Cyberpunk 2077, after going gold, gets delayed another month

[Karlston]

Cyberpunk 2077, after going gold, gets delayed another month

Studio previously pledged that new game “will have already been released” by December.

Enlarge / If you look closely at the shades, you can see the effect of today's news: Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed again, now to December 10, 2020.

CD Projekt Red / Aurich Lawson

95 with 62 posters participating, including story author

CD Projekt Red's next massive adventure game, Cyberpunk 2077, has been delayed for what appears to be the 4,000th time since being announced roughly eight years ago.

 

After assuring fans that the game's last delay—to November 19—was pretty much ironclad, due in part to the game "going gold," CD Projekt Red confirmed a new release date via a Twitter post on Tuesday. Cyberpunk 2077 will now arrive on December 10 simultaneously on a bunch of platforms. (Deep breath: Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PS4, Windows 10 PC, and Stadia.)

“Undercalculated”

"'Going gold' means the game is ready, can be completed, and has all content in it," the studio's leads wrote in a statement. "But it doesn't mean we stop working on it and raising the quality bar... This is the time period we undercalculated."

 

The top reply to Tuesday's Twitter post was an image captured from CDPR's Twitter account one day earlier, which showed the developer directly replying to a fan asking if the November 19 launch date was ironclad so that they might plan on taking that day off of work. CDPR's direct reply was two simple words: "Full confirmation!"

 

Before that assurance, CDPR's quarterly address to fans in early September included a claim from CFO Piotr Nielubowicz: "When we meet again in this format, Cyberpunk 2077 will have already been released." That language implied that CP2077 would be out before that CDPR video series' next installment, likely in early December.

 

Since the company's announcement of a November 19 release date, reports have surfaced confirming a surge in development "crunch" in the game's final weeks as written plainly in an email sent to the company's development team by studio lead Adam Badowski. As Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported:

“Starting today, the entire (development) studio is in overdrive,” Badowski wrote, elaborating that this meant “your typical amount of work and one day of the weekend.” The extra work would be paid, as required by Polish labor laws. Many other video game studios don’t pay for overtime.

 

“I take it upon myself to receive the full backlash for the decision,” he wrote. “I know this is in direct opposition to what we’ve said about crunch. It’s also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back—that crunch should never be the answer. But we’ve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation.”

Badowski served as co-author of today's delay announcement, which states that "it might seem unrealistic when someone says that 21 days [of delay] can make any difference in such a massive and complex game, but they really do."

 

 

Cyberpunk 2077, after going gold, gets delayed another month