Following the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red says it will release the first update within the next 10 days, with “a larger, more significant update, in the weeks after.” In a video released today, co-founder Marcin Iwinski issued a mea culpa to players, adding that he and the board members are “the final decision makers” for the game’s faulty release. “Please, don’t fault any of our teams for what happened,” Iwinski said.

Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10th, 2020, with immediate problems. While the game’s PC release was mostly praised by critics, console players — particularly those playing on the older generations — ran into widespread bugs, frame rate issues, and more. A week after the game’s release, Sony pulled Cyberpunk from the PlayStation Store and began offering refunds. An investor is suing CD Projekt Red over the disastrous launch. Today, you can buy the PC version of the game for nearly half-off.

In the five-minute video posted today, Iwinski said that “despite good reviews on PC, the console version of Cyberpunk 2077 did not meet the quality standard we wanted it to meet. I and the entire leadership team are deeply sorry for this.” Iwinski went on to point to the massive scope of the game and the developer’s grave underestimations of how much work it would take to match vision to reality, as well as the difficulties of working from home due to COVID. “We really believed we would deliver in the final days,” he said.

On its site, CD Projekt Red outlined concerns in an FAQ. In response to the quality gap between the PC version of the game and older-generation consoles, the developer said it made the work “more difficult for ourselves by first wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles — especially old-gens. That was our core assumption. And things did not look super difficult at first, while we knew the hardware gap, ultimately, time has proven that we’ve underestimated the task.”

Moving forward, CD Projekt Red says it is “committed to fixing bugs and crashes and will continue to work and improve the game via future updates to make sure you are enjoying the game regardless of the platform.” That work will apparently impact the game’s free DLC, planned for release this year, as well. “We have decided that our priority is working on the most important fixes and updates. We will be releasing free DLC afterwards — we’ll have more to say about that in the coming months.” The developer added that it intends to do so without “obligatory” overtime, despite the months of crunch leading up to the game’s release. “Avoiding crunch on all of our future projects is one of our top priorities.”

As for the game’s return to digital storefronts, the developer says it is “working on fixes and updates, and are working with Sony to bring Cyberpunk 2077 back to PlayStation Store as soon as possible.”

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/13/22229627/cyberpunk-2077-first-update-launch-cd-projekt-red-playstation-store