Years before Cyberpunk 2077 bailed on the idea, CD Projekt Red wanted The Witcher, the first RPG in the series, to have multiplayer.
Speaking at a Digital Dragons talk attended by GamesRadar+, CDPR senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek discusses the dusty documentation that's home to the first scratches of what The Witcher would become.
"If the state of your documentation is this black hole, this means you have to reverse-engineer everything," he says, "and basically reverse-engineer your own legacy. Since I've mentioned legacy: we don't have much in digital form, but we have some physical documents, and we would like to show one of them to you."
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Fulneczek brings up a notebook that "predates" The Witcher. "It lists the features we wanted to have in that game, among them a multiplayer mode, which didn't happen, but it shows ambition," he says.
Earlier in the talk, Fulneczek discussed how the early days of CDPR saw a small, tight-knit team of devs work out "our craft, our pipelines, and the logic as we went." This team was not, history has shown, up to the task of adding multiplayer to what was already a hefty RPG.
CD Projekt Red has an interesting history with multiplayer, which makes it doubly amusing that the original Witcher also had designs of its own at one point.
There's the Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer snag, obviously. The studio said years ago, following a disastrous launch and hard-fought recovery, that it had "decided to reconsider" making "a multiplayer Cyberpunk game". However, job listings for Cyberpunk 2 suggest it will fold in some kind of online play, though its scale and form are unknown.
Historically, any sort of online and/or co-op play has been reserved for spinoff or side games under CDPR. Gwent: The Witcher Card Game is the obvious pick, but there's also The Witcher Adventure Game digital adaptation, the MOBA-shaped Witcher Battle Arena, and the vaguely Pokemon Go-like Witcher: Monster Slayer.
Multiplayer in the mainline CDPR RPGs has thus come from fans, like the makers of Witcher Online and CyberMP.
However, the studio is now actively working on a new Witcher game with multiplayer, code named Project Sirius. It just added the narrative lead of Destiny 2: The Final Shape to its development team.
As it happens, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners characters Lucy and Rebecca will soon debut in Wuthering Waves through a collab, and that's technically an RPG with multiplayer. One small step for Lucy, one giant leap for Cyberpunk's roster.
"We learned our lesson": The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 won't repeat the development mistakes of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red says.
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