Cyberpunk 2077 Bugs Weren’t Caught Because QA Company Misled CD PROJEKT RED: Report

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Image: CD PROJEKT RED

One of the excuses that CD PROJEKT RED had initially given for Cyberpunk 2077’s bug-ridden launch in December 2020 was that the QA company it had hired failed to catch all of the bugs in its ambitious sci-fi RPG. Now, a year and half after the game’s release, YouTuber Upper Echelon has reported on a 72-page document sent by a whistleblower that offers some insight as to why CD PROJEKT RED placed significant blame on Quantic Lab, a QA company that was allegedly problematic for various reasons. Among the allegations made in the extensive document is Quantic Lab having over-exaggerated the size of its team in order to maintain its contract with CD PROJEKT RED, something that would explain why so many bugs were missed and ended up tainting the reputation of the original release. Others are even more serious, including the claim that most of the staff were amateurs with only half a year of QA experience despite Quantic Lab supposedly suggesting otherwise. The document shared by Upper Echelon includes names, production schedules, and other sorts of internal information that seem to confirm its authenticity.

  • Quantic Lab overexaggerated the size of the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 in order to keep the contract.
  • Quantic Lab said the team was made up of senior staff, but it was instead juniors with under six months experience in QA.
  • Quantic Lab had a daily quota of reported bugs, which led to CDPR getting thousands of relatively pointless bug reports from the testers which took up a lot of time, and caused gamebreaking issues to not be found or prioritized.

If true, this certainly would explain at least some component of Cyberpunk 2077’s launch issues, albeit of course it ultimately falls on CDPR to decide whether a product should be released in a given state. And I still remember CDPR saying the game performed “surprisingly well” on last-gen consoles, which was demonstrably untrue, and I don’t think there’s a “QA contractors tricked us” explanation for that one.

Still, if true, this is a story and could be at least a partial explanation for what happened with Cyberpunk at launch, if CDPR was flooded with pointless bug reports to fix from junior staffers attempting to meet quotas. And if this was the problem, it certainly seems like something that can be rectified in the future as I doubt CDPR would work with Quantic Lab again. I’m going to keep looking into this to see if I can dig anything else out of whatever the hell happened here.

Source: Upper Echelon (via Forbes)

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Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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