A solemn address to pissed-off console gamers vowing “never again”.

Marcin Iwiński, co-founder of the Polish games company CD Projekt has broken his silence on the car crash that was Cyberpunk 2077 in a 5-minute video address.

Iwiński, a man who looks as if he has had no sleep (or haircut) in the weeks since December 10th, promised that lessons will be learned from what turned out to be the biggest gaming disappointment of 2020.

In his statement, he offers up a variety of reasons to explain the games issues.

COVID was, of course, the biggest problem for the studios’ teams, as we imagine many devs were left working on complex problems sitting in their pants in front of a laptop at home. And given managements desire to avoid the PR nightmare of another delay to the game’s release, teams were expected to ‘crunch’ (the industry term for working very long hours) to get it out by December 10th.

He also cites managements laser focus on the PC version at the expense of consoles as another massive issue – a flawed approach he says, given the complexity and dense nature of Night City, the game’s setting. It’s a fascinating revelation, that most likely points to the speed limitations of the dog-slow HDDs used in the PS4 and Xbox One as the primary bottleneck to good performance, as streaming assets quickly enough to the dense urban sprawl was, and continues to be, a big problem.

Iwiński says “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, and this video is me publicly owning up to that. Please don’t fault any of our teams for what happened.”

Here is the statement in full:

A future commitment to quality is promised, but has irreparable damage been done?

Most would agree that an aggressive push from management to launch in 2020, along with the bolshy belief that last-gen versions could be patched at the last minute given their aforementioned limitations, were issues that could and probably should have been avoided.

Iwiński reflects this in his statement, emphasising that no blame should be aimed at his devs as, given the studios’ past record, there’s clearly a lot of talented people there – taking the bullet of blame is a positive first step.

But none of this excuses the game’s other flaws, such as its poor combat, pointless hacking and crafting systems and big gaps in the story that are obviously glossed over.

And no matter how sincere an apology it may be, it can’t reverse the soul-crushing disappointment that such an enormously hyped game that topped 8 million pre-orders was so under-cooked and unfinished come launch day.

A friend and colleague, one of the many rabidly excited to play Cyberpunk on December 10th, said to me in a text the other day “I’m 100% done with CDPR.” For a lot of players, that trust in the brand has gone, and will likely take years to rebuild.

Based on my experience – I chose to play on PS5 – this game felt miles off being ready. A Greek tragedy for anyone who bought it on console, especially in the shit-show that was 2020, as we all could have done with a great RPG to while away the lockdown hours immersed in.

As to what the embattled studio should do now? Let’s hope they keep their heads down, work hard (on reasonable hours) to not only fix bugs, but actively improve the game and, if possible, get a next-gen patch out before the end of 2021. PC players have been sheltered from the worst, now is the time for CDPR to prove they care about console gamers too.

Are you done with CDPR? Will their next game suffer a similar fate? Tell us in the comments.