Badowski took to Twitter to respond to certain points of a report by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier about Cyberpunk 2077, and first addressed the claim that the E3 demo was “entirely fake.”
“It’s hard for a trade show game demo not to be a test of vision or vertical slice two years before the game ships, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake,” Badowski wrote. “Compare the demo with the game. Look at the Dumdum scene or car chase, or the many other things. What the people reading your article may not know is that games are not made in a linear fashion and start looking like the final product only a few months before launch. If you look at that demo now, it’s different yes, but that’s what the ‘work in progress’ watermark is for. Our final game looks and plays way better than what that demo ever was.
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“As for ‘missing’ features, that’s part of the creation process. Features come and go as we see if they work or not. Also, car ambushes exist in the final game almost verbatim to what we showed in the demo. And if we get a bit more granular about our release, the vision we presented in this demo evolved into something that got multiple 9/10s and 10/10s on PC from many renown gaming outlets in the world. As for the old-gen consoles, yes that is another case, but we’ve owned up to that and are working super hard to eliminate bugs (on PC, too – we know that’s not a perfect version either) and we are proud of Cyberpunk 2077 as a game and artistic vision. This all is not what I’d call disastrous.”
Badowski then responded to the claim that many Cyberpunk 2077 developers knew the game would not be ready for release in 2020.
“You’ve talked with 20 people, some being ex employees, only 1 of whom is not anonymous,” Badowski said. “I wouldn’t call that ‘most’ of the over 500-people staff openly said what you claim.”
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Lastly, Badowski addressed the claim that Polish-speaking employees would speak Polish in front of non-Polish staffers, which “violated company rules” and made them feel “ostracized.”
“Everyone here speaks English during meetings, every company-wide email and announcement is in English – all that is mandatory,” Badowski explained. “Rule of thumb is to switch to English when there’s a person not speaking a given language in a casual conversation. It is, however, pretty normal for Germans speaking German, Poles speaking Polish, Spaniards speaking Spanish etc. (there are 44 nationalities at the studio, you get the point) when there’s no one else around. We are working in a multicultural environment. If the question is if it’s hard to move to another country, sometimes culture, and work and live there, then the answer is yes. But that’s universal to every company all over the world, and we’re doing what we can to ease that transition.”
Schreier responded to Badowski’s message, saying that “CD Projekt chose not to respond to specific questions or make Badowski available for our article, so it’s interesting to see these comments arriving now.”
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He also mentioned that he does regret bringing up the language issue, as it has gotten a “disproportionate amount of attention and is not a particularly big deal,” but also notes that Badowski did not address the “brutal crunch and the unrealistic timeline.”
For more on Cyberpunk 2077, check out CD Projekt Red co-founder Marcin Iwiński’s public apology for Cyberpunk 2077’s rocky launch and how he claims that the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S next-gen update will arrive in the “second half” of 2021.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.