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by chii 1989 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
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.