and in the meantime can continue generating a few more assets as needed depending how all the playtesting goes. So , just to play it safe they add in a further 60 day window to ... for the sake of it, clean up the console ports too. It really can't be easy to run this game on an original Xbone for example.
When it's all said and done then , you've got June 2016 through to roughly early August 2020 that Cyberpunk will have ended up in full production, we don't know what state it will ultimately release in , maybe it'll still get a few patches as Witcher 3 did, maybe not ? either way, that "full production" time will be only a hair over 4 years once it releases. Should CDPR have maybe not done that "we got the license and will make a game eventually" teaser back in 2013 ? maybe not , it got people excited but it does lead to situations like now where more than a few folks in this thread get annoyed or "I waited 8 years for this ??" becomes a sentiment. Games are NOT easy to build , they take a ton of people working their asses off for years and years and we should all be thankful CDPR has seen enough success that they can give their teams the time needed to see this game through. On the same note, every developer facing delays deserves similar respect.
In the future I hope people will be more accepting of this , if a game isn't ready it shouldn't be released. The world doesn't need more Final Fantasy XV's ... or any of the countless half baked GAAS titles.
The initial teaser for CP2077 was in early January of 2013, Witcher 3 hadn't even really been unveiled yet by that point but it was under development for a couple years (just assuming they went to work shortly after finishing up witcher 2 anyway). Witcher 3 didn't end up shipping until May of 2016 and it received 2 giant DLC packs , one came out 5 months after launch while the main game received substantial performance /QOL fixes. The second DLC came a further 7 months after that (about a year after the games initial launch) and again, the entire time more patches and fixes were being applied to the main game including a mild overhaul of the engine itself to improve rendering quality in blood and wine.
So , put more simply , CDPR was putting a TON of it's manpower into witcher 3 from at least some point late 2011 (witcher 2 came out almost 4 years prior to witcher 3) all the way until the middle of 2016. Only Around June of that year were the full resources of the studio brought over to put Cyberpunk 2077 into full production. "but pachinko" you say "that first trailer in 2013, what was that?" that was a proof of concept. They'd negotiated the license and had a few artists whip up a concept of something that *could* be a videogame version of the pen and paper game. More conceptual work and perhaps even many vague ideas about characters and probably a few scriptments for a vague story ... this stuff would have been slowly created for most of 2013 but as Witcher 3's scope grew so too did it's demands. Even though I imagine CDPR was hiring a ton of staff to help grow the studio into a place that could functionally build 2 games at once, witcher 3's grand scheme was growing with it. By the time 2014 rolled around I can see the place being a madhouse of many many people toiling away to build witcher 3 into the huge game we all know and love.... people that were too busy to help with cyberpunk and so... you can easily see that very little work was likely accomplished in 2014.... 2015 and probably a bit of 2016 even. The conceptual/pre-production was likely hammered down into a core idea - "cyberpunk 2077 will be *this* and here's the story we'll tell and here's what we have to build to make it work" - The studio was growing even larger that year (I recall people mentioning plenty of job opportunities, specifically for cyberpunk development). It's safe to say that "real" production began in earnest as early as June of 2016 then.
Fast forward 2 years, we get an E3 reveal trailer and a much hyped eventually shared full gameplay demonstration. So another thing about game development phases , is you've got your pre-concept/concept stuff followed by a pre-production phase... then full production where the code is written, assets beging to be produced and a combination of code an assets are used to actually make a function videogame. It can take a LONG time even with a lot of labor to turn this into even a vertical slice that's playable which also works. I'll cite 2018's God of War as an example, for those who watched the documentary "raising kratos" might know - the infamous E3 2016 trailer that opened sony's E3 presser ? that was literally ALL of god of war on that stage in that 10 minute playable demo. They hadn't built the rest of the game yet, it would end up taking them close to 2 years to do so. Why I bring that up is , well, once the production phase is underway hardcore, you've got a milestone moment like having a playable build up and running finally. E3 2018 was for Cyberpunk 2077 was E3 2016 was for god of war. That demo represented the only truly playable slice of the game that worked at that point. Certainly in both cases art assets and objects were still being built and it's not as though the game was frozen... it's just that ... an initial playable slice of god of war represented almost 3 years of hard work and then they had 18 months to make 30 hours as good as that 10 minutes. In CDPR's case , given their pedigree they had to turn that 45 minute slice into .... well who knows ? 90 hours ? the sky is kind of the limit there. You'll notice there was no kind of release date presented with that "night city" trailer and the game play footage only came out a couple months later with plenty of water marks warning of differences in the final product. Fast forward another year and after a positive reception for months the team has toiled away building out the full game, but it's still not ready. Rumors I've read here on era say they'd planned to attempt a fall/winter release in 2019 but by the time they came up with a new trailer it was apparent that couldn't happen so they just tacked 6 months on and hoped for the best. Thus we got our April release date, I really feel like they took a look at what was finished by the end of 2018 and thought along the lines of "so if the next 6 months goes as good as the last 6 , we'll be at X level of completion by Y date ... and need at least 3 months to clean the game up which puts us at Z date so let's plan a release 30 days after that" . It's all vague estimating that far out , but they wanted to get the ball rolling and start taking some pre-order cash in and well oh boy did it work, especially with the Keannu reveal.
So now here we are , 6 months after that reveal ; barely on the other side of the first real delay announcement. It really sounds like the content side of the games creation went about as well as they'd hoped but there were simply too many bugs and perhaps unplanned scenarios to account for depending on how people want to play through the game. Instead of 90 days of cleanup (which is roughly what they'd have to land the game in April as intended) , they'll need 180 days of cleanup and in the meantime can continue generating a few more assets as needed depending how all the playtesting goes. So , just to play it safe they add in a further 60 day window to ... for the sake of it, clean up the console ports too. It really can't be easy to run this game on an original Xbone for example.
When it's all said and done then , you've got June 2016 through to roughly early August 2020 that Cyberpunk will have ended up in full production, we don't know what state it will ultimately release in , maybe it'll still get a few patches as Witcher 3 did, maybe not ? either way, that "full production" time will be only a hair over 4 years once it releases. Should CDPR have maybe not done that "we got the license and will make a game eventually" teaser back in 2013 ? maybe not , it got people excited but it does lead to situations like now where more than a few folks in this thread get annoyed or "I waited 8 years for this ??" becomes a sentiment. Games are NOT easy to build , they take a ton of people working their asses off for years and years and we should all be thankful CDPR has seen enough success that they can give their teams the time needed to see this game through. On the same note, every developer facing delays deserves similar respect.
In the future I hope people will be more accepting of this , if a game isn't ready it shouldn't be released. The world doesn't need more Final Fantasy XV's ... or any of the countless half baked GAAS titles.
Having slept on it I have a few questions with this delay happening.
1. Can we seriously expect a next gen version in Nov 2020? Will CDP have developed enough for new systems (I know some will just say PC upscale it's easy) while still attending to the game in pre and post release to make a next gen version they are proud of? CDPR almost never do things half assed.
2. I know I likely can't wait two month to play in November with nextgen. If I start on current gen, can I carry over my save file and continue on new gen with a system patch to take advantage of PS5 or XBX?
3.Do I have to buy the game twice? Is there an upgrade path? Will native next gen versions be available at launch or in 2021?
4. How much on fire are the base console versions? We haven't seen a lick of footage, and I can almost imagine the smoke those machines will produce playing this lol
1. Can we seriously expect a next gen version in Nov 2020? Will CDP have developed enough for new systems (I know some will just say PC upscale it's easy) while still attending to the game in pre and post release to make a next gen version they are proud of? CDPR almost never do things half assed.
2. I know I likely can't wait two month to play in November with nextgen. If I start on current gen, can I carry over my save file and continue on new gen with a system patch to take advantage of PS5 or XBX?
3.Do I have to buy the game twice? Is there an upgrade path? Will native next gen versions be available at launch or in 2021?
4. How much on fire are the base console versions? We haven't seen a lick of footage, and I can almost imagine the smoke those machines will produce playing this lol
Nothing on that front. They are set on just getting it done for announced platforms, then worry about next-gen.
So the fact that games have bugs makes it good news that we found out this one is not ready like we thought it was? Also, how would it have been rushed? Up until now, we believed it was ready. Hence, the bad news that it is actually not ready.
1. No.
2,3,4. Even CDPR wouldn't know at this point because next gen port is not a priority until the game is released on current gen.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even announce next gen versions until after current gen versions are released, in the hope people double dip.
If they announce PS5/XSX versions before release i'm sure more people will hold off and wait.
So close to next gen release. Now do I get this Day 1 or wait and play this on PS5. Surely at minimum even the PS4 version on PS5 will have faster load times, smoother framerate and things like that.
The next gen port will be with the multiplyer launch alongside a GOTY edition 2 years from now.
Same deal with TLoU2
Same deal with TLoU2
Oh wow, I somehow missed this news until now. Not that this is in any way surprising given the lack of marketing, how optimistic this release date always seemed and CDPR's history of being extremely optimistic when it comes to initial release dates.
I'm not too concerned though, I've long since gotten over the disappointment over delays. I'd rather have a finished game than an unfinished one and there's plenty of other games I can play while I wait, especially in April with both RE3make and FFVIIR coming out. But I do feel for the devs, who I'm sure will have a hellish next six months.
I'm not too concerned though, I've long since gotten over the disappointment over delays. I'd rather have a finished game than an unfinished one and there's plenty of other games I can play while I wait, especially in April with both RE3make and FFVIIR coming out. But I do feel for the devs, who I'm sure will have a hellish next six months.
I am defin itely going to wait. Who knows, maybe there will even be surprise announcments for next gen at one of the console reveal events?
Has this been posted yet? Doesn't look like it will be a good delay.
It's good that they're taking the difficult decision to delay it instead of releasing it unfinished. Simple as that.
When a game is buggy at launch people say that it should've been delayed, more time in the oven, etc. But when a game gets delayed people seem to have little to no understanding why it's happening and starts to complain.
At least now I don't feel like I have to wrap up Cyberpunk in order to play TLOU2 before getting spoiled.
Cancelled my preorder. No reason to buy this on current-gen now for me. I'll probably pick it up summer 2021 or so if there is a deal on a PS5 around then. Glad it's closer so I don't have to play it on the PS4. I'm actually thinking this might be it for me on the PS4, I'm going to finish my backlog and then just wait a few months after release of the new gen to pick one up.
Delay of 5 months, 10 months, 20 months... what ever wouldn't matter. They would still crunch.
I agree, wonderfully I didn't get it until 2017 soo I thankfully didn't go through the week to week fixes and changes I had them all when I started playing.. I loved every minute of the 250 hours i put in TW3... I wish someone would ask them if they will do the same.. or will this delay of 5 months only just get the game releasable? Im truly annoyed with developers and their annouced release dates... They only announced them years in advanced to appease investors! they need to stop this.... finish the damn game then announce it 2 months before release.
Im usually a one "play-through getting as close to 100% the first time " kind of gamer. So I think that was one of the reasons I loved the game was that it was as close to as complete as CDred wanted it. But these delaying of games is soo annoying..
Hell I'm welling to bet not only was it for QA of the game but also that FF7R moved soo close the their games release that they delayed it again! So ima just get it on the next gen...(even though they said they weren't thinking about next gen yet) and let the day oners play-test it for a few months.
I'll tell on you! Hey Palpatine, come see this lolThat september could very well change to november...
