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EnricoPallazzo on 16 December 2020
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shikamaru317 said:
DonFerrari said:

Have I said a 50-100 devs can release a AAA/AAAA game? Nope I said a team this size can release a game in this period, so to pretend the development didn't start back them because "only" 50-100 devs were involved in those 3 years is ludicrous.

There is no work around the incompetence of the developer. It is a 8 year project that still got 3 delays, plenty of false promises, and released very poorly with they knowing it.

You have made a great effort to try and defend CDPR and spread their guilty on the matter when it is 100% on them and bad project management and false marketing.

A team that size can make a game in 3 years, but not Cyberpunk, which is what you seemed to be implying. I already told you that those first 3 years of work got scrapped. It's an 8 year project technically, but really only 5 years since they scrapped those early years work by moving to a new build of the engine. It's not like they had the full 500 devs on the project the entire 8 years. From what I'm reading, they not only scrapped the first 3 years of work, they also didn't move any devs over from the Witcher team to the Cyberpunk team until Witcher 3's Blood And Wine expansion was finished in mid 2016.

So, Cyberpunk development looks something like this from what I can find:

2012 announcement

2013: Cyberpunk team size is at 50 devs, according to a journalist who got a tour of the studio in 2013

Early to mid 2014: Cyberpunk team has expanded to 100 devs

Late 2014: Majority of Cyberpunk team pulled off of Cyberpunk to assist with Witcher 3 crunch, after it was discovered that Witcher 3 had 5000 bugs that needed fixing and they only had time to fix 2000 of them before the old release date, meaning the game needed to be delayed to May 2015

Mid 2015: The decision is made to scrap the early work on Cyberpunk 2077 that is on Red Engine 3, and build a new Red Engine 4. Small team of programmers begin working on new engine.

Mid 2016: Work is finished on Witcher 3's Blood and Wine expansion, and Witcher 3 devs start getting moved to Cyberpunk, with Cyberpunk still officially in the pre-production phase

September 2016: Cyberpunk team size increases to over 250 devs

June 2018: Cyberpunk dev team size has increased to nearly 350 devs

February 2019: Cyberpunk team size has increased to over 400 devs

Mid 2020: Cyberpunk dev team size increases to 500 devs

That being said, there were development issues obviously. I mean Cyberpunk got about 1 more year of development than Witcher 3, with a dev team that was twice the size by the end, and somehow the game is shorter, buggier, and broken on consoles at release. There was some kind of mismanagement happening, that much is for sure.

Nice post. Of course absolutely NOTHING justifies what they did, lie and hide the problems and release the game anyway, does not matter if it was forced by shareholders or not. But yeah, you cant compare it with the release cycle of for example, assassins creed or call of duty which are basically well oiled machines of releasing games. You cant also compare the 8 years of "development" of this game with the 3-4 years of development of other open world games. Cyberpunk had basically 4-5 years of pre production and 3 years of production.

Still, nothing justifies what they did, on purpose. Still I cant wait to play it, probably on February after the big patches because it seems to be really amazing. Also this game will definitely have long legs, multiplayer, dlc's and I truly believe they will pull out a game as service model at some point juts like GTA 5. We will still be talking about cyberpunk 4 years down the road.