The Daily Populous Sunday July 7th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by eurogamer.net and submitted by alex040512

The success of Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty DLC was only possible due to the base game's "negative reception".

That's according to senior quest designer Paweł Sasko, who acknowledged that if the original game's 2020 release hadn't been "as negative as it was", "it couldn't have been possible" for expansion Phantom Liberty to have "worked significantly better at launch".

"Phantom Liberty worked significantly better at its launch because we completely changed the production style, something that couldn’t have been possible if the initial reception of the game wasn’t as negative as it was," Sasko told TheGamer at Gamescom Latam.

"It changed me and us as a studio."

Three-and-a-half years after its disastrous December 2020 debut, after dozens of patches and the launch of last year's Phantom Liberty expansion, CD Projekt Red no longer has anyone working on Cyberpunk 2077.

As Tom summarised for us at the time, just 17 people had been working on the game still as of 29th February this year. As of 30th April, that number dropped to zero.

It's a small but significant moment for CD Projekt as it finally leaves Cyberpunk 2077 behind - with the vast bulk of its development might now focused on its next game in The Witcher series, currently still codenamed Polaris.

shkeptikal on July 6th, 2024 at 22:28 UTC »

Yep, really changed the studio. It's not like the CEO was making publicity rounds the week before the DLC dropped trying to gaslight their customers into thinking the game was fine at release despite getting them sued for fraud (first ever AAA fraud lawsuit btw, good job CDPR!)

CDPR makes good games in spite of their management and the entire company could use a workshop on how to shut the fuck up tbh.

pLudoOdo on July 6th, 2024 at 20:54 UTC »

Next time I make a game it will be with the intention to make a game. Not a way to trick Keanu into making me a personal porno that wont end up in said game.

Mindpit on July 6th, 2024 at 20:12 UTC »

This wasn’t so much an article as a minor blurb from a dev.