CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk Bug Reels and Early Demos Leaked

The hackers who have obtained the various source codes and internal documents from CD Projekt Red during the company’s big February data breach have released some of the information, including various internal videos of the many bugs and glitches the team caught. The videos are currently making the rounds on social media, Resetera, and other sites, and they’re pretty hilarious.

The videos are about what you’d expect from Cyberpunk’s pre-alpha gameplay — or heck, just Cyberpunk’s gameplay generally. Character models get launched into orbit, others are inexplicably replaced with objects, NPCs start T-posing. If you want to see what an incomplete game looks like, you’ll find something to tickle you in these montages.

Now, these would be fun enough by themselves, but they’re a bit more darkly funny if you remember that CDPR’s big defense after the game was released in its broken, buggy state was that the QA team simply didn’t catch the bugs that the players found in the games. A Bloomberg report in January alleged that wasn’t the case, and they were aware of how broken the game was — they just didn’t care. Not that these bug reels by themselves are evidence of the reported internal breakdown at CDPR — these are more of an industry-standard inside joke and are usually made with footage of bugs that have been fixed.

According to former and current QA testers, these are common things in their line of work. QA testers get bored and the development cycle for Cyberpunk 2077 was allegedly quite grueling, with almost a year of constant crunch time before the game was finally released — and I will never stop pointing out that in January 2020, CDPR was pointing out the game was finished and ready to play, and just needed time “finish playtesting, fixing, and polishing” before the projected launch date.

Source: VGC