CDPR Reveals Major Cyberpunk Mistake It Won’t Make Again

CD Projekt Red recently opened up about a major mistake they made with Cyberpunk 2077 and previous Witcher games, which they will not be repeating with Cyberpunk 2 and The Witcher 4.

Cyberpunk 2077 is now regarded as one of the best games out there; however, that wasn’t always the case. The title’s launch was so bad that many platforms began issuing refunds. After a lot of hard work, the developers were finally able to get it back to the standard they were aiming for, and will not maintain that for their next title.

CD Projekt Red Has Learned From Its Mistakes with Cyberpunk 2077

Spotted by GamesRadar+, technical writer Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek opened up about Cyberpunk 2077’s major mistake during the Digital Dragons panel. The major blunder they faced during the development of Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 1, and 2 was documentation. The problem was that during the development of these games, the team lacked the foresight to plan years ahead, and now has nothing left from that time.

Jarosław Ruciński spoke about The Witcher remake, in which the developers had to reimagine this iconic title for a modern audience, but found that “no technical knowledge preserved from that time”. Fortunately, the team tasked with working on this remake was made up of CDPR devs who could fill these gaps with an “injection of this lost tribal knowledge.”

The documentation mistake extended to Cyberpunk 2077, with the title beginning from a blank slate, and it was also a massive project. The dev team used a tool called ‘Confluence’ to document development progress, but after 8,000 pages, the project kept getting bigger, and the documentation kept losing value.

The Phantom Liberty DLC also fell victim to this problem, with the team now moving “to a cloud instance of Confluence.” The issue here was that documents were divided between cloud and local storage, which made it difficult to understand, not only for CDPR but also for their outsourced partners. Adrian Fulneczek advised, “If you can, don’t divide between platforms or different tools. You have to link very clearly between them.”

However, these mistakes will not be repeated with The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, as CDPR has learned its lesson. The team has now established new requirements and a “new definition of ‘done’.” Now, when passing through each stage of development to reach the next, one of the main requirements is documentation. Through this process, the knowledge becomes a shared asset, meaning that an issue resolved in The Witcher 4 can be used to improve Cyberpunk and so on.

In other news, PlayStation has revealed all the upgrades for Cyberpunk 2077 on the PS5 Pro, which include three distinct modes. Additionally, the official Cyberpunk Trading Card Game has raised over $12 million on Kickstarter, exceeding its $100,000 target by over 120 times. What are your thoughts on CDPR’s major mistake with Cyberpunk 2077? Leave your thoughts down in the comments, and join the official Insider Gaming Discord server.

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