What lessons did we learn from Cyberpunk 2077?
Where is the future we were promised?
My guest for this installment of Multiplier is former Kotaku Australia editor Alex Walker. Since Kotaku Australia’s archives got taken, it’s unfortunately no longer possible to read his superb review of Cyberpunk 2077. Fortunately for us all, Alex still writes from time to time. You can find him on Twitter, BlueSky and Threads.
Fergus: I didn’t formally review Cyberpunk 2077 back when it first launched but I did write a blog naming it ‘The Galaxy Fold Of 2020 Video Games.”
Like Samsung’s first foldable phone, CD Projekt Red’s genre-bending open-world game was as futuristic as it was unfinished. If you had a high-end PC or next-generation console capable of delivering what the game was going for, it was a pretty solid (if Watchdogs-like) rendering of Mike Pondsmith’s dystopian metropolis. Even then though, it was a vision of the future that barely hung together with countless bugs, crashes and other technical issues in the mix.
On the other hand, if you (like me) chose to pick up the Xbox One (or Playstation 4) version of the game then you were due for a very different kind of dystopia. In retrospect, I don’t think it's unfair to characterize the original launch of Cyberpunk 2077 as akin to an early access or beta period for the game. At the time, I remember it feeling like malpractice. Like someone got away with something. Sure, games being shipped too early and launching in a hot mess state is a tale as old as time. Cyberpunk 2077 won’t be the first and won’t be the last. Still, it feels like the biggest.
There are plenty of folks who have picked up the game at a later date and can see it charms sans that context. I can’t. When I look at it I can’t help but wonder what the rest of the gaming industry sees in Cyberpunk 2077. Was it dangerous proof that some AAA releases are in fact too big to fail?
Alex: Are AAA releases too big to fail? I think we can say absolutely not, and with a fair degree of certainty. I'm sure Warner Bros would have wished otherwise; the Singaporean government probably feels the same about Skull & Bones.
The early access labeling I want to get to, but before that I think it's necessary to reflect upon how this has been a running theme for CD Projekt Red. It took 7 patches before The Witcher 3 offered a completely different movement system that players were broadly happy with. The UI went through a rework. Roach teleported to new locations seemingly at will. Crafting materials originally had weight, which went about as well as it ever does. The performance was naturally an issue — not Cyberpunk on PS4/Xbox One levels of bad, but noticeably chuggier than it ended up being over a year later. And lots of odd little bugs ranging from saves not working, T-posing, and other glitches that would either break or force quests to be replayed.
The Witcher 2 was arguably worse, and it took the Game of The Year edition before the severe frame rate drops, crashes to desktop, corrupted saves, quest-breaking glitches, the game randomly not accepting inputs, and this was arguably CDR's best game on launch! The Witcher 1 is still broken in some pretty significant ways today, and I'm not talking T-poses. There's game freezes caused by having too many quicksaves — but you need those quicksaves to deal with the glitches and crashes to desktop. And it was still unoptimised the last time I fired it up on a GTX 1080 Ti — and this was a game that came out in 2011, mind you — but who knows. Maybe a 4090 could finally brute force through the issues.
So the idea of Cyberpunk 2077 being in early access only really works if we characterise CD Projekt Red as an early access studio, or something that they've done before. That's too uncharitable especially given the sheer amount of content that these games all launched with for their time, and particularly considering their asking price. The reality is that CD Projekt hasn't really launched a single mainline project -- I say mainline because I don't think the standalone release of Gwent or Thronebreaker counts against the $US436 million spent on Cyberpunk's development and marketing. (Or the $US80-plus million that Phantom Liberty cost.)
But the context makes it harder to see Cyberpunk's circumstance as a unique affront, and more so as a recurring anomaly. Every generation gets one, whether it's the horror glitches of Assassin's Creed: Unity, the completely unplayable and beyond broken Ultima IX: Ascension, SimCity and Diablo 3's failures with online-only services. There was the whole saga around Rise of the Robots, a fighting game complete with enemies you couldn't jump over. A two-player arrangement where one player was stuck to the same character. That was probably for the best, actually, since you had to swap disks any time you fought a different enemy. And all the marketing and pre-release hype for that reached boundless levels of bullshit, like promises of movie-level graphics on an Atari, and fighting AI that learned from your fighting style. (Fun fact: Creatures in 1996 was one of the first forms of machine learning used in video games, and every single game shipped with a unique set of starting eggs that you could hatch and raise.)
Hell, some games had to be recalled because the issues were so severe. Ask anyone who installed Myth 2 by accident to their C: drive. And while I'll grant that maybe Myth 2 isn't on the same tier as comparable hype or marketing spend for AAA games, things like SimCity with decades of legacy and fans, or the weight of anticipation for the first Ultima powered by 3D accelerators (and burgeoned by the expectations of the Ultima Online community) probably would.
Put another way: Cyberpunk didn't win a Shonky award. SimCity did.
But there is a new phenomenon with games like Cyberpunk and its ilk: public investment, specifically from government grants to support the game's development. Public-private partnerships are nothing new around the world, but public co-investment in game development -- as opposed to some form of visa support or a more favourable operating environment through tax credits and the like -- is relatively new.
The Polish National Centre for Research and Development, for instance, offered multiple grants to CD Projekt to support Cyberpunk's development. Around $US7 million went towards projects that would enable "a significant increase in quality and production of complex face and body animations", not to mention research into seamless multiplayer, the creation of "live, playable in real-time, cities of great scale based on the principles of artificial intelligence and automation", and tech to power "a unique, film quality RPG with [an] open world".
Cyberpunk 2077 has abandoned its multiplayer ambitions, although you can make a better case for the work done in the facial animations and open-world tech. But I wonder how the Polish ministry feels about that? Would they see their public investment in a different light against the 30-plus million copies sold? How would they feel about being approached for grants into a Cyberpunk sequel?
Fergus: That’s really interesting! I didn’t realize how specifically interlinked the public grants were with Cyberpunk 2077’s depreciated efforts to move into the multiplayer gaming space. It reminds me of the investment that Rhode Island made into 38 Studios way back when, though obviously this is a much better outcome for everyone involved.
As for whether the Polish ministry is happy with that investment, I think it’s hard to untangle CD Projekt Red from the reality that the studio has become a symbol of what a modern Polish export can look like. Remember that time that Barack Obama got gifted a free copy of The Witcher 2? CD Projekt Red isn’t just a Polish developer as much as it is the Polish developer. In the lead-up to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, the company’s value skyrocketed to become the most valuable asset on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
I remember talking to developers from the same region around the time and hearing stories of how this bubble had completely warped expectations and valuations for what the average Polish game developer could offer as an investment vehicle. Weird as it sounds, maybe nationalism doesn’t get enough credit as a driver of commercial viability in the video games industry?
Alex: That nationalism probably was baked in a lot more than folks realise. Consider the legacy that got them here. You have a studio that's become internationally famous around the Witcher, something that's very culturally Polish, and powered by technology they built along the way. They were Polish. The ideas were Polish, the technology was Polish, and when it all finally worked the way it was supposed to, it was genuinely world-class.
But their adoption of Unreal Engine 5 is an admission of reality of modern development. They didn't have the right mix of people, circumstances and money to continue investing in an engine that can match their ambitions. And that's fine. Some studios can still pull it off — Remedy's a great one, Bungie another — but for everyone else, that time and investment is better spent elsewhere.
For one, just consider the opportunity costs. The studio spent more than $500 million on Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty combined, but they can't develop more than one expansion due to — and this is the official term given to investors — "technical issues".
The game, quite literally, couldn't support more content even if the studio wanted to. After almost a decade of ideation and development, that's a hard pill to swallow. And from an investor perspective, it illustrates just how expensive AAA development truly is -- and the reality that there are no guarantees in video games.
Poland's biggest studio had all the talent and money in the world, and the local support to match. But even they found a ceiling they couldn't smash.