- Former CDPR Devs Form New Studio To Create Character-Driven Game Set In Apocalypse Game Informer
- Cyberpunk 2077 And The Witcher Veterans Are Forming A New Studio Called Blank GameSpot
- Witcher 3 director and Cyberpunk producer launch a new studio: ‘After working for years in an increasingly conservative industry, we’re ready to make bold, impactful projects’ PC Gamer
- Cyberpunk’s director and other former CD Projekt Red devs form new studio, Blank | VGC Video Games Chronicle
- Former CD Projekt Red devs found new studio, Blank. The Verge
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: CDPR
Witcher 3 Next-Gen Update Includes Some Mods, Break Others
The good news is that The Witcher 3, already a very good-looking game, is about to get even more good-looking when its next-gen update is released. The bad news is that, for anyone playing the game on PC, loads of your favourite mods from the last seven years aren’t going to work anymore.
As CDPR explain in a blog post, “updating a game means that we change various files, so the mods that modify those exact files stop working”. And when it comes to making those updates, CDPR have prioritised changes that make the base game better, over keeping older things the same for the sake of mods.
Acknowledging that it has been six years since the last major update to the PC version of the game, though, CDPR say that’s “a long time to get used to one’s favourite mods”, and so in an effort to make “this transition to be as smooth as possible” have compiled a list of some of the community’s favourite mods, tested them and shared which ones work with the next-gen update and which ones don’t.
Some of them work! Sadly loads of them, especially the ones reliant on scripting, don’t. As CDPR say, “Because we are changing scripts in the update due to the addition of a new quest, most of the mods that are based on scripts will error out”. For mod creators concerned about this, a team of “modding experts” from CDPR will be around to “provide help and advice to modders on forums post-release when possible.”
Helping to alleviate this somewhat, though, is an accompanying announcement that the next-gen update will be shipping with some fan-made mods baked into it at launch:
Additionally, we are including several popular mods in the update (they’ll be available depending on the platform). We obtained permissions from their creators, reimbursed them, and they’ll be featured in the credits of the updated game. The mods were reworked and assets optimised as needed, and the game adjusted to run with them. There was even a case when a dev got so engrossed in tinkering when including a mod that he ended up simply remaking that particular aspect of the game. So, in a way, the game comes with some mods already included.
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That’s neat! Especially the reimbursement part.
Cyberpunk 2077 QA Team CEO Responds To Claims They Misled CDPR
Cyberpunk 2077 will always be a cautionary tale of how not to make and release a game. It was notoriously marred by technical bugs and developmental woes and now, according to a new report from YouTuber Upper Echelon Gamers, a QA firm allegedly misled CD Projekt Red during the game’s development. But in response, the quality assurance company’s CEO, Stefan Seicarescu, has stated that this is all just a big misunderstanding, according to a VGC interview.
Upper Echelon Gamers posted a video on June 25 going over some deets he got from a whistleblower at Quantic Lab, a Romanian-based outsourcing quality assurance testing team. Quantic Lab has had a hand in ironing out bugs in some big-name games, including Desperados III, Destroy All Humans!, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Cyberpunk 2077. The whistleblower, an anonymous Quantic Lab employee who UEG believes to be authentic based on a series of documents they claim to be in possession of, including a 72-page quality assurance testing file and detailed spreadsheets tracking worker productivity, explained in a June 23 email to UEG what went down during Cyberpunk 2077‘s QA testing.
Read More: CDPR Says ‘Vast Part’ Of Fixing Cyberpunk 2077 Is Done, Focused On Other Projects
According to the source, things started getting bad for Cyberpunk 2077 QA testing around late 2019. Quantic Lab leads were apparently sent to Poland to work directly with developer CD Projekt Red. The team was supposed to consist of “veteran testers,” folks that had “extensive experience with quality assurance who understood the process and workflow,” UEG stated. However, those that showed up were allegedly “junior testers” who had less than a year or, in some instances, just six months of work in the field. According to UEG’s source, CD Projekt Red wasn’t aware of this junior tester team, instead believing they were getting veterans from Quantic Lab who had worked on The Witcher 3.
But it wasn’t just Quantic Lab’s QA department that caused hiccups in Cyberpunk 2077‘s development. Quantic Lab upper management allegedly instituted a “bug quota” policy that required each individual tester to submit no less than 10 bugs per day. The thinking was that the new policy, which inevitably overworked employees, would increase productivity and further polish the game. To accomplish this, though, testers bombarded developers with thousands of minuscule errors, from items clipping to missing textures.
According to UEG, the QA team focused too much on negligible or low-priority bugs to meet the quota. The source claimed the torrential rain of superfluous glitches drenched workers across departments. You should watch the full video.
In response to UEG’s video, Quantic Lab CEO Stefan Seicarescu lowkey told VideoGamesChronicle that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. He didn’t appear to deny or address any of the allegations specifically; instead, he clarified that the claims made in the video were full of inaccuracies about QA testing.
“The video published on social media as mentioned in your article starts with incorrect statements about Quantic Lab’s history,” Seicarescu said. “There seems to be a lack of understanding in the process of how a game is tested before its release to the market.”
Seicarescu said no global publisher leans on just a single QA team, suggesting CD Projekt might’ve recruited multiple groups to debug Cyberpunk 2077.
“Quantic Lab supports over 200 projects per year from several global leading publishers and continues to maintain a quality comes first approach to all the work we undertake,” Seicarescu said. “All our customer agreements are confidential but in general, global publishers are working with several QA outsourcing companies, not depending solely on one, in addition to internal QA resources at developer level in most cases. Each project we undertake is unique with regard [to] project requirements. Project direction is agreed and adjusted accordingly as per real time requirements with our clients. Quantic Lab always strives to work with transparency and integrity with our industry partners.”
Kotaku has reached out to CD Projekt and Quantic Lab for comment.
CDPR corrects staff allocation chart, majority of team actually working on Cyberpunk 2077 expansion
It was previously reported that the majority of CD Projekt Red was working on other projects, with a small portion of the team remaining on Cyberpunk 2077. This information came directly from the studio’s fiscal year 2021 presentation. As it turns out, this was an error on CD Projekt Red’s part.
The official CD Projekt Red Investor Relations Twitter account has since addressed the oversight, publishing an updated version of its fiscal report. According to the account, the previous presentation’s chart legend, which showed a larger investment in projects such as the next The Witcher game, was incorrect. In actuality, the majority of the team is working on the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion.
As of the time of writing, CD Projekt Red claims that it is targeting a 2023 release window. Considering the studio’s history with delays, which included delaying the current-gen Cyberpunk 2077 patch, it’s best to keep expectations tempered. More recently, the studio has even delayed The Witcher 3’s upgrade indefinitely as it continues to improve Cyberpunk 2077’s reputation.
The vague 2023 window could be explained by prior statements from a Cyberpunk 2077 developer. According to quest director Paweł Sasko, work hasn’t halted on the expansion. Sasko stated that the team recognizes there is still work to be done on improving the base game. While work on both the expansion and base game support are occuring simultaneously, it has likely slowed down the expansion’s development cycle.
CDPR Moving On From Cyberpunk 2077 To Witcher 4 And Other Games
Cyberpunk 2077’s best days may still be ahead but developer CD Projekt Red announced today it’s now shifting focus and resources away to other projects, including its new open-world Witcher game. While the beleaguered sci-fi shooter will still get a story expansion in 2023, it doesn’t sound like it will be getting any more major overhauls in the future.
“We will obviously continue supporting Cyberpunk 2077 and still working on updating it but [the] vast part of the job we believe has already been done and was done in 2021,” the company said during today’s earnings call. It also shared a presentation slide showing how development resources have shifted over time, with “support for Cyberpunk 2077” becoming one of the smallest segments as of February 2022.
That was around when CDPR released the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game, as well as patch 1.5, which added a ton of new fixes, rebalanced rewards and skill trees, and expanded relationships with certain NPCs. Many of the improvements directly addressed earlier criticisms of the game, and I’ve recently been enjoying diving back into the latest version.
At the same time, patch 1.5 struck me as the midway point in Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc rather than a final victory lap. There are parts of the game I love and then there are the parts where the simulation still frequently breaks and shatters any sense of immersion. CDPR didn’t say the open-world RPG won’t ever get another patch on that scale, but all signs point to development winding down when it comes to any deeper revamp of how the game plays or is structured. That might not be a retreat so much as a concession to the limits of what the game is.
If so, a No Man’s Sky or Final Fantasy XIV-style comeback might not be in the cards after all. During its rough 2020 launch, including a PS4 version that was so bad Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store, Cyberpunk sold 13 million copies. Today, CDPR announced it only sold another five million in the 16 months since. Currently, that puts total sales slightly ahead of Super Mario Party and behind God of War, both first-party exclusives. It’s also still severely below some analysts’ initial projections.
And while Cyberpunk 2077’s future is still murky, plans for additional DLC have also appeared to get downgraded over time. CD Projekt president Adam Kiciński had previously said the game would receive “no less DLC than The Witcher 3 had,” and that game received two giant and stellar expansions. For that reason, some had originally presumed Cyberpunk 2077 would similarly get two major paid DLCs in addition to smaller free ones, but so far CDPR has only confirmed one. It will arrive in 2023, the company announced today. Further specifics remain elusive. A previously planned multiplayer component also appears to have been cast aside. CDPR didn’t clearly confirm what its fate was when asked about it during today’s earnings call, and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment when asked to clarify its future plans for Cyberpunk 2077.
It’s not surprising that the company is eager, in the meantime, to move on to other things, especially more Witcher. CDPR revealed today The Witcher 3 has shipped over 40 million copies, with the series as a whole selling over 65 million. As it buckles down on developing the next game in that series, it also has plans for more updates to Gwent and The Witcher: Monster Slayer, a new Gwent spin-off, an unannounced project at the recently acquired Boston studio, The Molasses Flood, and the next-gen version of The Witcher 3.
That last release slipped out of this summer after CDPR revealed yesterday it was taking development away from Russia-based Saber Interactive and finishing it in-house. Despite the lack of a new release window, the company said it was unfair to describe it as “indefinitely delayed,” saying it simply needed more time to evaluate what work was left. “Nobody is saying the game is delayed in some monumental sort of time gap ahead of us,” said Michal Nowakowski, SVP of business development.
Cyberpunk 2077’s Best Next-Gen Feature Is The Overhauled Map
Earlier this week, developer CD Projekt Red rolled out a massive patch for its Blade Runner homage, Cyberpunk 2077. It’s the type of update that could turn a troubled RPG around, retooling everything from the notoriously wonky combat to the unbalanced skill tree. But my favorite new change is more subtle: The map.
Prior to the update, Cyberpunk 2077’s map was a tangle of disorder, jam-packed with so many icons you could barely make out the underlying geography of its setting, Night City. Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 is by no means the only open-world game to commit this sin—everyone, say hi to Ubisoft—but previously it didn’t offer many tools to make the map any less of an indecipherable clusterfuck. What’s more, the color scheme wasn’t exactly complimentary. Teals bled into dark blues bled into muddy yellows, all overlaid on a muted red map. It was, in short, tough to parse.
Following the update, however, I feel safe saying that Cyberpunk 2077 now sports one of the better open-world maps around. CDPR added a slew of options for customizing how it’s displayed. One setting allows you to filter solely for the game’s jobs—main missions and side quests—displaying them, and only them, in circled exclamation points on the map. Another displays “service points,” basically encompassing everything that isn’t a job. There’s a third setting that allows you to customize a filter across 14 categories, including missions, side-quests, vendors, vehicles, personal apartments, and fast-travel points.
All three are terrific, but the one I’m most struck by is the “dynamic” setting, which fills in more detail based on how close you zoom in. Check it out:
It’s an ideal balance. I can zoom out and consider Night City in streamlined totality, seeing nothing more than the missions on my plate. If I need more detail, I can zoom in and pick, say, a fast travel point to head to or a vendor to hit up. I get the best of both worlds. All things considered, it’s a minor improvement, but it’s the sort of detail that shows CDPR was conscientious in considering what to fix for Cyberpunk 2077’s second coming.
Indeed, right now, there’s no shortage of reasons to return to the once-busted RPG. As my colleague Jeremy Winslow noted earlier, the haptic controls are transcendent on PlayStation, thanks to Cyberpunk 2077’s newly next-gen version making use of that console’s revelatory DualSense controller. Fans have spent the past few days praising background visual flourishes, like police chases and umbrellas, that make Night City feel less like a neon-lit diorama and more like a real metropolis. Oh, and in case you were worried, no, Keanu Reeves hasn’t gone anywhere.
In the wake of Cyberpunk 2077’s phoenix-like reemergence, a lot of people, rightfully burned by its original 2020 rollout, have been wondering if it’s worth returning to, have asked if I’m back myself. I haven’t had an answer. But after spending the past few days considering the quieter merits of Cyberpunk’s respray, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back.
CDPR Settles Cyberpunk 2077 Lawsuit, Will Pay $1.85 Million
This time last year a group of investors filed a class-action lawsuit against CD Projekt Red over Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch, saying the game was “virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs”.
The class-action lawsuit, filed by Manhattan-based Rosen Law Firm in California’s Central District Court on behalf of investors, argued:
(1) Cyberpunk 2077 was virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs; (2) as a result, Sony would remove Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation store, and Sony, Microsoft and CD Projekt would be forced to offer full refunds for the game; (3) consequently, CD Projekt would suffer reputational and pecuniary harm; and (4) as a result, defendants’ statements about its business, operations, and prospects, were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages.
Twelve months later and the case has been settled, with CDPR issuing a statement today that reads:
“In the framework of negotiations concerning a potential settlement agreement in a case pending before the US District Court for the Central District of California (hereinafter referred to as “the Court”), a proposal regarding key terms, which – if agreed upon – would provide the basis for a prospective written settlement agreement was officially formulated on 7 December 2021. According to these terms, members of the class (including the plaintiffs) would relinquish all claims against the Company and members of its Management Board. Furthermore, under the agreement, a settlement in the amount of 1 850 000 (one million eight hundred and fifty thousand) USD would be paid out to the class by the Company and its insurer – Colonnade Insurance S.A.”
In relation to the above information, the Management Board of the Company wishes to inform that following the conclusion of negotiations on 15 December 2021 (of which the Company received notice on 16 December 2021) the sides signed a binding Settlement Term Sheet (hereinafter referred to as “the Term Sheet”) specifying key provisions of the settlement agreement. The Term Sheet stipulates that the settlement shall cover all parties to the case (including members of the class).
CDPR then go on to list the reasons for the settlement, with top spot going to “the duration and costs related to further legal proceedings in the U.S”:
As expressly stated in the Term Sheet, execution of the Term Sheet does not imply admission of any responsibility on the part of the Company or any of the other defendants named in the case.
The Company wishes to announce that its decision to enter into this settlement agreement was motivated by (i) the duration and costs related to further legal proceedings in the U.S., which might arise irrespective of the Court’s findings; (ii) acceptance of the key provisions of the settlement agreement by the Company’s insurer; (iii) opinion expressed by the U.S. law firm representing the Company and the other defendants named in the case recommending acceptance of the agreement; (iv) the general practice in the U.S. of concluding such litigation by way of an out-of-court settlement.
A reminder that this class-action wasn’t filed on behalf of fans or those who had bought the game on PS4/Xbox One and been lumped with something unplayable. It was just by and for investors.
CDPR Asks Fans To Fund The Witcher: Ronin On Kickstarter
The Witcher: Ronin is a manga that sees monster-slayer Geralt of Rivia’s adventures recast in the world of Japanese folklore, and little-known RPG-maker CD Projekt Red wants your help to make it happen. The company launched a Kickstarter campaign for the project today aiming to raise just over $100,000 to deliver it into the hands of fans.
Announced at WitcherCon back in July, The Witcher: Ronin is written by longtime CDPR comic book editor Rafał Jaki and illustrated by Japanese artist Hataya, and features an “Elseworlds” take on the titular hero that sits outside the official Witcher canon. It sounds really cool and the 100-page hardcover version exclusive to the Kickstarter campaign seems worth the $40 asking price. But why is CDPR asking for fans to crowdfund the manga at all?
The Poland-based game developer and publisher is the largest in the country and valued at several billion dollars. And despite the hit it took from Cyberpunk 2077’s trainwreck of a launch, it continues to do alright for itself. Nevertheless, it’s asking fans to support The Witcher: Ronin like it were some indie imprint just getting off the ground. There’s even an early-bird bonus.
“Time is of the essence! Back within the first 24 hours of the campaign and you’ll receive an exclusive collectible miniature inspired by The Witcher: Ronin with your pledge!” CDPR writes in today’s announcement.
The company has already blown through its initial goal and is currently headed toward raising over $200,000 in the project’s first few hours. CDPR tried to head off potential criticism of its reliance on the crowdfunding platform back when Ronin was first announced, citing it as a means of creating a deluxe collector’s edition and also launching the manga globally. The company also said the collector’s edition could expand with additional support.
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“The more support for the comic, the more amazing new artists we can enlist to create stunning variant artwork — all showing off unique takes on this Japanese-inspired Witcher story,” CDPR wrote on Kickstarter.
The Kickstarter campaign no doubt also doubles as a good peg for extra publicity and an easy way to effectively take pre-orders. Ronin isn’t expected to ship until early 2022.
“Rewards aren’t guaranteed, but creators must regularly update backers,” reads the Kickstarter reminder in the middle of the page. I have no doubt CDPR will be able to deliver. It is, after all, several times the size of established comic book labels like Dark Horse.
CDPR puts off planned multiplayer Cyberpunk game amid restructuring
Enlarge / Bad news if you’ve been hoping to shoot sword-wielding laser-beam punks controlled by other humans, rather than AI…
A planned standalone multiplayer version of Cyberpunk 2077 is being “reconsidered,” developer CD Projekt Red says, as the company reconfigures itself for a new development structure going forward.
In a “strategy update” video posted Tuesday, CDPR joint CEO Adam Kicinski mentioned that the team had previously “hinted that our next AAA would be a multiplayer Cyberpunk game, but we have decided to reconsider this plan given our new more systematic and agile approach [to development].”
Instead, CDPR will be focusing on “building an online technology that can be seamlessly integrated into all of our future games,” Kicinski said. That means developing technologies that can “power online components we choose to add to our games without any technological delay.”
While such online features will be “an important part of our future games,” Kicinski stressed that “CD Projekt Red makes single-player story-driven AAA RPGs. That is not changing.” Online features will be implemented in future games only “when it makes sense,” he added.
Parallel development and cross-functional teams
CDPR’s new partial focus on online features comes amid an internal restructuring of CDPR’s project management. Kicinski said that instead of focusing on one big-budget title at a time, the company will “shift and adapt our focus to enable parallel AAA game development.” That means using “cross-functional teams” that can do simultaneous work on games in both of CDPR’s major franchises—The Witcher and Cyberpunk.
The goal is to create faster iteration and more seamless contact between teams, studio co-founder and joint CEO Marcin Iwinski said. That goal takes on added importance since Iwinski said in January that poor internal communications were partly to blame for the company missing massive bugs in “last-generation” console versions of Cyberpunk 2077 before the game was released.
“We underestimated the scale and complexity of the issues, we ignored the signals about the need for additional time to refine the game on the base last-gen consoles,” Iwinski said in a December conference call addressing the same issues. “This caused the loss of gamers’ trust and the reputation that we’ve been building through a big part of our lives.”
Under the new structure, the company’s Red Engine technology will be refocused to better serve both franchises at once, CTO Pawel Zawodny said. The newly centralized version of the engine will let the team “prepare certain functionalities that can be used in both franchises,” meaning that features like NPC routines and character control can be programmed once and applied to multiple games in parallel. Zawodny said he hopes that strategy will bring more “consistency” to CDPR games’ technical performance.
CDPR also said that, going forward, it will be changing the way it promotes its upcoming games before their release. PR campaigns for future titles will be much shorter and start closer to the game’s planned launch, with only short teasers releasing further ahead of time. Senior VP of Business Development Michal Nowakowski also promised that the team would focus on showing actual game footage before release, not mere concepts, and would make sure all planned platforms were represented in pre-release materials.
Elsewhere, in a Q&A session with investors, Nowakowski said that he feels recent patches for Cyberpunk 2077 have gotten the game closer to a planned return to the PlayStation Store, following its delisting in December. “Each and every [patch] brings us closer to going back to the PSN store,” he said. “However, the final decision, you have to understand, belongs to Sony. We do believe we’re closer than further, but of course, the final call is theirs, so let’s wait and see.”