CD Projekt Red Revamped Dev Processes for The Witcher VI and Cyberpunk 2 After Cyberpunk 2077's Launch Drama

With the reputation Cyberpunk 2077 currently has, it's easy to forget that the game launched in a rough state, afflicted by major performance and polish issues. According to a recent talk by CDPR's lead technical writer, Jarosław Ruciński and senior technical writer, Adrian Fulneczek, at a Ditigal Dragons panel, the studio doesn't intend to make the same mistake twice. According to the pair (via GamesRadar+, the studio has addressed the main cause of the issues that afflicted the Cyberpunk 2077 launch—specifically poor documentation. During the development of Cyberpunk 2077, the studio created more than 8,000 pages of documentation with a tool called Confluence, after which, the development team decided to migrate to a cloud instance of the tool, which further fragmented the documentation. As Fulneczek explains, the studio stopped prioritizing maintaining the documents entirely as a result, which led to difficulties understanding those documents both within CDPR and at its international partner studios.

Coming out of the tumultuous Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR has "learned its lesson" and integrated documentation into its development process. Now, before anything is allowed to go through a development gate, to the next stage of development, it has to be documented properly. Institutional knowledge and documentation are no longer restricted to specific teams, with everyone working on the studio's projects having access to the same knowledge base, even across separate projects. This helps cut back on duplicate work and lets the whole company benefit from breakthroughs that happen in individual projects. Neither Cyberpunk 2 nor The Witcher 4 have release dates attached to them at the time of writing, but Cyberpunk 2 is expected to launch sometime in 2030, while The Witcher 4 is thought to be past the pre-production phase.