Cyberpunk 2 director recalls that making Phantom Liberty was like "group therapy" after 2077's "crushing" launch

News
By published

Paweł Sasko remembers a particularly hard time at CD Projekt Red

Cyberpunk 2077
(Image credit: CD Projekt Red)

After Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous launch - plagued with bugs, missing features, and a storm of online controversy - making the game's excellent Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 facelift was a kind of "group therapy" for the development team, according to the expansion's lead.

Cyberpunk 2 and Phantom Liberty director Pawel Sasko recently recalled the heated 2020 launch in an interview with Flow Games, where he says the base game's reception was "absolutely crushing," particularly for developers who had joined CD Projekt Red after The Witcher 3 had already snatched up endless acclaim.

"I know how success feels because I've already shipped games that were really cherished. I know how that feels," Sasko explains in the video below. "And then you have members in our team who had never experienced that... For me, that was probably the worst aspect of it - seeing the people in the team crushed by that... we took it really bad in general." The subsequent production of Phantom Liberty was "like our group therapy," as the team was "trying to go through this and work through those issues."

Sasko then runs through what that journey looked like, calling patches 1.2 and 1.3 "stepping stones" that fixed "a lot," but ultimately didn't do much in terms of public perception. Update 1.5 was a much bigger leap for the game's road to recovery, but still, player feedback felt like a "consolation prize" for Sasko, as if the team "came seventh in a marathon." What really turned things around was the Edgerunners 1.6 update that launched alongside the Netflix anime series of the same name, and really "tipped the scales." Sasko says the anime was an even better introduction point to the universe than even the game, and in conjunction with the prior updates, Edgerunners gave the team the "additional motivation" needed to believe "Maybe this is possible, maybe we can fix this for real."

Cyberpunk 2077's 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty expansion proved the team's hunch was right, they could fix it, since the developers recently celebrated the RPG's 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Steam review comeback.

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a massive multiplayer mod that’ll let you join PvP death matches, races, and more with 20 other players.

Kaan Serin
Freelance contributor

Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.