Although Cyberpunk 2077 no longer presents the problems it had at its launch and CD Projekt Red managed to turn the game around to make it profitable, we cannot deny that the title marked the video game industry in a very negative way, frustrating the expectations of the players and failing to deliver what it promised.
Even knowing that the game’s DLC is on the way and a sequel has already been confirmed, many wonder what happened to the multiplayer mode of the first game, which had been announced before launch and ended up falling by the wayside.
In an interview with Eurogamer, CDPR’s Philipp Weber confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077’s multiplayer mode was indeed cancelled, as many suspected, due to the game’s poor state at launch. The developer had to look at the game’s priorities and make the core experience work as expected, which meant other spinoff projects had to be cancelled.
The priority was for the core experience to run in a really good state. And, essentially, changing priorities meant that other R&D projects had to disappear. With Cyberpunk, we wanted to do a lot of things at the same time and we just needed to focus and say, ‘Okay, what’s the important part? Yeah, let’s make that part really good’.
While the news is disheartening for some, it’s good to see that the studio has at least managed to patch the game well enough for it to work in the main campaign and bring success to the studio, but it’s a shame that the promises that were made to sell the title prior to launch were not fulfilled, which is something very worrying, as it may set precedents for other games to do the same.
Have you been waiting for the Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer campaign?
