Cyberpunk 2077: QA team work documents show one of the reasons for the game’s state at launch


The launch of Cyberpunk 2077 was more than chaotic, the fault of many bugs that tarnished the reputation of the game, but also that of the studio. The reasons linked to this semi-failure for CD Project Red are numerous, and have already been pointed out, but today we learn new details about what happened behind the scenes, especially on the side of the external company in charge of QA (therefore testing the game ), with an investigation by Upper Echelon Gamers, relayed by VGC.

A QA team that lied?

Upper Echelon Gamers first claims to have in its possession confidential documents from an employee working at Quantic Labs, the company that took care of all the QA part for Cyberpunk 2077in addition to the own internal QA team at CD Projekt Red.

These documents detail in particular what happened during the tests in order to better understand how the game was able to come out with so many problems at launch. The source is apparently authentic, with several elements that prove its veracity.

To put things in context, Quantic Labs is an experienced QA studio that worked with Ubisoft and Techland in particular, before being acquired in 2020 by Embracer Group.

But despite the presence of many talents with experience within the company, Cyberpunk 2077 could not have benefited from this expertise, first of all because Quantic Labs would have lied about its number of employees to secure the contract. Once the latter is in the pocket, the team placed on Cyberpunk 2077 would have doubled from 30 to 60 people, but with mainly new talent, which means that the elders spent weeks training them.

A project entrusted to people who are not experienced enough

The report tells us that when Quantic Labs and CD Projekt Red first met in 2019 to discuss the testing process, only testers with relatively little experience were sent to meet the Polish studio, instead of veteran and experienced testers.

CD Projekt Red thought they were working with a company made up of a lot of veterans, but the QA team assigned to Cyberpunk 2077 was actually conducted by someone with about a year’s experience, which is far too little for such a juggernaut.

Everything would have started to get complicated when Quantic Labs would have asked each tester to list at least 10 bugs per day per person. This resulted in the members of CD Projekt Red then receiving reports containing quite minor bugs, often visual bugs, which they then had to spend time on instead of focusing on larger bugs. CD Projekt Red then asked for this to stop, to focus on major bugsand was then quite unhappy with the work of Quantic Labs.

All this could partly explain the state of the game, although it should not be forgotten that CD Projekt Red was aware of all these problems before the release (and could therefore have postponed it). One thing is certain, the post-mortem of Cyberpunk 2077 has not yet revealed all its secrets.



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