Cyberpunk 2077’s dreadful reception “changed me and us as a studio”, says CDPR dev

The success of Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC was only possible due to the base game’s “negative reception”.

That’s according to senior quest designer Paweł Sasko, who acknowledged that if the original game’s 2020 release hadn’t been “as negative as it was”, “it couldn’t have been possible” for expansion Phantom Liberty to have “worked significantly better at launch”.

“Phantom Liberty worked significantly better at its launch because we completely changed the production style, something that couldn’t have been possible if the initial reception of the game wasn’t as negative as it was,” Sasko told TheGamer at Gamescom Latam.

“It changed me and us as a studio.”

Three-and-a-half years after its disastrous December 2020 debut, after dozens of patches and the launch of last year’s Phantom Liberty expansion, CD Projekt Red no longer has anyone working on Cyberpunk 2077.

As Tom summarised for us at the time, just 17 people had been working on the game still as of 29th February this year. As of 30th April, that number dropped to zero.

It’s a small but significant moment for CD Projekt as it finally leaves Cyberpunk 2077 behind – with the vast bulk of its development might now focused on its next game in The Witcher series, currently still codenamed Polaris.