[devonkim]

Yeah, the other situation is that PC players have oftentimes gotten buggy and unplayable ports from consoles for years, and now that a PC first development studio wound up screwing console players first it’s much more visible and the outcry worse. They never launched simultaneously on 9 platforms at a time. Heck, not a lot of titles do that at all that are well established veteran studios across many prior console generations.

CDPR is no saint but compared to the rest of the industry they are relatively. I’m thoroughly enjoying it despite some small bugs here and there but given the massive size of the game and the really ambitious stuff they’ve done in animation it’s amazing what they got done in the time window they had between Witcher 3 and the original launch timeframe.

I hope CDPR learns the right lessons though and focuses upon engineering management and how to rein in their marketing better.

[chii]

a lot of CDPR staff left in the wake of TW3 because of crunch and other various factors (presumably, they weren't as well compensated for such a successful title as they presumed they would).

CDPR cannot replace talent that's gone - and it shows in cyberpunk.

[devonkim]

This seems to be a longstanding trend in game dev houses across the industry worldwide, so the question is whether it was sufficient enough to cripple Cyberpunk development into its current state and whether the churn was worse than industry averages. It's not clear whether spending more money on developers would have been sufficient to make release better given Cyberpunk is the most expensive game in history and with only 30% of the budget spent on development.

[chii]

It's very clear that spending more money will not retrieve talent lost - just because you're hiring more people doesn't mean the old, internalised expert knowledge from old staff can be replaced.

The graphical details are amazing and the art direction great in cyberpunk (disregarding the bugs and stuff on console). But it's very much a high production value game, but without the singular vision that would've made it an excellent immersive sim game (ala Deux Ex). And this missing singular vision is due to the lost staff that had this element for TW3.