Cyberpunk 2077 developer reportedly refutes claims surrounding disrupted bug-fixing pipeline

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has reportedly refuted the claims that an outsourced QA testing company contributed to the game’s bug-riddled launch. 

Following a report from YouTube channel Upper Echelon Gamers, who said they’ve been contacted by a whistleblower from the QA testing company that worked on Cyberpunk 2077, fellow YouTuber @LegacyKillaHD has shared new claims supposedly from CD Projekt Red employees on Twitter which dispute the original information. 

The original report alleged that one of the reasons why Cyberpunk 2077 was launched with so many bugs is because of internal struggles within the QA company, Quantic Lab. 

In the video, Upper Echelon Gamers analyses documents given to them by the Quantic Lab employee - including a 72-page QA testing file, the company's human resources paperwork, workflow charts, production maps, productivity spreadsheets, and more - and shares possible theories as to why Cyberpunk 2077 had such a disastrous launch. 

There were many reasons put forward in the video as to why Quantic Lab might have had issues with Cyberpunk 2077, however, the main ones are as follows. According to Upper Echelon Gamers’ source, the Quantic Lab team working on the CD Projekt Red game was made up of primarily junior staff members, supposedly with less than a year of experience in QA testing.

The source also claims that the team was given a daily quota of 10 bugs reported per day, per person in order to drive productivity and eventually result in a polished game. What actually ended up happening though is that CD Projekt Red received thousands of minor bugs to fix which eventually meant that the bigger, game-breaking bugs were either not found or not prioritized by the developers, says the whistleblower.

You can watch the original video for more details below. 

Since all of this has been revealed though, the aforementioned @LegacyKillaHD has released a tweet containing an article reporting on the video that reads: "[I] spoke to a few different CD Projekt Red sources that worked on #Cyberpunk2077, they all refuted this claim." This then developed into a Twitter thread with more supposed insight from CD Projekt Red employees.

The rest of the thread details what the CD Projekt Red employees were actually affected by during production with one apparently saying: "we knew about the bugs that people were complaining about. This was not something that was "unknown" to us. But we did not have time to focus on it, we were crunching like crazy so we were paper thin at the end." 

According to LegacyKillaHD, the same dev explained to them that "more important or tech aspects of the game were tested internally" and claims that "Quantic's QA role was minimal with much of the issues being on CDPR's own mismanagement." 

12DOVE reached out to CD Projekt Red who declined to give a comment about the claims. Neither CDPR nor Quantic Lab have made public statements regarding the report or LegacyKillaHD’s tweets yet.

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