Cyberpunk 2077's rough launch killed multiplayer ambitions, says developer

The multiplayer mode for Cyberpunk 2077 was cancelled as a result of the game's catastrophic launch, and with a list of issues to sort as long as your arm, this part fell to the wayside.

This is confirming what we had already surmised from the story behind the RPG, however, CD Projekt Red recently shared more with Eurogamer in a visit to the studio's site. "We really needed to look at what were the priorities for Cyberpunk [after it launched]," explained senior quest designer Philipp Weber. "The priority was that the main experience will run for the people in a really good state... Essentially, the switch of priorities meant that other R&D projects had to go away. With Cyberpunk, we wanted to do many things at the same time, and we just needed to really focus and say, 'Okay, what's the important part? Yeah, we will make that part really good.'"

Check out Keanu Reeves on Cyberpunk 2077's motion capture set playing one of the most iconic characters in the cyberpunk genre - Johnny Silverhand.

While the game squared away eight years of development costs in only one day after it hit the shelves, the damage to CD Projekt Red's reputation was devastating. Its share price was sickening, there were allegations of crunch and gamers everywhere memed the product into oblivion. Things are of course significantly better now and Cyberpunk 2077 became one of our favourite games last year. In spite of this success, the multiplayer is not making a comeback.

"Instead of primarily focusing on one big, online experience - or game - we are focusing on bringing online into all of our franchises one day," relayed president and joint-CEO Adam Kiciński in 2021. "We are building an online technology that can be seamlessly integrated into development of our future games... we don't want to go overboard or lose our single-player DNA. We want to take thoughtful steps to build robust online capabilities."