Special Report
PCG INVESTIGATES
CYBERPUNK 2077’s director takes us inside the three year road to redemption
When Gabe Amatangelo stepped into the director role for Cyberpunk 2077 in May 2021, morale among the team was low. The RPG had sold 13 million copies, yet was plagued with bugs and ran so poorly on older consoles it was pulled from sale on the PlayStation Store. CD Projekt’s stock price cratered. Cyberpunk’s former director had left CDPR after an investigation into workplace bullying. So when Amatangelo said yes to the job, that yes came with conditions.
“Part of my conversation at the beginning with my boss and the board was: I believe in the team, I believe in this IP, but I want to do it right. And I’m going to need the support to do that,” says Amatangelo. “And they’re like, yes, you have the support.” From that point on, every patch for Cyberpunk 2077 was a deliberate step along the path to 2.0 and its ultimate redemption – walking away after merely polishing up performance and bugs was never even on the table.
To even reach that point, though, CD Projekt had to begin righting a very large, very ungainly ship. For Amatangelo, that meant making sure everyone on the team was talking to one another and encouraging them to share their ideas. “Everyone, after the launch, was like,
‘Oh, if we’d done this differently, or if I’d been able to do this or add this…’ I wanted them to not only feel like their voices were heard, but see examples of their voices being heard.” They reorganised the development team to be more cross-discipline, putting “pods” of developers together who may have once been separated – a writer and level designer, for example. The first six months of that new structure was “bumpy” but they found a groove.
Amatangelo points to the 2.0 update’s revamped police system as a “very visible example” of the collaborative process across tech, art, narrative, and gameplay working. The police now more or less mirror what you’d expect from a Grand Theft Auto game, chasing you in vehicles and searching for you with telegraphed vision cones that let you hide until things cool down. More stars trigger an escalated police response, like roadblocks and fearsome Max-Tac bruisers showing up to wreck your day. The NCPD will no longer show up in the middle of the Badlands – Militech show up instead. And they can now also respond to other crimes, not just yours.
