Last week, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077, which was due out later this month, is going to be pushed back to December 10. Shortly thereafter, the Poland-based developers had a conference call with investors, where they said that they’re “not comfortable, but confident” in the game’s new release date, so, who really knows whether or not the game will actually launch next month.
During the same conference call, CD Projekt Red’s CEO Adam Kicinski talked about why the game is being delayed, citing that it’s ready to go for PC and next-gen consoles while suggesting that their upcoming open-world first-person game is having issues on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
“The game is ready for the PC and runs great on the next-gen consoles, and could be shipped on the scheduled date on those platforms,” said CD Projekt Red’s CEO. “However, even though the game has been certified on the current gens by both Sony and Microsoft, some very final optimisation processes for such a massive and complex game require a bit of additional time.
“We are releasing a game which is, to be honest, a next-gen game, and we’re preparing it for fairly old machines, which poses certain unique challenges.”
CD Projekt Red staffers are currently working six days a week to fix the various bugs and other issues on the current-gen versions of Cyberpunk 2077, which went gold a few weeks ago and is already being pressed onto discs. Of course, the game will be updated with a day-one patch to fix whatever issues are pushing back the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions.
Even though the game is performing well on next-gen consoles, CD Projekt Red hasn’t given a firm release date for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of Cyberpunk 2077. All we know is that the game will come to next-gen platforms sometime next year.
Also during the aforementioned conference call, CD Projekt Red executive Michał Nowakowski said that another reason for Cyberpunk 2077’s delay is that the devs want to push for a 90+ review score on Metacritic. Their last AAA release, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, had a 90+ score for its Xbox One, PC, and PlayStation 4 versions, while the Nintendo Switch version fell slightly below their targeted score of 90+.
“So, when it comes to Metacritic, we continuously aim at a 90+ game, so nothing has changed here; this remains the goal and, as Adam mentioned, this is actually the main reason for postponing the release.”
Right now, Cyberpunk 2077 is scheduled to be released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on December 10.
