Smash Bros. Designer Shares His Thoughts On Cyberpunk 2077 Issues

Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai has chimed in regarding Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles and the ensuing fallout, sympathizing with the studio and especially complimenting CD Projekt Red for its console refund policy.

The essay from the Japanese magazine Famitsu (via Siliconera) quotes Sakurai as saying he supports the game "from the bottom of [his] heart" for how it dealt with refunds "sincerely." He also detailed his own experience with the game, encountering bugs on PC but finding it mostly smooth on a PS4 Pro. He also called it a "dream game" and said that it's "wonderful."

In this essay, he also mentioned the struggles he ran into in the final phase of designing the puzzle game Meteos. Sakurai has written guest columns for Famitsu before on industry events and trends, such as his impressions of the PlayStation 5.

The launch of Cyberpunk has run into significant backlash, with poor performance on consoles that forced CDPR to acknowledge the problem and offer refunds. But those refunds didn't appear to be discussed with platform-holders beforehand, leading to some confusion. Sony later pulled the game from the PlayStation Store. CDPR is also facing class-action lawsuits over the game performance.

Despite all that, the game enjoyed high launch sales and appeared on the Steam 2020 top-sellers chart. (Its player base on Steam did drop off precipitously, however.) Most recently, studio founder Marcin Iwinski issued a statement about what happened and issued an updates roadmap. That includes upgrades for the PS5 and Xbox Series X planned for later this year. The multiplayer companion game is still said to be coming, but we're not sure when. Dataminers recently found evidence that it could include heists.