The 2018 E3 Gameplay Demo of Cyberpunk 2077 “Was Entirely Fake”

Nightmares for Cyberpunk 2077 Continue as this time, Industry Insider and notable Journalist for Bloomberg – Jason Schreier confirms Cyberpunk 2077’s 2018 E3 Demo was “entirely fake.”

Writing a long news article on Bloomberg, Jason uncovered some hot information he accumulated from various CD Projekt workers. According to the report, CD Projekt was very focused on marketing and prioritised it above development costs. Besides, they were additionally stressed over the game’s outer popularity and had chosen to show a fake demo at E3 2018 to impress the fans and Journalists.

“Fans and journalists were wowed by Cyberpunk 2077’s ambition and scale. What they didn’t know was that the demo was almost entirely fake.”

“CD Projekt hadn’t yet finalised and coded the underlying gameplay systems, which is why so many features, such as car ambushes, were missing from the final product.”

There isn’t more context on how it was faked, but I reckon it must be a pre-rendered video running in the background and wasn’t user-controlled.

This decision to ultimately focus more on marketing had gotten developers frustrated. One of the developers told Bloomberg that they “felt like the demo was a waste of months that should have gone towards game creation.” This is also one of the more reasons why there were so much crunch problems at CD Projekt. The game wasn’t ready because of these lacklustre decisions that prioritised something useless over the actual game.

Although, we already knew that the final version of Cyberpunk 2077 lacked some features were previously promised. However, to find out that the entire gaming industry was misled through a fake demo is somewhat sad and unapologetic. The remainder of Jason’s report is additionally intriguing. He examines other serious issues as the conflict between Witcher 3 Developers and Adam Badowski’s vision’s, which resulted in numerous individuals leaving CD Projekt.

Further, the report also confirms that up until 2016 the game was designed in third person, but later a reboot happened that completely transformed it. Some employees also confirmed that the vision was to make something like GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2.

This once again comes down to our previous article, on how CD Projekt made several rash decisions for their benefit and was perfectly aware of the consequences. It would be interesting to see how many of these statements from the article will be used and reinitiated in further lawsuits that would ultimately bring down CD Projekt.