Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer "had to go away" after game's rocky launch

CD Projekt Red has shed more light on the reason why multiplayer never materialised for Cyberpunk 2077.

Simply put, the game’s rocky 2020 launch changed the studio’s plans. CD Projekt Red had to prioritise fixing the single-player experience, and multiplayer suffered as a result.

“We really needed to look at what were the priorities for Cyberpunk [after it launched],” Philipp Weber told me when I visited the studio last week. Weber was senior quest designer and coordinator on Cyberpunk 2077. Today, he’s acting narrative director of the new Witcher game codenamed Polaris.

“The priority was that the main experience will run for the people in a really good state,” he said. “And essentially, the switch of priorities meant that other R&D projects had to go away. With Cyberpunk, we wanted to do many things at the same time, and we just needed to really focus and say, ‘Okay, what’s the important part? Yeah, we will make that part really good.'”

It’s the first admission I’ve seen that Cyberpunk’s launch was to blame.

A year ago, CD Projekt said that it had “reconsidered” the plan to release a triple-A, standalone multiplayer Cyberpunk game. “Previously, we hinted that our next triple-A would be a multiplayer Cyberpunk game,” said Adam Kiciński, president and joint CEO, in an investor presentation. “But we have decided to reconsider this plan given our new, more systematic, agile approach.