The recent announcement of Cyberpunk 2077‘s delay prompted a bunch of rumors surrounding the reasons behind CD Projekt RED’s decision. One such rumor indicates that the game was delayed because it didn’t run well on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
God of War director Cory Barlog decided to address an article covering this rumor, explaining why video games often run badly until the end of development cycles.
“EVERY game runs badly until you optimize for the hardware in the final push before gold,” he tweeted before adding the following context:
In truth, we often probably do NOT want to share this because, for some reason, we believe people will jump to apocalyptic conclusions and get angry. I can’t say I speak for the industry, so fellow devs chime in to disagree or correct if you feel your experience is different, but I feel this to be true for *most* games. GAMES ARE VERY UGLY, FOR A LONG TIME, UNTIL THEY ARE NOT. Traditionally, that is right near the end.
This is due to the absolutely fucking bananas level of complexity and moving pieces required to make really any game today. We are, more often than not, going on passion and belief that the vision of this buggy + duct taped together ‘thing’ is going to come together in the end.
To me there is NOTHING shameful or nefarious about the game not running well in development. We ALL obviously want to release the smoothest/most bug free experience humanly possible. Sometimes we (mostly) succeed. Sometimes we don’t. But it is NEVER because we did not try.
In response to a fan who suggested that CD Projekt RED should skip current-gen consoles and aim for the next gen, Barlog said that such decisions have “multi-year” implications and aren’t easy to make.
Cyberpunk 2077 will now release on September 17, 2020. Preorders are live on Amazon.
[Source: Cory Barlog (Twitter)]
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