The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 will not repeat the same mistakes as Cyberpunk 2077, says CDPR

CD Projekt Red seems to have learned a thing or two from its disastrous Cyberpunk 2077 launch. After the immense success of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, expectations were at an all-time high when CDPR teased its next project based on a futuristic dystopia. However, the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was riddled with bugs and performance issues that just left a sour taste in gamers' mouths. It now looks like CDPR is taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen again.

At the Digital Dragons panel attended by GamesRadar, CDPR technical writers Jarosław Ruciński and Adrian Fulneczek discussed some of the development challenges the team faced during The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, and how they have addressed them moving forward. Apparently, a key oversight during the development of those games was that not enough technical knowledge was preserved through documentation, which later became a huge hurdle.

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The writers also stated that during Cyberpunk 2077's development, the team had over 8,000 documentation pages, which posed a new challenge. Maintaining these documents required a huge amount of time and effort, which is why they later became low priority. What's important is that CDPR has learned from these challenges and aims never to repeat the same mistakes.

"The future looks really promising for us. We learned our lesson."

- Adrian Fulneczek, technical writer

CDPR is trying to move past these mistakes by taking a two-pronged approach with future releases. Documents will now be shared across the company to keep everyone in the loop, and secondly, keeping documentation is "non-negotiable" in general. Fulneczek also said that the company is changing its definition of "done" and implementing new mechanisms so that the various teams can benefit from each other's breakthroughs.

The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 are still in development, with the former closer to release but still a few steps away. We still have no concrete information on when these much-anticipated games will release, but based on the information CDPR provided, they will only hit the shelves once they are fully ready by CDPR standards. I, personally, would rather wait a couple of years for a fully polished Witcher 4, rather than a half-baked release in 2027.