CD Projekt Red’s Apology?

Connor Edrington
3 min readDec 14, 2020

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This morning, CD Projekt Red put out the above statement apologizing for the lack of transparency in regards to the quality of Cyberpunk 2077 on the base consoles that launched in 2013.

Screenshot: CD Projekt Red

I wanted to dive in and discuss this apology as I find the apology to be a little paper thin. I feel like they have had this apology ready for a while as they knew the previous generation would have trouble running Cyberpunk 2077.

For example, as mentioned in the apology they showed no footage of Cyberpunk 2077 running on base model consoles before the release of the game. On top of that they only gave reviewers PC copies of the game and restricted them from putting gameplay footage within video reviews until the day the game released.

While I loved The Witcher 3, I was already starting to get concerned with Cyberpunk 2077. I ended up canceling my preorder for the game. This was mostly because I still have a base model PS4 and I had seen no footage of the game running. I had not upgraded to the pro in last few years and have still yet to been able to snag a PS5.

The fact that CDPR is releasing an apology is not surprising to me, they have made a name for themselves in the past for being a pretty transparent studio and honest studio.

The thing that surprised me is that the apology is honestly a little too little too late. They almost seem surprised that people are upset that an entire division of the player base is having trouble playing their game. There are a good amount of people out there still playing on base consoles. It seems like they should be trying a little bit harder to get this figured out for the people that supported their company and game.

Partner this with the fact that Digital Foundry ran tests on the base model PS4 and PS4 Pro, the PS4 pro doesn’t even run the game all that much better. It seems like CDPR kind of dropped the ball when it came to the last generation versions. I have not seen the game running on an Xbox One X, but I’m guessing it most likely does not run at the same quality of the next gen hardware. Then we have the PC which in the comparisons I have seen looks like an entirely different game when compared to any of the consoles.

I believe that CDPR needs to step in and fix this problem with a little more than “our bad”. They have had a lot of scandals and situations regarding the development of Cyberpunk 2077, they may need to step up their efforts to ensure that they have a healthy player base for their next game.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

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