Time4Tea: Bear in mind ... this is a game that has been in development for
8 years.
Cat on lap ... it might've been announced eight years ago but I don't believe active development started back then. Probably they started working on it for real sometime after TW3 and its DLCs were mostly done.
In the end though I don't think it matters how long it's been in development. If it's not ready, it's not ready, and management should have had the guts to push for a longer delay, despite all the pressure.
Of course, that puts them in a difficult situation as they've already promised the game for previous-gen consoles.. even a limited edition CP2077 console was made:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-one-x-1tb-console-cyberpunk-2077-limited-edition-bundle/94ffrq8swhzd?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab So delaying release by another year would've been very embarrassing (as well as bad for 2020 balance sheet) and at that point releasing the game for prev-gen consoles wouldn't make much sense at all but if it's been promised.. and yes it was supposed to be ready for next gen consoles' launch too. Yeah, I can see why the CEO might've been sweating nervously in that investor call where they discussed the 3-week delay.
I get the vibe that they wanted to save face and avoid that embarrassment, hoping that three weeks would be just enough time to fix the most obvious issues and then they could roll out patches quickly before anyone has time to find out and complain about how broken the game is.
Didn't pan out so well if you ask me. I think a delay and the embarrassment that comes with it would've been far better than a horribly broken release that makes the whole company look like a bunch of incompetent liars after all the hype. I mean it's already turned into a bunch of memes and I don't think we'll see the end of it anytime soon. I pity the devs.
pippin15: All major games release like this.
I don't agree. Yes, most big games have some issues at launch but this one has so many of them, and so many of them run so deep.. it's like entire subsystems of the game are entirely missing and major features that were supposed to be in the game are nowhere to be seen. Do all major games get a user score of 2-3 (out of 10) on metacritic? CDP's stock took its biggest nose-dive in history. Does that happen to all major game companies when they release a game?