To me, the disaster that is Cyberpunk 2077 is a fallout of the 2015 high of the Polish video game industry and e-sports, which unlike the early 2000's high of Adam Małysz earning gold medals in world championships in skiing and Mariusz Pudzianowski gaining the title of "World's Strongest Man", has also managed to seep into the consciousness of the worldwide audience.
You see, Poland is this funny nation that after many decades of being a satellite state of the USSR has reactivated a deeply seated inferiority complex and clings onto any success it achieves that gains it a worldwide recognition. And in 2015 you had Witcher 3 coming out with high praise all over the world, and also the Russian e-sports team, which at the time had a fully Polish CS:GO roster, being on top of the game.
So the high of Poland being this amazing hotspot of great games and great gamers was really strong. So strong in fact, that most of the world believed it. So Cyberpunk 2077 had an insane amount of hype. A gameplay trailer was a massive event, and everyone was just hoping that it will be the greatest game ever made, that it will be the messiah of the gaming industry.
However the reality of it was that CD Projekt is essentially what one would call a "Januszex", which is a slang term for companies in modern day Poland ran by bosses that have no sense of how a company should be ran because through decades of communism the concept of capitalism was a novel one, and communism has taught everyone that if they don't overwork themselves to death they aren't working at all, which creates this very unique work culture that still exists to this very day.
Hell, the co-founder of the company used to sell pirated games before starting a legitimate game distribution business which gave them the foothold to also start producing video games if we're going to mention this cognitive dissonance arising from an abrupt transformation from communism to capitalism.
Combine it with the general lack of idea how to manage a company and you're in for a disaster. Add the fact that CDPR is publicly traded and has shareholders from all over the world and you're in for a really, really big disaster.
So fast forward a few years from that golden year of 2015, it turns out that the entire project got fumbled completely. Everyone who worked on Witcher 3 was gone from the company, including people who worked on their in-house engine, so everyone working of CP2077 were completely new, and the upper management got lightheaded over how much attention their game was getting.
They've struck a deal with Keanu Reeves, and told the entire team to redo the game to insert Johnny Silverhand because of that, essentially throwing out a perfectly ready game that was presented on the gameplay trailer, and due to it happening really close to the release date, with the amount of work needed to redo basically the entire game because of this one decision, a metric fuckton of bugs arose from the process.
CDPR went into heavy crunch time, the release date got postponed a few times, and the end product was nothing like what people were expecting. The hype train derailed so hard it caused an earthquake, people were absolutely furious over the state of the game, and lawsuits ensued. But by the divine powers that somehow still keep this shitheap of a country together, CDPR also got their ticket to getting out of this disaster mostly scot-free.
People forgot about all the content that was promised, that was shown in the gameplay trailer, and failed to notice just how badly the end product, despite all the bugs, deviates from what was promised and shown. At a certain point in the story you see a cutscene, after which all the different outcomes related to your character build ceased to matter, but by this point people don't care, because they've forgot that it was meant to look completely different, because the year is 2020, and gamers are susceptible to such manipulations as much as the entirety of Poland is susceptible to forgetting about the most recent political scandal, only to focus on the next one.
Even now, with the release of the new DLC and the 2.0 patch, the game is still a completely different product than advertised and it still has a whole bunch of bugs, but by this point people got used to the current state of the game, which is nothing like CDPR promised for years, and they are ready to still defend CDPR over it, failing to realize they're as scummy as every other AAA company in the industry, and that they're not the messiah that everyone made them to be.
If you think what was happening in this thread is ridiculous, it's even more ridiculous when you see people in the Polish web sphere still clinging on that sliver of hope, that CDPR is still a great company. They will twist into a pretzel to not admit that they were lied to, and that Poland's video game companies are as scummy as the ones in the West. Anything, everything only to still believe in that rosy view of affairs from 2015.
By the way, I've mentioned Virtus Pro as the other main factor of the hype train back from 2015. Anyone remembers Pasha Biceps? Snax? Pasha London School? Yes my friend? Yeah exactly, it was lightning in a bottle as much as Witcher 3 was. But CDPR has been holding onto that bottled lightning for far too long for their own good, and people also believed that this phenomenon wasn't temporary. And clearly some people still want to believe in it.
