Cyberpunk 2077 Lead States "Sustainability is incredibly important" To Keep Studios Alive

CD Projekt Red is one of the renowned game studios that developed beloved titles like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. While talking in an interview with Aftermath, Pawel Sasko, quest director on Phantom Liberty, shares his insight on sustainably structuring the studio, which helped them to reach the glory. Sasko is currently the associate director of the next Cyberpunk 2077 sequel.

While CD Projekt Red had a dream run with The Witcher 3, the traumatic launch of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2022 shattered the studio internally. Sakso talks about how the blunder during the launch created internal havoc at CDPR, resulting in multiple resignations. CDPR was quick to recover, and with the new structural pods, the studio reached new heights.

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“CDPR Switched From Old-Fashioned Production Structure To An Agile Approach,” Says Cyberpunk 2077 Lead Pawel Sasko

In his interview with Aftermath, Sasko talked about how CDPR became a sustainable studio and got rid of crunch and overburdened employees. Sasko shared the philosophy behind releasing successful expansions without burdening the employees. He said (via Aftermath):

Sustainability is incredibly important. To be able to, when you are finishing up a project, have a team in a state where they haven't been doing crunch or overtime or anything, that they are able to go into the production of the next thing, which means delivering something earlier, which means having a product you can sell as a studio, which means having the money to sustain. That requires your production to be structured in a way where it does not require those spikes, those moments when suddenly there's an all-hands-on-deck approach.

Sasko and CDPR were able to achieve sustainability and bring new life to the studio by creating content teams or pods, with almost 22 different specialists working together with creative freedom. Sasko shared the recipe for CDPR’s agile approach to Aftermath.

We created the content teams – or pods, as the industry often calls them – and you had a quest designer, cinematic designer, open-world designer, writer, QA, environment artists, VFX artists, and SFX artists [working as a single team on a single piece of content]. It was, like, 22 different specialties in one pod, and they were working on, let's say, shipping the first quest in the expansion. That was their thing. They were doing it together. And then when we were reviewing that content as directors, we were always looking at it together, as a team.

Sasko beautifully explained the team’s mindset with the example of the development of the “Somewhat Damaged” quest in the Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty expansion. Sasko said:

You were hidden in a bunker, and there's the Cerberus chasing you. It's a horror quest. When I was working on it with my designers – at the time I had open-world quest and cinematic design teams – I kept coming back to this. 'What is the genre? What is the theme? What are we building? We're building horror.' And I kept bringing up this comparison: Imagine you are in a maze with a minotaur chasing you. That is basically the quest we're building. If you come with any other ideas that do not fit that, we are not doing it. Please stick to this. You cannot imagine how many times I said it to them. But it helped. At some point, they were making better and better decisions, and I had to course correct less and less.