If you missed the recent news, Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed yet again from the initial release date of April all the way back to September 17, 2020. At this point, I’m not surprised that the game is being delayed yet again, it’s a huge project that was extremely ambitious for the developer. CD Projekt Red explained that they want this game to be the crowning jewel of their work on the current console generation, and in order to meet that hefty goal they have to delay the game. Apparently Cyberpunk 2077 is already playable right now, but a lot of polish, more actual development than polish, is needed in order to get it to full release quality. The developers have also described how staff are now working crunch time to get the game done in time, and I don’t know if I want that to happen.
Is The Crunch Necessary?
Obviously the crunch development work is needed in order to get Cyberpunk 2077 finished for this new release date of September 17, 2020. There are people who are very good at project management who will have been able to work this out based on current levels of work and how fast the developers are able to create/fix things. What I’m really talking about here is the affect that crunch time, which is between now and September, will have on the people working more than 40 hours every week for the next eight months.
Crunch pushes developers way too far. It sees them working more than 40 hours per week just to finish a game to a deadline that was probably set without any input from them. Having worked in development myself, I know the frustration when you try to explain why a certain project will take a certain amount of time to complete, only to have someone else completely ignore what you’ve said and set an unrealistic deadline. I’ve worked 15 hour days for two weeks to get a project done according to someone else’s deadline, and I can tell you that it really isn’t fun.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I’d rather get Cyberpunk 2077 in 2021 than see the developers go through crunch. There are loads of games coming out this year, more than enough for all of us to enjoy, I believe we can wait. It also seems like the game will straddle two generations, releasing on PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X in the future. If that’s the case, we can definitely wait a little bit longer for this game, and definitely well into 2021 in my opinion.
I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on crunch, so please tell me them in the comments.