Cyberpunk 2077 vs GTA 6 launch comparison
People keep putting the Cyberpunk 2077 launch next to GTA 6, but the comparison ignores what each studio was actually up against. CD Projekt Red had never built a game like Cyberpunk before. The Witcher titles didn't have a dense futuristic city, tons of NPCs, or cars moving at high speed, so this was their first attempt at that kind of open-world design. The 2019 gameplay video even carried a disclaimer that it was work in progress and not the final look. After the rough launch, Marcin Iwiński explained the bugs came from building for PC first, then scaling down to PS4 and Xbox One, which still used hard drives. That scaling is hard on its own, and the pandemic hit development at the same time. Rockstar Games is in a different position. They have years of experience with large open-world games full of NPCs and fast cars, and they even got GTA V running on a PS3 with only 256MB of VRAM and 256MB of RAM. For GTA 6, they're developing for current-gen consoles first, then scaling up to PC, not the reverse. Rockstar also usually shows gameplay close to launch. GTA 6 Trailer 2 was captured on a base PS5, and more gameplay is expected on August 27th. One studio was making this genre for the first time, while the other has made multiple GTA games. That's why the direct comparison isn't fair to either company.
Transcript (en)
Now I'd like to tell you how the situation looked like from the inside. Cyberpunk 2077 is huge in scope. And I'm not only talking about quests or things you see at first glance. I'm talking about a multitude of custom objects, interacting systems and mechanics. In the game, everything is not stretched out over flat terrain where we can make things less taxing hardware-wise, but condensed in one big city and in a relatively loading-free environment. On its own this is a challenge, but we made it even more difficult for ourselves by wanting to make the game look epic on PCs and then adjusting it to consoles, especially old gems. That was our core assumption, and things did not look super difficult at first. We knew the hardware gap, yes, but ultimately I think that time has proven that we've underestimated the task. To give a concrete example and the main culprit, we had to constantly improve our in-game streaming system for old-gen consoles. is responsible for feeding the engine with what you see on screen as well as the game mechanics And since the city is so packed and the disk bandwidth of Ogins is what it is it constantly challenged us Every change and improvement needed to be tested and as it turned out our testing did not show a big part of the issues you experienced while playing the game. As we got closer to the final release we saw significant improvements each and every day and we really believed we would deliver in the final day zero update. Now let's talk about the review process. We started sending our PC review keys in the first days of December. On launch day, December 10th, we hit the ground running with a really good start on PC. While not perfect, it's a version of Cyberpunk we are very proud of. At the same time, we're fighting for quality on all gen consoles till the very last moment. And every extra day of us working on the day zero update brought visible improvement. This is why we started sending console review keys on the 8th of December, which was later than we originally planned. This all happened while working from home with all the challenges resulting from the COVID-related restrictions. A lot of the dynamics we normally take for granted got lost over video calls or email. And we took that hit too.
