Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most ambitious games ever made, one that will only be surpassed in scale by the upcoming GTA 6 and its own sequel, Cyberpunk 2. As development continues on the sequel—which recently hired new writers—CD Projekt explains that its learned from the game’s chaotic development.
Speaking at the annual Digital Dragons conference, thanks RPS, senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek explained that the development of Cyberpunk 2077 was “chaos” due to poor documentation management that caused major headaches for the studio.
Fulneczek explained that Cyberpunk’s development was not the first instance of poor documentation hindering a project. As developers left between projects, documentation wasn’t kept safe, lorebooks were lost, and new employees struggled to connect with tools. “Nobody was thinking 20 years ahead back then,” he said, adding that, prior to The Witcher 3, “it was a tight-knit group, so the knowledge didn’t live in a database somewhere, it was passed around”.
On The Witcher 3, they explained that the team really struggled when it came to creating mod tools for players to use. “There was nothing on the engine in our documentation,” he said. “And also, [The Witcher 3 engine] is not the most intuitive of engines, right? It’s pretty old by now.”
“We’ve got some new requirements, especially a new definition of ‘done”
Cyberpunk 2077 senior technical writer Adrian Fulneczek
While The Witcher 3’s development suffered from the loss of shared knowledge, Cyberpunk 2077 was hit the most. Unlike the studio’s prior games, CD Projekt RED tried to create documentation on everything with ‘over 8,000 pages of documentation”, but everything became split, certain documents were left outdated, and it created even more confusion for those working on the game.
“Cyberpunk was a fresh start, but it came with new problems. It was a massive undertaking. The hopes and expectations surrounding it were enormous. Internally, we had our documentation tool, Confluence, we had a proof of concept of ‘living’ documentation, so we thought, we were ready,” he said. “But it turned out we weren’t, because Cyberpunk was the first project of this scale, this size that we documented, and it also took a very long time.”
Fulneczek explained that, as sprints to finish features and ship updates started, this process became even harder. As the team continued to work on fixing the game, certain files were stored on old servers and newer ones were stored on an external server. When working on the game’s sole DLC expansion, Phantom Liberty, this made development even more confusing, and developers were growing tired of the issues.
“It was chaos. We had two spaces, two instances,” he continued. “A situation like this, and we also have some studies to back this up, with fragmented documentation, it clearly can correlate to burnout. If you can, don’t divide between platforms and different tools. If you have to, link very clearly between them, but always aim to have this one source of truth.”
Fulneczek explained that CD Projekt RED and its new studio working on Cyberpunk 2 has “new requirements, especially a new definition of ‘done’” which aim to fix all of the issues that plagued the studio’s last two games. Documentation through this method may be more time intensive, or even more expensive, but it should lead to a smoother development with less annoyance, less burnout, and less lost knowledge.
Additionally, as The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 are developed hand-in-hand, that shared knowledge benefits everyone. “If a team working on The Witcher figures out a solution [to] a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, [and] take it into their own code,” added technical writer team lead Jarosław Ruciński.
It’s no secret that the development of Cyberpunk 2077 was a nightmare for CDPR. There’s been a significant gap between releases—not just for the team to work with Unreal Engine 5 instead of its “old engine”, but also to refine documentation after an extraordinarily tough development period. With these changes, development of both The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2 should be much, much smoother, and hopefully we’ll be able to see the fruits of that labour sometime in the future.
