Cyberpunk 2077’s numerous game-breaking bugs were apparently caused by numerous failings by the QA team, according to a new 72-page report.
As reported by YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers, a long-form report has been leaked by a whistleblower which points to a number of ways the QA team deceived developer CD Projekt. The Witcher developer and publisher had outsourced the quality assurance testing of Cyberpunk 2077 to the team at Quantic Lab.
The report concludes that Quantic Lab lied to CD Projekt in order to secure and maintain the lucrative contract. Firstly, it reportedly claimed the size of the team which would work on the project was much larger than reality in order to keep the contract. Secondly, Quantic Lab apparently said that the team was made up of a number of senior staff, however, it is claimed the team was actually made up of junior staff with less than six months of quality assurance experience.
Quantic Lab apparently had a quota of bugs reports it had to submit each day. It is unclear whether this was an internal quota or one imposed by CD Projekt. However, this quota led to issues as thousands of minor bugs were reported preventing both QA and the engineers at CD Projekt from exploring the major game-breaking issues.
Shortly after release, co-founder of CD Projekt, Marcin Iwiński, updated fans in a video detailing a roadmap for bug fixes and explaining the reasons why Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t meet expectations. In it he claims “Our testing did not show a big part of the issues which you experienced while playing the game.” At the time this seemed ludicrous as a number of these bugs felt impossible to miss.
The new report shows that this might have been the case, due to both the programming and QA teams being inundated by minor bug fixes. Despite naming the QA team as one of the reasons for the game’s unsuitable release, Iwiński ultimately took responsibility for making the decision to release Cyberpunk 2077 in its broken state. “Please don’t fault any of our teams for what happened,” he said “Myself and the board are the final decision makers, and it was our call to release the game.”
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
