To say Cyberpunk 2077 had a "troubled launch" is understating the reality of what happened. Alongside games like No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077 is the poster child of what can happen when a hyped game does not meet expectations, and content is rushed out as a buggy, unfinished mess. Thankfully, it didn't stay that way, and now, Cyberpunk 2077 stands as an example of redemption in the gaming world. And Pawel Sasko, Cyberpunk's lead quest designer, thinks that initial backlash was the reason why the game ended up good in the end.
News in brief:
- Lead quest designer thinks negative reception helped push the game to new heights
- It's a rare victory for gamer outrage
- Cyberpunk 2077 is now a finished game, and close to what was promised
Cyberpunk 2077 has changed a lot since launch, and it's largely for the better. The game's final update pushed out a number of additions, some of which being the metro system, which exists largely for flavor. But even before this, the game was in a much better state than on launch — and apparently, that's because of how broken the game was on launch.
According to Pawel Sasko, lead quest designer, the team was spurred on by the terrible reception the game originally got, and pushed extra hard to fix it. "That couldn’t have been possible if the initial reception of the game wasn’t as negative as it was, it changed me and us as a studio," Sasko said in an interview with The Gamer. "I believe that when you have scars, you should become proud of your scars and carry them. There were many hardships in my past, games that I worked on that were cancelled and then, of course, Cyberpunk."
It's important not to understate how broken Cyberpunk 2077 was on launch. The game ended up being pulled from marketplaces due to how many bugs it had, and the game was even blamed for causing seizures at one point. But you'd never know it now to look at the game, which has successfully built itself back up from nothing. It was likely a sobering lesson for CD Projekt Red, but an important one that they're sure to take forward with them.
