Cyberpunk 2077's messy launch completely overhauled quality checks for Witcher 4

Cyberpunk 2077 is in an incredible place. In fact, I recently finally dove in myself and oh my, I am having a marvelous time. As we all know though, the Cyberpunk 2077 that we’re all loving today is a far cry from the sloppy mess that was released in December 2020.

CD Projekt RED spent a whopping $120 million saving Cyberpunk 2077. It was worth it though. Many fans say the incredible quality of expansion Phantom Liberty is proof that Cyberpunk 2077 should’ve been given more time in the oven. Following the 2.0 update, many are hailing the game as one of the greatest ever made - and it’s already outpacing The Witcher 3 in sales. It all bodes very well for Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel, currently codenamed Project Orion, but it also spells positive news for The Witcher 4.

Take a look at Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty in action below.

As reported by PCGamesN, CDPR devs are overhauling their internal quality checks ahead of the release of The Witcher 4, so we don’t see Cyberpunk 2077’s mistakes repeated. Cyberpunk 2077 engineering director Colin Walder spoke about this at the Inven Game Conference where he said, “This approach we had, the way we were working production-wise, creating demos, and moving towards an agile mindset and workflow - it’s about ensuring we’re on top of certain things from the start.”

“Take consoles, for example; we need to make sure they’re functioning from the get-go,” he continued. “For our next project, Polaris, we’re already running our demos and internal reviews on the console from the very beginning. This is a step we only took later in Cyberpunk’s development.”

“Regarding other tools or strategies for maintaining morale post-release, especially after the difficulties we faced – it was indeed a challenge. The morale took a significant hit, that’s clear. The crucial thing was to acknowledge what happened. We had to admit that the outcome wasn’t what we’d hoped for and that we were determined to change things. But it’s one thing to say it; it has to be put into practice, you know? Actions speak louder than words.”

“You’ve got to demonstrate commitment. For instance, when a deadline is looming, instead of reverting to crunch, we might say, ‘Let’s adjust the schedule,’ or, ‘Let’s approach this differently.’ Once this becomes a repeated behaviour, once the team sees a genuine effort to prevent crunch, that’s when trust and morale start to rebuild. People need to see it to believe it.”

There’s no current release window for The Witcher 4, but it has become the main focus of CDPR’s efforts following the launch of Phantom Liberty.