Cyberpunk 2077 was closely criticised following its 2020 launch for holding quite a few bugs and glitches. However a brand new leak from a supposed whistleblower means that developer CD Projekt Purple is probably not totally guilty, because it was misled by third-party high quality assurance firm Quantic Labs.
In a video posted by Higher Echelon Avid gamers, and initially reported by Forbes, an nameless whistleblower – who contacted Higher Echelon immediately – shares a 72-page doc outlining how Quantic Labs, which has beforehand delivered QA companies on video games like Wreckfest, and CDPR’s personal The Witcher 3, made false claims concerning the seniority of the QA staff engaged on Cyberpunk 2077, and created a quota system which incentivised staff to deal with trivial relatively than vital bugs.
Higher Echelon claims to have acquired workflow charts, manufacturing maps, and spreadsheets documenting employee productiveness that had been all created inside Quantic Labs between 2019 — when it was first approached by CDPR to work on Cyberpunk — and 2020.
The whistleblower outlines how within the fourth monetary quarter of 2019, Quantic Labs initially met with CDPR which wished to make use of the corporate’s third-party QA companies following the work that it had accomplished on The Witcher 3. Based on the whistleblower’s report, CDPR believed that the Cyberpunk staff could be comprised of the identical QA-industry veterans that had labored on The Witcher, when in truth Quantic Labs assigned junior workers, some with lower than one 12 months of expertise, to supervise high quality assurance on the sci-fi RPG.
After being contracted, Quantic Labs allegedly created an in-house quota system to inspire QA testers, anticipating every tester to search out and report a minimum of ten bugs per day. Based on the whistleblower, this led testers to hunt out small visible and performance-issue issues, relatively than bigger bugs, as these had been simpler to determine and would extra shortly contribute to their every day whole. It’s claimed that CDPR finally grew to become overwhelmed with these small-scale glitches, and redirected Quantic Labs to deal with Cyberpunk’s bigger points.
In response, in the summertime of 2020, Quantic elevated the scale of its Cyberpunk QA staff from 30 to 60 testers. The vast majority of these new testers, nevertheless, had been allegedly new hires who both acquired two to 4 weeks of preliminary coaching, or had been in any other case educated whereas additionally actively engaged on the sport. The whistleblower claims that, because of its committment to Cyberpunk, Quantic Labs began to make false claims concerning the dimension of the QA groups it had assigned to its different tasks — with a view to guarantee and keep relationships with purchasers apart from CDPR, Quantic Lab would exaggerate the variety of testers that it had dedicated to their tasks.
We have now contacted each CD Projekt Purple and Quantic Labs for touch upon this story, and can present any updates as they arrive.
