Nowakowski revealed (reported via Reddit ) that the two planned expansions were cancelled simply for technical reasons but he did not share additional details on what these technical reasons might be.
For me, these “technical reasons” are that from now on they want to put all their resources into Unreal Engine 5 and focus on The Witcher 4 (www.gamesradar.com/the-witcher-4-release-date/).
They spent a LOT of resources trying to tune their REDengine to meet the demands of Cyberpunk. I can only imagine the tech debt of them adding hack after hack to meet the promises of Cyberpunk after the release.
And over there is Unreal 5, which has many many successes. Even the shitty unreal games still function better than Cyberpunk on launch.
Hopefully the next CP game will be good (and actually a complete product). I beat it around launch and the highest praise I have is that the art department must have broken backs from carrying the entire game. I’m confident that if it wasn’t for the incredible art assets, the game would be nothing, because it’s not a fun thing to play with.
I’m sure you’re aware after all the press it’s had recently, but the game was insanely fun following the 2.0 patch. So much so, in fact, that I had to force myself to reluctantly uninstall the game after I finally beat it (after delaying the main story for so long), just so I could move on to the other great games on my list.
With the incredibly high bar they’ve set themselves, the sequel is sure to impress. I still wouldn’t advise anyone to preorder it though, just in case!
Technical reasons tends to mean that they’d painted themselves into a corner development-wise that was prohibitively expensive/time consuming to get back out of.
I am a fan of them giving the game an end. Don’t get me wrong, would love more cyberpunk content but everything does not need to continue forever. So basically with phantom liberty you have the full game. Now if they can just focus on finish polishing the game as they have been doing
Ive commented this elsewhere but I think we would get a better standard of AAA game if we were all just a little more patient.
Id like to see more games like Cyberpunk say at launch. "We have a 5 year plan for this game. 1 major paid dlc and one smaller free dlc a year for 5 years. Than trying to rush some massive unfinished turd out the door and getting 1 expansion.
You just ate more in one sitting than you ever have before consequently you are going to do a bigger shit than anyone else ever has before.
Which sounds like the better outcome… try and push out one massive nugget, or one still very impressive nugget with a few smaller followups leading to the same enormous bowl filling volume as the first option, just slightly less braggable.
Or you’re lactose intolerant and what you ate was just a big hunk of cheese, ice cream and curd creating a horrorshow that covers the whole bathroom and yourself with your digestive system never recovering also known as live service games.
After their launch of the first I don’t believe most customers will trust them again, so they’ll have a smaller player base for the sequel and will therefore spend less money and time on it because there’s less potential. It’ll be trimmed down in features and maybe a much better game though I predict.
Agreed, bummer to see cancelled rather than delayed. That makes me think the technical reasons were either really difficult to overcome game breakers, or a complete scapegoat. “Technically we didn’t want to put the time or money into these” style
Iirc (I think there was a statement?) they were running into creation engine style issues with red engine as they really had to stretch it to make cyberpunk work. I’m sure we’ll all be happier in the long run to not have the next cyberpunk come out like starfield.
Hadn’t they been forward about this earlier? They canceled the 2 DLCs to focus on the follow up to CP2077 and the new Witcher IPs. Something to do with their old game engine, which they said proved harder to work with than expected, and moving onto an off the shelf engine.
Edit: here’s the Ars Techina article about it from Sept. 2023.
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