A new interview on Eurogamer.net hears from CD PROJEKT RED designer Philipp Weber about the fate of multiplayer support for Cyberpunk 2077. Back in 2013(!) it was announced that the sci-fi RPG would include multiplayer, which later morphed into a plan to release an entire separate multiplayer Cyberpunk 2077 game. Then in 2019 it was announced that multiplayer support would be added in a post-release update. In 2020 it was announced this would come sometime after 2021. A roadmap published in January 2021 worryingly had no mention of multiplayer support. A couple months later came word that the company was "reconsidering" this altogether. "Previously we hinted that our next AAA would be a multiplayer Cyberpunk game, but we have decided to reconsider this plan," Joint CEO Adam Kiciński explains. "Given our new, more systematic, and agile approach, instead of primarily focusing on one big online experience, or game, we are focusing on bringing online into all of our franchises one day." This brings us to this new interview, which confirms that the multiplayer plan is dead, and that the game's rocky launch was indeed to blame:

"We really needed to look at what were the priorities for Cyberpunk [after it launched]," Philipp Weber told me when I visited the studio last week. Weber was senior quest designer and coordinator on Cyberpunk 2077. Today, he's acting narrative director of the new Witcher game codenamed Polaris.

"The priority was that the main experience will run for the people in a really good state," he said. "And essentially, the switch of priorities meant that other R&D projects had to go away. With Cyberpunk, we wanted to do many things at the same time, and we just needed to really focus and say, 'Okay, what's the important part? Yeah, we will make that part really good.'"