You might not realize it, but today is the 4th anniversary of Cyberpunk 2077. That’s significant for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s hard to believe that it’s already been four years since this game came into our lives in an incredibly broken state, yet somehow has been able to bounce back in one of the greatest “comeback stories” in gaming history, and many are now eagerly awaiting the arrival of the sequel. For fans, the last four years were full of simply hoping that the game would be fixed and then enjoying the game once it finally was.
However, the dev team members aren’t afraid to admit that things got really dark when certain elements started to work against them. That includes Pawel Sasko, who was the associate game director for Cyberpunk 2077. In a special tweet, he thanked fans for supporting the game throughout the hard times and even admitted how “hard” it was to keep going at times and that it would’ve been “easy” to give up and just move on to the next project. However, the crew at CD Projekt Red kept going, and as such, they were able to turn the game around, making this an anniversary to remember.
For those who don’t recall the troubled launch of the game, the title was in development for years by CD Projekt Red, and many promises were made about it, including that it would be a truly revolutionary RPG and game when it dropped. Yet, when it finally arrived after MANY delays, the game was anything but revolutionary. In fact, it was a buggy mess that almost no one could play. It was performing so poorly on certain consoles that sales had to be full-on stopped due to the massive amount of refunds that companies like Sony were getting.
That led to massive scrapings of post-launch content, and the team had to refocus on not just fixing everything but providing meaningful content for players to enjoy so that they would consider coming back. Eventually, with the help of a Netflix anime that was set within Night City and a very complete and non-buggy DLC, the game was able to return to the land of the living, and gamers now appreciate it far more than they did back in 2020.
Granted, it would be best if this kind of thing didn’t happen in the future, but at least the team was able to pull off the reversal and can now look happily at what they built.
