It’s hard not to be frustrated with CDPR. I have atonof goodwill for the company thanks to The Witcher 3 (from the quality of the game itself to its post-launch content rollout, culminating in an imperfect but overall impressive andfreegraphical overhaul at the tail end of last year). EvenCyberpunk 2077still has the potential to become one of those No Man’s Sky turnaround success stories, recovering from a nightmare launch to becoming the game that people were hoping for.
But when, as in a recent interview withGamesindustry.biz, Gilewski can spend several hundred words talking about Cyberpunk’s launch withoutoncetaking collective responsibility or admitting that there was anything wrong with the game, then that goodwill seriously plummets, especially when he comes out with a zinger like this:
“I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive… it became a cool thing not to like it”
The interview is an exercise in corporate revisionism. Seriously, if you want to say a bunch of stuff that sounds all pensive and reflective, without attributing any responsibility to your company for a monumental cock-up, then look no further. Cut through the waffle in this interview, and you’ll see that actually,there was nothing innately wrong with Cyberpunk 2077 on launch; the careful wording here reframes it so that Cyberpunk 2077’s hellish launch came down to how peoplerespondedto the game, not to how the game actually was (i.e. so broken on PS4 that it got was removed from the Playstation Store, seriously struggling on Xbox One, and extremely buggy and unpolished across other platforms until about a year after its initial launch).
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Statements in that interview like“I was personally not happy with how things turned out. I was not expecting that,” “I want to rebuild the connection with gamers, because we had people following us for years and they were disappointed,“and saying that CDPR attained“a critical mass of negativity”all conveniently outsourced Cyberpunk’s issues to the gaming public. Combined with the bizarre ‘it was cool to hate Cyberpunk’ comment (which isreallynot for him to say), it all paints a picture of a man who either never really came to terms with the game’s launch, or thinks that enough time has passed that he can simply remove that from the narrative about the game’s launch.
Now, I’m not saying we need endless grovelling from CDPR, or that they should self-flagellate over Cyberpunk for eternity; the company apologised way back around the time of release, and I tend to believe that a single apology [followed by tangible results] is enough. Cyberpunk 2077 is in a much better place than it was, it’s clawed back some goodwill for CDPR over the two-and-a-half years since its disastrous launch, and the upcoming Phantom Liberty DLC is an opportunity for CDPR to complete the redemption arc with style.
But just because the Cyberpunk debacle is now in the rear-view mirror doesn’t mean that CDPR can stopowningthat debacle when it comes up, and go on the offensive against haters and online bandwagons as a reason for Cyberpunk’s negative image. Yes, there’s talk about restructuring, work-life balance, improving development pipelines, and all these things (that tacitly address the well-documented crunch in the leadup to Cyberpunk’s release). There’s plenty about what ‘we went through as a team,’ and ‘what we will do going forward,’ but a notable absence of ‘we failed on this’ or ‘we went wrong here.’
Someone’s really gotta tell Gilewski that just because Cyberpunk is on a good path now doesn’t mean that they can whitewash the narrative around its launch, or shift the blame elsewhere (on regulargamers, no less). Cyberpunk 2077, with all its ups and downs, are CDPR’s to own forever. If Phantom Liberty is a hit of CDPR’s own making, then they’ve every right to reiterate that every time they’re asked about it. By the same token, when talking about Cyberpunk’s, they need to remain steadfast in owning it as a cock-up of their own making. Otherwise, how can we believe that they’ve really learned fromtheirmistakes when their most recent thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077 are that “it became a cool thing not to like”?
I like CDPR, I admire their journey, and how they’re a development studio that’s grown from humble beginnings bootlegging games in post-communist Poland to create triple-A games that put those of far richer, far more established games companies to shame. It’s a hell of an arc, but if they want to get all that goodwill back, they need to own their past, without caveats or revisions.
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