In case you haven’t read about the big Cyberpunk 2077 expose, a report by Jason Schrier talks about multiple issues like their 2018 E3 demo being “almost entirely fake”, developmental problems, and the many discrepancies in the production schedule of the open world IP. Since then, Studio head of CD Projekt Red, Adam Badowski, has responded to this report via Twitter, pointing out 3 main issues.

On the topic of the “fake demo”, Badowski’s response was “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. 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.“

As for the claim that developers knowing the game wasn’t ready for the 2020 release, Badowski retorted with, “You’ve talked with 20 people, some being ex employees, only 1 of whom is not anonymous. I wouldn’t call that ‘most’ of the over 500-people staff openly said what you claim.“

If you read our review of Cyberpunk 2077, our first impression of the game was “it wasn’t what was advertised”. A gameplay demo sets up an expectation of what the final product would be, and the 2018 demo gave the impression that it was a polished game, which the PS4 version that we played at launch was definitely not with frame rates dipping below 20 FPS.

Whether certain features were not present at the launch of the game, the fact that we were presented with an unpolished game compared to the well-made 2018 E3 trailer; Badowski’s response feels lukewarm and reactive rather than addressing what many outlets (including us) noticed from the final product.

In response to Adam Badowski, Jason Schreier replied with “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.”

According to the roadmap laid out during the apology of co-found Marcin Iwinski, the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S next-gen update for Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive in the “second half” of 2021 after the much anticipated fixes for the older-gen consoles will drop in the next few weeks, with the first update coming soon.