Cyberpunk's QA team

Let Quantic Labs take the stand

Cyberpunk, the disgrace of a generation, proof that most which glitters is really just dolled-up woe and faeces speckled with incense and false promises. Oh, and since I'm talking CDPR again, let me take this opportunity to make my regular reminder that Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be the "next generation of open world game", that is verbatim. No amount of bug fixing is going to make that game fulfil that promise. Like the game the team delivered all you want, it seems to be a decently solid beast that does the Ubisoft formula better than that company ever has; but you can't deny it's nothing compared to what it was promised to be. I was sold on that dream, I bought that dream, which is why I will never be able to reconcile with the product that CDPR delivered. And I will left forever asking 'Why', why did we get wrapped in a web of lies and deceit from such a beloved developer as them? And everytime a little bit of that puzzle becomes clearer, it's as though another piece slots into place of the jagged hole in my heart that company left with their betrayal. Never underestimate the power of real closure.

If there's something we're never going to hear, it's the full story. Not from CDPR, and certainly not from infrequent exposé leaks that flitters out of the woodworks once every blue moon. But every slipped story, every nugget of reality, each pilfered detail is a salve on the still sore wounds left on the fanbase. Which is why I was grateful to hear just another small part of the story behind Cyberpunk 2077's development when Youtube commentator 'Upper Echelon Gamers' conveyed  his own findings regarding the failings of an outsourced Quality Assurance team that worked on some parts of Cyberpunk. How much of the QA process they actually covered has been called into question by CDPR devs who have taken to social media to get defensive about this for some reason, but what is undeniable is that this outside team was involved and their... let's say 'off kilter' manner of handling their business might very well have contributed some small part to the grand soliloquy of Cyberpunk's failure. 

The company in the spotlight here is Quantic Labs, and not 'Undead labs' the creators of State of Decay, like my knee jerk reaction assumed when first hearing of this news. (I almost jumped out my seat when for a second when I first heard that name.) You'll not have heard of them, and that is completely alright because they are a team of perspective developers who couldn't make that model work for them and so fell into doing QA work for other projects in order to remain solvent. That might be a slightly disparaging way of phrasing it, however, so I'm going to throw the phrases 'allegedly' and 'probably not really' around just to add some spice to the dish around here; I'm sure you understand. (Not that such precautions would mean anything for another faceless nobody on the Internet like me. I'm practically an undead ghost.)

As UEG tells it, Quantic had some questionable business practises with some of it's other projects including, and this is directly refuted (without evidence for or against) by the company themselves so consume the requisite salt, the act of lying about the number of developers it was assigning to certain projects in order to keep contracts. Which would be some form of fraud, if true; so I don't blame Quantic for slapping back at that hard. Cyberpunk 2077 would be the biggest project that they worked on, however, so they pulled none of that sleight-of-hand stuff for a QA job like that. Instead it was all-hands-to-the-deck at Quantic as they scrambled to ensure they could keep ahold of a huge resume boost like working on what was shaping up to be the biggest game release of all time back when we still had hope in the game's industry. (What a grand and intoxicating innocence.)

Instead the slightly scuffed (alleged) nature of Quantic rubbed off on Cyberpunks QA in other ways, such as tying their commission based reward system into the work of bug reporting. Now I've worked in a commission-based environment before so let me tell you how asinine of a choice it is to arrange your business in such a fashion. That only works in the type of job where a competitive nature is a requisite and unpleasant sycophants are built to excel; during a team-process like assisted development, it's a pure hinderance. Point-in-case, for this instance it led to a daily bug bounty being (reportedly) implemented by Quantic in order to encourage a certain amount of bugs to be reported each day in order to hit sales targets and, I presume, make a bonus. Literally like a sales floor. And I've been on one of those, I know how demoralising of a position that is.

Predictably this setup fed into a slew of low-level bug reports, symptoms rather than the disease, which CDPR became so inundated with that they had to request themselves that such bugs are no longer sent their way. Of course this is just the tip of such an iceberg and the rot of a company that (as told by UEG) runs in this manner runs deeper than is easily quantified by a few internal leakers and probably portends a studio in a dark pit of it's own operating. But perhaps it goes some way to explain why it is that CDPR believed their game to be more stable than it was, given how they were testing their product on elitist best-of-the-best tech and had expected QA teams like this one to do that testing on a more 'everyman' level to bridge that tech-wealth gap. Only some way, though. It's hard to imagine they had no idea how egregiously false their fart-sniffing claims of being 'the next evolution of open world gaming' were. Nor how utterly abysmal the last gen ports were. ("What, do you guys not own Xbox One's?")

What this report speaks to in my eyes is a wider culture of contract work and how completely unregulated some of these ventures are, allowing them to become something so weird and (apparently) toxic that they create tail-eating systems like the one described here. This company screams 'high turn over rate' and much to the tune of the sales floor I worked on, it seems that senior staff were constantly being replaced with under-trained junior staff when they couldn't, or wouldn't, put up with the grind cycle. It's a self defeating pattern which leads more time than not, to a company folding in on itself. How many other small game related support studios out there are similarly built? We know Activision worked with one during the development of one of their disasters, it's probably safe to say a lot of these companies have skeleton strewn closets we never hear about because their games launch fine.

CDPR have inserted themselves in this tale out of some misguided ploy to 'exonerate' themselves by downplaying Quantic Labs involvement, but the actual issue here is the rampant mismanagement and the tangible consequences it caused. Stress, resentment, turnover and, after all that work, a disappointing game to show for it. Interestingly this does mean that the various failures which ripped apart the 2077 dream stretched to outside entities too, almost implying that this was simply a doomed venture that corrupted the sensibilities of all who touched it. But such fancies are dismissive of the very real egos at fault here. The egos that ran Quantic Labs with (allegedly) a failure pattern not entirely dissimilar to the model of a Ponzi-scheme, the egos that fiddled with the vision of this ambitious game often enough to waste months of active development, and the egos that decided to lie to the public about the state and professionalism of what they had created. Until the next layer of this onion is peeled, let us reflect on what other possible ways the once exciting Cyberpunk ended up a victim of ego.