Cyberpunk was probably the most disappointing game of all time when it launched. But why? According to a whistleblower, it wasn't actually CDPR's fault. They were lied to by their QA testers...
Cyberpunk was not good. It was far, far worse than anyone could have expected. And it was worsened by the unprecedented level of hype the community had. Seriously, how could they have messed up this badly?
Now, you might be thinking: it was released over a year ago, we don't need to do an autopsy on the rotting corpse of this game. But I disagree. I'm still left asking: "how?". And so if you too are curious, and you want to know the gory details of want went wrong, then keep reading.
Did Quantic Lab Lie To CDPR?
YouTuber and Cyberpunk content creator Upper Echelon Games was recently sent a 72-page document by a whistleblower that claims a QA company called Quantic Lab are to blame for Cyberpunk's terrible state at launch. The whistleblower claimed that Quantic Lab had done the following:
- Quanitc Lab claimed to have assigned seniors to the project, but it was largely juniors with less than 6-months experience in QA.
- Quantic Lab worked by setting a quota of daily bugs to report, and to reach that goal they overwhelmed CDPR with pointless and repetitive bug reports.
- Quantic Lab exaggerated the size of the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 to keep the contract.
If this is indeed all true, then you can see why CDPR did such a poor job of fixing any of the bugs before release. Although, I know that I'd welcome any excuse to alleviate some of the blame for producing a game worse than Battlefield 2042...
How Have CDPR Responded?
Neither CDPR nor Quantic Lab have officially responded to the allegations, but industry insider LegacyKillaHD has claimed that his sources within CDPR blame it more on company "mismanagement". According to them, Qauntic Lab's role has been exaggerated, and it was more the fault of the higher ups at CDPR who knew about the bugs.
Management not knowing [about the bugs/issues] is laughable... They knew, everyone knew. They would play the game all day, every day."
The truth of the matter probably lies somewhere in between. Of course CDPR are mainly to blame for the game being terrible, but any issues with QA testing would surely have compounded the problems. Let's just hope rumors of the same thing happening with Starfield aren't true...
We will update you as this story develops.