Cyberpunk 2077 undeniably had one of the rockiest launches to have ever occurred in gaming. Players encountered glitch after glitch, making the game damn-near unplayable for the first few weeks after release.
Years later, the title has been polished into the diamond it is today.
But the initial catastrophe that was Cyberpunk’s release, caused players to miss out on game-changing features, including some big ones.
Multiplayer was going to be a part of Cyberpunk 2077—it was one of the major promises to come out of CD Projekt Red pre-release—but after the 2020 launch, all the focus went into salvaging what they’d brought to the table, to begin with. According to Cyberpunk’s quest designer and coordinator at the time, Philipp Weber, “[the devs] really needed to look at what were the priorities for Cyberpunk [after its initial shaky release].”
The single-player experience was at the forefront of the devs’ goals, and so multiplayer was thrown by the wayside to solve the various issues that presented themselves.
Weber said, “The priority was the main experience will run for the people in a really good state. The switch of priorities meant other R&D projects had to go away.”
This is where the more important aspects of the game needed the most attention, leading to multiplayer becoming a distant memory. “We just needed to really focus and say, ‘Okay what’s the important part?” he added. “Yeah, we will make that part really good.’”
The idea of bringing multiplayer to other CD Projekt Red games isn’t a foreign concept. The company is dedicated to bringing the feature to future games, meaning the potential for Cyberpunk’s multiplayer is never out of the realm of possibility.
For now, though, it looks like it was a casualty of the horrible launch.
