The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 likely won't suffer from some of the same behind-the-scenes issues that infected Cyberpunk 2077, developers at CD Projekt Red say, and it's all because the studio finally sorted out a crucial if unexciting part of the production process: documentation.
CD Projekt Red's lead technical writer Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek spoke about the company's evolving documentation efforts in a lengthy Digital Dragons panel attended by GamesRadar+.
The duo explained that CDPR has traditionally not documented its games very well. During the development of The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2, for instance, almost no one at the company "was thinking 20 years ahead," and now the studio has almost "nothing from that period."
Messy or non-existent documentation proved particularly troublesome when work began on The Witcher remake. "We were tasked to recreate the classic game for the modern audience, only to realize that we had little to no technical knowledge preserved from that time," Ruciński says. Thankfully, co-developer Fool's Theory consists of many veteran CDPR devs who provided an "injection of this lost tribal knowledge."
Cyberpunk 2077 was perhaps the biggest victim of the developer letting its documentation get out of hand, though. Fulneczek says the game "was a fresh start" and a "massive undertaking" - one the devs thought they could tackle thanks to a new documentation tool called Confluence, which was a "living documentation" tool. Things quickly snowballed from there on. The devs created more than 8,000 unwieldy pages of documentation, and as the project ballooned in size, maintaining those documents became "a low priority."
To avoid the tangled pile of files, the team then decided to separate documents relating to the Phantom Liberty DLC and moved "to a cloud instance of Confluence." Suddenly, documents were split between those stored on the cloud and those stored on the company's servers. "It was chaos, right? Two spaces, two instances," Fulneczek adds, pointing out that fragmented documentation could also correlate to worker burnout. "It was very difficult to understand for us, for our outsource partners as well… If you can, don't divide between platforms or different tools. You have to link very clearly between them."
Mistakes were made, sure, but the company is trying to move past them with the upcoming CD Projekt Red games and a two-fold approach. First, documents are shared across the company, so teams working on the other side of the globe, in different time zones, are kept in the loop. And, second, keeping documentation is non-negotiable if a team wants to go through a development 'gate' - pre-production to alpha to beta to release.
"The future looks really promising for us," Fulneczek says of The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2. "We learned our lesson."
"We've got some new requirements, especially a new definition of 'done'," Fulneczek explains. "So as you know, any project, any game goes through development stages, and right now, every stage ends with a gate. Part of the requirements to pass that gate is the documentation, which wasn't the case before."
"Unlike in the past, now, today our knowledge isn't locked between specific teams' permissions," Ruciński goes on. "It's a shared asset. If a team working on, let's say, The Witcher figures out a solution for a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, take it into their own code, modify it probably a little bit." The more shared approach ensures "problems aren't being solved multiple times by different teams, and also that if a breakthrough happens on one of the projects, the whole company benefits."
