Cyberpunk 2077 became 'the cool thing' to hate on, says CD Projekt exec

CD Projekt Red executive Michał Platkow-Gilewski recently reflected on the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, claiming it wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be.

It’s no secret Cyberpunk 2077 had a disastrous launch back in 2020. All the hype for the game dramatically crashed when it was released, due to the game being riddled with bugs and performance issues. It was so bad, that the game was recently admitted into the New York Museum of Failures.

Since then, it has had a bit of a redemption story, and it’s in a far better state than it was years ago, and there’s even more to come with the upcoming DLC expansion Phantom Liberty, which promises more story, new characters and extra gameplay enhancements.

Take a look at the trailer for Phantom Liberty below.

Recently though, Cyberpunk’s developer CD Projekt Red, reflected on the game’s rocky start, and believes it was blown out of proportion. Vice President of PR and communications, Michał Platkow-Gilewski, said: "I actually believe Cyberpunk on launch was way better than it was received, and even the first reviews were positive. Then it became a cool thing not to like it. We went from hero to zero really fast. That was the tough moment. We didn't know what was happening. We knew that the game is great, yes we can improve it, yes we need to take time to do it, and we need to rebuild some stuff."

The majority of criticism the game faced came from a swarm of glitches performance issues on consoles and low-end PCs. Poor optimisation was blamed but has since been patched. While there are still some technical issues on last-gen consoles like the Xbox One and PS4, it’s nowhere near as bad as it once was.

Now CD Projekt Red is looking to the future with Phantom Liberty, which will continue the story of V and Johnny Silverhand and introduce a new part of Night City called Dog Town.

Platkow-Gilewski says the team have learnt from their mistakes and will be working hard to ensure the expansion performs well when it launches later this year. They said, "We have a lot of discussions, like what is most important right now? Where do we want to go? What do we want to achieve? The discussions we're having are really healthy. It's easy to spread the butter too thin, but we are constantly checking and talking, and we think we know what to do."

Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion will be released in September for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC.