Some sad news came out of the developers of arguably the most anticipated game of 2020. Unfortunately, CD Projekt Red has announced that they’ll be delaying the launch of Cyberpunk 2077 until September 17th, 2020. This is roughly six months longer than the original anticipated April 2020 release, putting it back a considerably long time.
The announcement came from Adam Badowski and Marcin Iwiński, the Head of Studio and Co-Founder, respectively. In their announcement, they outline their reasons for delaying Cyberpunk:
“We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but there’s still work to be done. Night City is massive – full of stories, content and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing and polishing. We want Cyberpunk 2077 to be our crowning achievement for this generation and postponing launch will give us the precious months we need to make the game perfect.”
Looking on the bright side, it’s great that the game is already in a playable state, as it means that the work that needs to be done likely won’t be intense enough to cause further delays. The team also seems confident enough in their work that they’ve given it the exact launch date of September 17th, rather than simply saying that it would be out “sometime in the fourth quarter” or something similarly noncommittal.
On top of having a new launch date clear from the start, you also can’t foster much of an argument against a company trying to make their game better for their fans. In today’s gaming industry, it’s become increasingly common for companies to push out unpolished or just flat out unfinished games. Even massive companies like EA or Kojima Productions have recently been releasing games that clearly needed months more of playtesting to stop the game from being afflicted with game-breaking glitches.
Cyberpunk 2077 also has a huge reputation to live up to due to the work that CDPR has done on the Witcher series, namely Witcher 3, which is one of the most highly acclaimed RPGs of the last decade. Even now, five years after launch and with no multiplayer, Witcher 3 has a steady average of around 50,000 daily players. Of course, those numbers are a bit slanted at the moment due to a surge in popularity as a result of the Netflix Witcher series, but a high player base certainly isn’t a new thing for the franchise.
The point is, while it’s definitely a bummer to see Cyberpunk delayed, it’s definitely much better than seeing the game release in April in a disappointing state. While it’s a shame to have to wait a few more months, we’ll still get to burn down Night City alongside Keanu Reeves soon enough.
