Will we ever see a "director's cut" of this game, with all the corners cut and missing contets restored and the dumbing down reversed, on top of bug fixing and optimisation that are just the strict necessary?
Or will the Witcher trilogy remain the high and glorious peak of their career, followed by a sudden, sad and inglorious downfall?

Downfall? Cyberpunk has sold millions and has great reviews. You’re putting a bit too much stock into the faux outrage, and also greatly overestimating the effect the outrage will have on their future. There have been countless games launch with big issues and the studios turn out just fine. Look at Bethesda Game Studios. Look at BioWare. Look at numerous Ubisoft and EA studios. 

They could announce Witcher 4 next month and people will be extremely excited. 

How nice of them to apologize. They seem to be well behaved adults. :)

Faux outrage? How many times has it happened before that Sony de-listed a major AAA title a week after release, refunds for everyone.

Just like after TW3, CDPR will lose a lot of talent. They'll have to recruit new people for TW4 and it might never get near TW3. I also doubt people will be very excited if announced next month. Evolution studios did not recover however since CDPR has GoG as steady income, they're not going anywhere. At worst they become like Valve.

The downfall has already happened, the question is, can they climb back up and top TW3.

Literally just rammed my bike into a traffic light and everyone 2 blocks down the street is doing this in unison...

All AI is basically attached to the same scripts/nodes, it's hilariously god awful. 

But will their millions sold (subtract the ones bring returned as we speak) offset their insane 8 years of development on the game?

Perhaps not quite to this scale, but Halo MCC had largely unplayable multiplayer for a good 5 months. If you found a game, it took half an hour. 

Took 5 months for a complete fix. They gave away Halo ODST for free the following year and honoured some refunds for about 2 weeks after the game launched. 

I doubt a majority of people will return the game, and it will continue to sell well into 2021 and when the next gen version comes out. There’s also merchandise, and it’s not like the game was in full on development with a full staff for those eight years.

Theyll be fine. Hell I think the deadline for refunds is tomorrow or Wednesday? 

Nope that wasnt the issue. The company didnt have good management of allocating time to ensure the game runs on base PS4 and XB1. They focused on making it run on next gen consoles.

It sucks it's your favorite game that broke the camel's back, but this shit storm has been a long time in the making. Just like you said, releasing broken/unfinished games has become the norm. People are fed up and hyper emotional from the crap we've been living through in the past year.

CDPR only threw gasoline on the fire with their ill stated apology. Things like, don't expect it to look like the high end PC version (doubt anyone expected that) and please give us a chance only made it worse. Then they said you can get a refund if you don't want to wait without informing any stores first. Sony got flooded with refund requests which is the reason why it was pulled from the store. Can't refund a working game, can't sell a broken one. MS can, but MS is always more flexible. Steam and EA store don't give a crap, no refunds. Brick and mortar stores are also completely inconsistent. You think that calms people down?

Then you have the die-hard defenders that jump on every complaint saying it runs fine for me, console trolls, console held the PC version back, old consoles can never run the game you should have known etc. This all adds more fuel to the fire, turning it from, the game sucks, move on, into fan bases going at it against each other. Console wars, console vs PC wars, PC elitists vs budget PC wars, Online store wars, GTA vs RPG lovers, it never ends.

CDPR created the perfect storm which blew their house of cards down. The most hotly anticipated, hyped up game in years. Most pre-ordered, desperately needed to get away from the world we're dealing with atm. Turns out to be based on lies, facilitated by glowing reviews from 'critics' and influencers all over. Bad timing when the whole world has reached the end of their patience.


As for you last paragraph, how exactly should the "average consumer" have known better when they literally have been told by pretty much everyone that the game is great and all issues will be fixed on release day. It's going to be a completely different game on release day.

Btw, you can still play it on PS4, it's called a physical edition.