There’s been no shortage of delays to major upcoming releases in the last few days, but without a doubt, the biggest of them all has been Cyberpunk 2077, which recently got pushed back from its imminent April release by five months, to September of this year.
And the reason for this massive delay may have come to light, if a recent report has anything to go by. During his recent podcast (via altchar), Polish filmmaker Borys Nieśpielak – who directed a documentary on indie game development called We Are Alright (and also recently said that Microsoft was in the market for a Polish studio) – said that CD Projekt RED had been having trouble optimizing Cyberpunk 2077 for the base Xbox One.
Apparently, the studio finds the original Xbox One console too weak to properly run Cyberpunk 2077 properly, and had internally come to the decision that if they were unable to get the game properly optimized for the console by January 2020, they would delay its release- which, of course, they ended up doing. The game’s performance on the hardware was, as per Nieśpielak, “extremely unsatisfactory.”
It’s worth noting that games running into optimization issues before launch is not a very uncommon occurrence, especially for a project as massive as Cyberpunk 2077. Hopefully, with the extra months at their disposal, they’ll be able to overcome these issues. More importantly, it’s best to take this report with a grain of salt, as is always the case with unconfirmed and unverified reports such as this one.
Cyberpunk 2077 is out for the PS4, Xbox One, Stadia, and PC on September 17, and CDPR promises that the game will be worth the longer wait– though they also recently admitted that they will be crunching “to some degree” to hit the game’s new launch date. Meanwhile, Cyberpunk 2077’s multiplayer component is probably not going to be out until after 2021.
