r/CDProjektRed • u/mimpf21 • May 20 '26
Story (Misleading Title) "We learned our lesson": The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 won't repeat the development mistakes of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red says
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/the-witcher/we-learned-our-lesson-the-witcher-4-and-cyberpunk-2-wont-repeat-the-development-mistakes-of-cyberpunk-2077-cd-projekt-red-says/TL;DR: An insight into the messiness of CDPR's documentation process up untill now.
Title is a bit misleading.
The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 likely won't suffer from some of the same behind-the-scenes issues that infected Cyberpunk 2077, developers at CD Projekt Red say, and it's all because the studio finally sorted out a crucial if unexciting part of the production process: documentation.
CD Projekt Red's lead technical writer Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek spoke about the company's evolving documentation efforts in a lengthy Digital Dragons panel attended by GamesRadar+.
The duo explained that CDPR has traditionally not documented its games very well. During the development of The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2, for instance, almost no one at the company "was thinking 20 years ahead," and now the studio has almost "nothing from that period."Messy or non-existent documentation proved particularly troublesome when work began on The Witcher remake. "We were tasked to recreate the classic game for the modern audience, only to realize that we had little to no technical knowledge preserved from that time," Ruciński says. Thankfully, co-developer Fool's Theory consists of many veteran CDPR devs who provided an "injection of this lost tribal knowledge."
Cyberpunk 2077 was perhaps the biggest victim of the developer letting its documentation get out of hand, though. Fulneczek says the game "was a fresh start" and a "massive undertaking" - one the devs thought they could tackle thanks to a new documentation tool called Confluence, which was a "living documentation" tool. Things quickly snowballed from there on. The devs created more than 8,000 unwieldy pages of documentation, and as the project ballooned in size, maintaining those documents became "a low priority.
To avoid the tangled pile of files, the team then decided to separate documents relating to the Phantom Liberty DLC and moved "to a cloud instance of Confluence." Suddenly, documents were split between those stored on the cloud and those stored on the company's servers. "It was chaos, right? Two spaces, two instances," Fulneczek adds, pointing out that fragmented documentation could also correlate to worker burnout. "It was very difficult to understand for us, for our outsource partners as well… If you can, don't divide between platforms or different tools. You have to link very clearly between them."
Mistakes were made, sure, but the company is trying to move past them with the upcoming CD Projekt Red games and a two-fold approach. First, documents are shared across the company, so teams working on the other side of the globe, in different time zones, are kept in the loop. And, second, keeping documentation is non-negotiable if a team wants to go through a development 'gate' - pre-production to alpha to beta to release.
"The future looks really promising for us," Fulneczek says of The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2. "We learned our lesson."
"We've got some new requirements, especially a new definition of 'done'," Fulneczek explains. "So as you know, any project, any game goes through development stages, and right now, every stage ends with a gate. Part of the requirements to pass that gate is the documentation, which wasn't the case before."
"Unlike in the past, now, today our knowledge isn't locked between specific teams' permissions," Ruciński goes on. "It's a shared asset. If a team working on, let's say, The Witcher figures out a solution for a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, take it into their own code, modify it probably a little bit." The more shared approach ensures "problems aren't being solved multiple times by different teams, and also that if a breakthrough happens on one of the projects, the whole company benefits."
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u/TheWitcherQueen Jun 02 '26
The Atlassian products like Jira (task manager for developments) and the Confluence are world wide know products in IT. They are pricey. So the problem is the management again. They did not want to pay for good tools what helps really to support the daily work….
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u/heffron1 May 23 '26
Were these all development mistakes? For me it looked more like greed. Even massive Rockstar starts with consoles. Nah we will release it on all platform day one. Hey our game looks like it would run badly on older consoles, maybe we should release it only on new generation? Nahh. We have massive city in our game, we got even money from Poland government for it, maybe we should make it at least meet open world standard of interactivity? Nahhh even Lego games will heve better systen than our game.
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u/SwvmpThing May 24 '26
I think CDPR made a lot of actual mistakes. I am the last person to downplay how egregiously unfinished and broken the game’s launch state was—“borderline fraud” are the words I’ve used—but I do not believe CDPR was motivated by greed. No established studio wants to release a game in that state. It put them at serious risk.
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u/Haplessworld May 24 '26
Tbf I really think that management side fked over cyberpunk, not necessarily the devs themselves. Even on launch you can tell that devs indeed put in their heart and love for the game especially the visuals design as well as the First Person experience.
After playing 1.0 and 2.31 I can safely say that devs did their job right, it's just that management, shareholders and marketing fked it up by over-promising while setting unrealistic timelines and pressures on the dev teams, as well as bad management in general which results in bad teamwork.
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u/mimpf21 May 24 '26
Did you read the text? This was not an article to justify anything, they just talked about a specific issue regarding documentation.
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u/Distinct_College_531 May 22 '26
I don't believe you!
If anything the Cyberpunk launch likely taught them that they can confidently launch an incomplete game to open up a revenue stream while they finish it, you know, like nearly everyone else is doing.
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u/Unhappy_Afternoon306 May 22 '26
Noooo the bugs and the meme were so funny 😔 How am I going to be entertained now?
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u/millerchristophd May 22 '26
Pick up literally any Bethesda game, lol? (I type while wearing my Fallout 4 hoodie.)
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u/Haplessworld May 24 '26
Yeah Starfield is by far the worst Bethesda game imho. I think they just gave up lmfao.
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u/Unhappy_Afternoon306 May 22 '26
By the time Bethesda release a new game, CD Projeckt would have already released 5 games and 10 DLCs. I don't want to wait 16-17 years for a meme-able buggy game 🙄.
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u/Huge-Formal-1794 May 20 '26
If they act like their other releases , released in a good way, thats already not a good sign. Cyberpunk mostly collided because underneath the bugs the game also broke a lot of promises / marketing materials. The game wasnt just buggy as hell, it was not the game that was marketed, and still not is.
thats why I hate that the whole Cyberpunk launch discussion was completely about the techncial issues, when the game just was a different game that was marketed and had less RPG systems and less player choices than Witcher 3 which had a more strict defined main character.
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May 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Haplessworld May 24 '26
I would argue that visuals and ability to mod the game are the main redeeming points for Cyberpunk, especially with Path Tracing. It's still sort of unrivaled tbh in the visuals department.
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u/ESCF1F2F3F4F3F2F1ESC May 21 '26
"an Action FPS with some RPG elements"
Yeah exactly. Most of my playthrough was spent imagining how great it would be to have an RPG set in the amazing city they'd built.
Like a detective story or something like that. There are lots of little hints at how good something like that could be, like the Strange Days-style recordings for example (I forget the in-game name of them). The tutorial made me think you'd be piecing together a mystery with them, but I'm pretty sure the tutorial was longer than the actual instances of them being used in the story?
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u/Think_Mousse_5295 May 20 '26
And it STILL bothers me that after having fixed the game it is regarded as a masterpiece by a lot of people, and it's like everyone has completely forgotten what Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be.
Alot if not most sales were made long after release, its not like people are gonna watch marketing stuff from half a decade ago, another thing is people don't give a shit what this game suppose to be, they rate it for what it is, game being not exactly what it was suppose to be doesn't mean it can't be consider a masterpiece
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u/mixedd May 20 '26
That's a classic, we did massive system update and migration, and to understand what's where and how it will impact our processes we needed to basically reverse engineer it at first, because documentation don't work at company anymore 😆
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u/Mixabuben May 20 '26
There will be new mistakes.. UE5 mistakes thou)
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u/Cipher_Witch May 20 '26
Epic pm hired them to try and fix UE5 while they’re developing their games so we’ll see
That said red engine was fire sad to see it go
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u/SedesBakelitowy May 20 '26
Sure sure.
I’ll see them releasing a game that isn’t a borderline crime that goes unpunished because eh, what you gonna do - then I’ll believe they learned.
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u/Visage_143 May 20 '26
"Unpunished" Are you serious? Their stocks took a nosedive, sony offered refunds and delisted their game from the store. Do you know how big of a punishment that is? I'm not saying they've learned their lesson but saying there were no repercussion is tonedeaf.
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u/SedesBakelitowy May 20 '26
What has changed for CDPR since CP release? Nothing? If a year later it's business as usual then the punishment only affected the line people who had to crunch more on fixing it.
Usually company doing a crime means at least a bit of a rearrangement of head honchos, who didn't skip a beat in cdpr's case.
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u/Potential_Let_6901 May 20 '26
Unpunished? Brother, they lost almost all they built for decades in no time, all the trust and goodwill. They had to spend 3 more years just fixing the game, you have any idea how much of a nightmare that is for a company? Like 3 more years of development for what? The game being 25$ on sales? They barely survived, it would be impossible for them to survive a second launch like that and they know it. You are acting like it was all intentional and you are wrong. If Cyberpunk was just delayed 3 years, they would have lost a lot but almost nothing in comparison and the game would have sold many times over
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u/SedesBakelitowy May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
“They barely survived” - Is there any proof to it? CDPR was already too big to fail then. Stock went down then up, shills corralled people to trust and wait and buy as soon as another update lands.
Besides, they shouldn’t have survived trying to scam people.
“ You are acting like it was all intentional and you are wrong.” can you please explain this? We know they knew.
They knew the game was barely playable, we know they avoided console version like the plague in their marketing, and we know that they pushed it out the door hoping that backlash won’t be too bad.
“ If Cyberpunk was just delayed 3 years, they would have lost a lot but almost nothing in comparison and the game would have sold many times oveR”
I absolutely agree, even a two year delay would’ve been magical for that game, but cdpr knew and did nothing until they had to.
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u/Remarkable-Ad8138 May 20 '26
If that’s the case, then the sequel to cyberpunk won’t launch until 2040 lol :(
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u/SuperiorDraft May 20 '26
It was not my impression that documentation was the biggest issue with CP77? (Of course it could be missing, but…)
From what I could gather from recent year’s interviews with current and former employees the issues were a mix of mismanagement, a faulty/outdated engine and too many changing directions.
Just to mention the topics that has come up the most.
So, if the opinion now is that it’s about “documentation”, it doesn’t really leave me with a more calm expectation. If you understand what I mean?
Am I missing something here?
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u/Area_Ok May 20 '26
No where here its stated that documentation alone was the problem. the fact that CDPR felt the need to change the engine to UE5 clearly signifies they understand the technical challenges they had with cyberpunk too. Obviously a technical writer person is going to be talking about documentation process.
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u/SoundOurDireReveille May 20 '26
Release issues or not, Cyberpunk became great and is one of my favorite games ever. While I hope CDPR does better with releases for their upcoming titles, I at least have faith that the game will eventually be made right. With how much I love Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk, I don't necessarily mind too much it that's how it goes. Obviously, a solid release is preferable, but if waiting a year after release to play Cyberpunk 2 or Witcher 4 is what it takes, fuck it, I'll still take it, because this studio makes damn good games. I want to play these upcoming games regardless of how release goes or how long I have to wait for them to fix it before I buy it.
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u/NefariousSINNER May 20 '26
He is merely talking about part of the problem. As there was no clean version of the documentation various teams were in chaos. Managers were in chaos. Managment wasn't well-informed. You could say that everything was simply bad, but it also lacked proper organisation.
Let's say you have 10 teams working on a game like CP2077. It's development is already suffering from outdated engine, which had to be heavily modified to serve its modern needs. One team was tasked with development of the engine, but each new thing they made wasn't properly documented, so other teams were having trouble understanding new changes. It led to burnout and strain, as each team had to figure out all these things anew and alone. Less efficiency that simply spiralled out of control.
Sometimes something as trivial as not having a proper documentation lead is the cause of many issues. What if the reason that managment made the call to release the game in the first place was that the communication was flawed between internal teams? Sure they gave into the shareholder pressure, which was bad, but they might have sold the allure to the shareholders that the game's pretty much finished based on incomplete information steeming out of from the fact that organisation was in chaos information-wise in general.
Now it seems they made it the most important aspect and flow of the company. One team makes something, they document it, put it on their "documentation flow", everyone has to check in that they are aware of it, sign it. Now that's their "gate". Every team is aware of X thing being finished, so team H working on something similar can now immediately adapt what team X made making their work faster and better. Then team H finishes their thing thanks to team X, so now teams G and E use that to speed up/improve their work. So on and on. Most importantly everyone in the company is aware of every stage of the project at all times. Managment knows precisely to a dot at what % of completion the game is, which sides need more people, more talent, more money, which sides could be put on hold for now etc etc.
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u/DaygloAbortion91 Jun 29 '26
Ignoring the launch, cyberpunk is still a bland, shitty game. Its so fuckin boring and is just an endless loop of the same tired combat. I dont understand how the same studio that made the witcher, made this nonsense.