A whistleblower has spoken out on the (YouTube channel Upper Echelon Games) and revealed shocking details about the production of Cyberpunk 2077. If the allegations are true, the QA company is largely to blame for the game’s disastrous start.
Cyberpunk 2077 went down in history with its release almost two years ago. Even though developer CD Projekt Red has done a lot of clean-up work since then, the title will probably be remembered forever for its terrible release condition. When a publisher announces a release delay today, many fans comment with “Take your time, we don’t want another Cyberpunk”. Another indication of how deeply this “incident” has affected the gaming scene.
Up until now, management and investors were mainly blamed for this fatal false start. But a whistleblower’s report now also puts the focus on QA firm Quantic Labs.
The sum of the failure of Cyberpunk 2077
Quantic Labs was responsible for the quality assurance of Cyberpunk 2077. The company thus commissioned test players who passed on error messages to the developers in order to further improve the RPG. As the result shows, a lot seems to have gone wrong with the quality assurance. Upper Echelon Gamers finds in the whistleblower’s letter, among others, the following reasons for the failure of the QA work:
- Quantic Labs had lied to CDPR about the experience level of the testers. Instead of veteran testers, they were just juniors who had less than a year’s experience in the field.
- The team of 30 testers was indeed doubled to 60. But the new testers were newly recruited and accordingly had little to no experience in the field.
- The testers bombarded the developers with a plethora of bugs according to an internal specification. As these were not prioritised, the developers could not focus on the serious problems and instead had to deal with the sheer volume of bugs first.
Because of this misinformation, the final process on the part of the developers was severely compromised. Combined with misguided management and investor pressure, the result was eventually the gruesome final product we got to see at the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
Although this information seems very credible, it cannot be said with one hundred percent certainty that the words of the alleged whistleblower are true. This is emphasised in the video.
