Interview: CD Projekt RED has learned its lessons for the next Cyberpunk
Plus: America's newest, biggest video game union, and Nintendo's 2024 calendar mystery
Game director Gabe Amatangelo believes his team at CD Projekt RED can repeat what the studio did on Cyberpunk 2077.
He’s not talking about the bad part.
Not the disastrous 2020 launch that produced a heavily hyped game (13 million copies sold in 10 days) that was so buggy and so disappointing that Sony removed it from the PlayStation’s online store for six months. Not the part that led CDPR, trying to contain the damage, to offer refunds.
Rather, he’s thinking of the good part: the development of Cyberpunk 2077’s expansion, Phantom Liberty, one of the best-reviewed releases of 2023. That add-on, launched last September alongside a 2.0 patch that overhauled the base game, turned a debacle into a darling.
It didn’t come easy, and it didn’t come cheap.
The expansion and overhaul cost Warsaw-based CD Projekt $63 million to develop.
It needed around 400 in-house developers, plus contributions from co-development studios and contractors.
It came from a company motivated to win over fans and investors alike. (Note: The investors don’t seem sold yet; CDPR’s stock trades at about a quarter of what it did on the eve of Cyberpunk 2077’s release, though it has rebounded from 2022’s lows).
“I think what we did with Phantom Liberty is very achievable,” Amatangelo told me during an interview last month at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas, when I asked if they could pull it off again. Some of his confidence is due to evolving the game design in Cyberpunk. But a lot of it, Amatangelo said, is about finding better ways to make a game.
“It comes down to the composition of the team, the talent. And, really, kind of trusting each other and believing in each other.”
Getting the gig
Amatangelo joined CD Projekt in early 2020, after a career that included work on online multiplayer games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and single-player expansions to Dragon Age Inquisition.
He became Cyberpunk 2077’s game director in spring 2021, after the game had been patched several times.
He held the reins for 2.0 and Phantom Liberty, an expansion he said the team approached as a sequel. They focused on iteration, on reviewing how protagonist V and the game world of Night City functioned for the player—and how it could be improved.
“A lot of what we did on the road to 2.0 was just to be like, ‘Okay, if this is supposed to be functioning in this world, why is it not? And let's address as many of those as we can: AI, police system, other other activities happening with or without V.’”
Amatangelo also wanted the pieces of the open-world game to connect to each other more. That complexity is easier to achieve when the basics have been established by a first game.
For the expansion, he wanted V’s side quests—open world bounties, favors for Night City’s citizens, etc—to better complement the game’s main quest, which in Phantom Liberty involves a body-enhancing relic. As Amatangelo put it: “We didn't want there to be a separation between merc V and [the] V going for the relic. In Phantom Liberty, I wanted it all to be connected.” So players in the expansion may do side jobs for the enigmatic Mr. Hands, which impact the region’s local politics, which feed back into V’s overall efforts to conduct espionage in Night City.
Better teamwork
Amatangelo doesn’t talk much about how Cyberpunk’s team operated before he was in charge. But he allows for some inference as he talks about the army of developers he led through the game’s successful redemption.
“The big change was just to give everyone more freedom,” he said, “letting them just create and not have to worry about the game directors checking the box on every little thing.”
Managers might do spot checks, “just check the overall alignment,” he said, “And then, seeing if there is a misalignment, kind of having targeted discussions to get everyone to understand why.”
Phantom Liberty’s vast crew of developers benefited from working in cross-disciplinary teams, he said. He explained that a smaller game might have a quest team that sends an art request to an environment team and to a level design team. But he found more success with an approach that included people with a mix of skillsets. He gave the example of a bar scene in which the level that gets made doesn’t have enough space between the stools for the characters to act out a scene in a cinematic. If you have a team that spans multiple disciplines making that scene, “and they all kind of just do it all at the same time, that is helpful,” he said. (It’s not a silver bullet, he cautioned, noting that a multi-disciplinary group can be out of sync with the larger team. ”My job is just trying to, like, mind meld with everyone and [get] all of us on the same page.”
CDPR is infamous for crunch on some of its biggest games and reneged on a promise to avoid it for Cyberpunk, mandating, per Bloomberg, six-day work weeks in the months leading to its December 2020 launch.
Amatangelo thinks they got around it with Phantom Liberty, not simply by keeping hours in check but by offsetting long ones with short ones.
“I'm not going to sit here and say everyone perfectly had 40 hours a week,” he said. “Sometimes it was 50, sometimes it was 60, but then the next one was 30 or 20. You try to balance it out.”
A sequel made in Boston
In late 2022, CD Projekt said it would open a studio in Boston to expand its operations and build a new Cyberpunk.
The company wanted the new office to be far enough from its Warsaw HQ so that CDPR could develop multiple games at once without competing with itself on hiring, Amatangelo recalled.
As for why Boston: They wanted to tap a North American talent pool that wouldn’t want to move to Europe; they needed it to be in an East Coast city to have some overlap with working hours at the European home office (they also considered North Carolina); and for those CDPR devs crossing the Atlantic, Amatangelo said, “this city, I think, just felt more culturally familiar to Europeans.”
Amatangelo brought over a team of directors he’s worked with before, including Cyberpunk quest director Paweł Sasko. Last month, the company announced several veterans from Ubisoft, Amazon, and Bioware were also joining the Boston team.
Can’t quite quit 2077
CD Projekt RED has signaled that it’s done with Cyberpunk 2077, but hasn’t been able to resist adding more to it.
Phantom Liberty was the presumed end, but then the game’s 2.1 update last December added a functional metro system. That new feature fit the goal of making the city function the way a player might expect, Amatangelo recalled, and wouldn’t be taxing to create. “My team had a plan on how to accomplish it in a reasonable way, sort of in a timely way. And I was just like, ‘Okay, great.’” (And it didn’t hurt that Amatangelo read an article wondering why there wasn’t a subway and found himself agreeing.)
That also wasn’t the end. January’s patch 2.11 added custom paint jobs for some in-game cars.
“Yes. We're done,” Amatangelo told me.
But, he added: “It's possible that there's some other little thing that comes in here or there, just because, as you're kind of messing around with stuff, sometimes you discover something that is not a high risk. Or it's easy to integrate. Or, you know, some developers have some bandwidth.
“Then they bring it to me. I'm like, ‘All right, well, I trust you that it isn't going to mess with your other work…So let's give it a go.”
Item 2: Newest, biggest video game union
Around 600 game testers at Microsoft-owned Activision are forming a union, the group announced on Friday after a certification of their vote to organize (the tally: 390-8).
The group, dubbed Activision Quality Assurance United, is organizing through the Communication Workers of America, which brokered a labor neutrality pact with Microsoft in mid-2022, in exchange for the union’s support for the company’s bid to buy Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft has voluntarily recognized the new Activision union, a company rep told Game File on Friday.
The CWA says the new group is the largest game worker union in the U.S., surpassing the 300-something game testers who organized at Microsoft-owned ZeniMax a year ago.
Microsoft had no unions in any of its businesses in the first 40+ years of its operations, but that changed in recent years as its efforts to acquire Activision converged with unionization efforts among workers at Activision Blizzard who were frustrated by their company’s management. Microsoft took a more labor-friendly posture to help the deal go through.
The new 600-person tester union works specifically on Activision games and encompasses teams based in California, Minnesota and Texas.
Item 3: In brief
🎮 Deviation Games, a studio that announced backing from Sony PlayStation in 2021 to create a major, original game, has shut down, VGC reports.
👀 Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is interested in buying TikTok, as the social media giant faces pressure from the U.S. government to separate itself from its Chinese parent, The Wall Street Journal reports.
🤔 EA’s Battlefield franchise has lost another creative director, this time DICE’s Craig Morrison, Insider Gaming reports.
😲 Chances of a strike by video game voice actors over AI issues is “’50-50 or more likely” in the next 4-6 weeks, according to SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator, Variety reports.
🥊 WB Games is bringing back its free-to-play Smash Bros.-style platform fighter Multiversus for a full release on May 28, after shutting down the game’s public beta over a year ago.
Item 4: Nintendo’s late 2024 mystery
Nintendo celebrated Sunday’s pseudo-holiday “Mar10” day with the announcement that it will release remakes of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD for the Switch on May 23 and June 27, respectively.
The company had previously dated those games for “2024” and “Summer 2024,” allowing for expectations that Nintendo could stretch the releases deep into the year. Instead it is packing the two Switch games into the first half of 2024, maintaining its standard game-a-month release cadence. Those games will follow the May 2 release of the recently-revealed Endless Ocean Luminous.
The Paper Mario and Luigi dates nearly exhaust both the announced and speculated line-up of games for the Switch this year, raising questions about what the game-maker has in store for the second half, when it tends to release most of its marquee games.
What could Nintendo have in store?
Hopes for a Switch successor in late 2024 have dimmed following reports from Bloomberg and VGC that it wouldn’t ship until March 2025 or later.
A major Pokémon release, a staple of nearly every November of the last decade, also seems unlikely for late 2024, following a showcase last month that revealed a major franchise sequel, Pokémon Legends: Z-A, but dated it for 2025.
Nintendo’s only other announced game for the Switch, Metroid Prime 4, was teased in 2017 and had its development rebooted by early 2019. Nintendo lists its release window as “TBA.”
The company is likely to show its hand by June, when it typically holds an online showcase laying out its games for the rest of the year.
In addition to games, Nintendo announced yesterday that a sequel to The Super Mario Bros. Movie will premiere on April 3, 2026.