After Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch – plagued by bugs, missing features, and a storm of online controversy – delivering the excellent Phantom Liberty expansion and the game’s 2.0 facelift was a kind of “group therapy” for the development team, according to the expansion’s lead.
Cyberpunk 2 and Phantom Liberty director Pawel Sasko recently reflected on the rocky 2020 launch in an interview with Flow Games, where he said the reception to the base game had been “absolutely overwhelming,” especially for developers who joined CD Projekt Red after The Witcher 3 had already achieved unending success.
“I know what it feels like to be successful, because I’ve released games that were really well-received. I know what it feels like,” Sasko explains in the video below. “And then there were people on our team who had never experienced that… That was probably the worst part of it for me: seeing people on the team get devastated by it… we took it really hard in general.” The subsequent production of Phantom Liberty was “like our group therapy,” as the team “tried to work through it and work through these issues.”
Sasko then reflects on what that journey looked like, calling Patches 1.2 and 1.3 “stepping stones” that fixed “a lot of stuff” but ultimately didn’t have a major impact on public perception. Patch 1.5 was a much bigger leap forward in getting the game back on track, but the player feedback still felt like a “consolation prize” to Sasko, as if the team “came in seventh in a marathon.” What really changed the game was Edgerunners Patch 1.6, which launched alongside the Netflix animated series of the same name and really “tipped the scales.” Sasko says the anime was a better introduction to the universe than the game, and that in conjunction with previous updates, Edgerunners gave the team the “extra motivation” needed to believe that “maybe this is possible, that maybe we can solve this for real.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion proved that the team’s hunch was right, they could fix the problem, as the developers recently celebrated the return of the RPG’s “overwhelmingly positive” Steam reviews.
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