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The past few days, Cyberpunk 2077 has been trending online, and not because of the new 1.31 patch that arrived this week. Rather, it’s because amidst a flurry of announced and rumored delays of game releases this fall, the phrase that kept being repeated was “they don’t want to be another Cyberpunk 2077.”

Games like Dying Light 2 and Horizon Forbidden West have been delayed until Q1 2022, while Battlefield 2042 got a Cyberpunk-like delay keeping it within the 2021 holiday window. And with all this talk, I wanted to explore a question.

Would another full year’s delay have saved Cyberpunk 2077?

First, I suppose there’s the definition of what “saving” means. Cyberpunk 2077, even releasing in the state it did last December, sold 13 million copies that month alone, a massive haul. While we haven’t gotten any numbers since, we are likely creeping toward 20 million copies sold at this point.

Rather, the “saving” would be more in terms of how the game is viewed, and CDPR’s reputation along with it. But if the game was delayed a year, what would have changed?

Fundamentally, it still feels like the game was simply never meant to be released for last-gen consoles. There have been a year’s worth of fixes and while the game may function on base PS4s and Xbox Ones now, it certainly doesn’t run well there. However, I highly doubt we would have seen the entire “the game is removed from the PlayStation store” debacle that took up most of the past year, which was completely unprecedented and remains one of the wildest gaming stories in recent memory.

In terms of what else has been changed, pretty much the entire year has been about performance issues and bug fixes. There have been thousands and thousands of bug fixes with each patch, and yet more always remain. As recently as last month, we had a livestream with CDPR showing off an upcoming patch with T-posing happening in real-time. So you’d never fix them all. And yet, thousands of players running into thousands fewer progression blockers would have been a good thing. I was, however, able to beat Cyberpunk twice on two platforms without anything truly “breaking” the game unpassably, so the true severity of the bugs may be a bit overstated, as meme-worthy as many were.

What wouldn’t have changed at all, most likely? Any actual core content in the game, which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you view what Cyberpunk offered at launch. On one side, you have a host of unrealized promises and missing features, and things like “lifepaths” meaningfully influencing the story simply did not play out the way CDPR pitched. On the other, I think you can make the case that Cyberpunk does have a pretty solid core story and fascinating universe, and has created some newly iconic characters between Panam, Judy and V herself. There is a lot to like in the core game, despite what it’s clearly missing.

The ultimate point is…another year certainly would not have hurt the game, and is in fact, probably the bare minimum of what should have been required to release it. If it sold 13 million copies in December 2020, I have to believe it still would have sold 13 million copies in December 2021, and it would have done so without the ensuing scandals of removal from the PlayStation store, barely functional last-gen versions and so on. CDPR may have also been able to hold onto the 55% of its stock price it lost the past year, even though this entire rushed release was meant to please investors and executives in the first place.

But now, all they can do is move forward, and we’ll see where the game ends up in the annals of video game history, redemption story or eternal cautionary tale.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series, and The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.