The last AAA heavyweight from polish developer CD Projekt RED was 2020’s seminal open world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 which left a really bad impression when it first launched back in 2020 and required several years and multiple game-changing patches to get back on it’s feet. And although Cyberpunk 2077 is a vastly different game right now, the disastrous launch had really affected the studio as well as many players in more ways than one.
However, CD Project Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has assured in detail that their next massive AAA Open World RPG The Witcher 4 won’t be making those mistakes ever, cause it’s ongoing development is taking into account all of the factors that had resulted in Cyberpunk 2077’s catastrophic launch.
In a recent interview with Game Business (via Rock Paper Shotgun), Nowakowski also clarified that there was no external pressure to launch Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020: “The decision to launch was for sure wrong, period. There’s no denying it. But there were no magical investors telling us, ‘you have to get this out’. It was much more complicated and psychological.”
“The team was getting exhausted in a different way. There were people outside telling us we should launch, fans asking for it, but the team itself also wanted to push it out the door because it was really tiring at that moment in time,” he explained.
He also details how the failure of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch has helped them make sure that The Witcher 4 doesn’t run into those issues ever again:
“For example, technically, we should hit, let’s say, 10 checkmarks… Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, ‘we’re gonna catch up with that later on.’ Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn’t, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it’s not that easy.”
Nowakowski also added that The Witcher 4 is being built to run equally well on both the current-gen consoles as well as on the PC:
“you come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now… You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it’s going to run.”
The Witcher 4 is currently targeting a 2028 release and is expected to be part of a whole new trilogy of action RPGs.
