CD Projekt Red admits its biggest development mistake and how it’s fixing it

Cyberpunk 2077 had one of gaming’s most notorious launches. Refunds, patches, and years of reputation repair followed. Now, CD Projekt Red is being refreshingly candid about where things went wrong and it wasn’t just bugs.

The real problem that nobody wrote anything down

At the Digital Dragons panel, technical writers Jarosław Ruciński and Adrian Fulneczek pointed to documentation as the studio’s most damaging blind spot. During the development of The Witcher 1, 2, and Cyberpunk 2077, the team simply didn’t plan far enough ahead.

When CD Projekt Red later attempted a Witcher remake, developers found “no technical knowledge preserved from that time”, gaps that had to be patched by veteran staff who remembered things others had long forgotten.

Cyberpunk 2077 compounded the problem at scale. The team used Confluence to track progress, but 8,000 pages in, the documentation had become so sprawling it was practically useless. The Phantom Liberty DLC made things worse by splitting files across cloud and local storage, confusing not just internal teams, but outsourced partners too.

A new standard for The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2

CD Projekt Red has since overhauled its approach entirely. Documentation is now a hard requirement at every stage of development, not an afterthought. Knowledge becomes a shared studio asset, meaning a problem solved during The Witcher 4‘s production can directly benefit Cyberpunk 2.

It’s a practical fix, but also a telling one. Sometimes the biggest lessons come from the most unglamorous places.

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