Don't think for a second that employees 'are not afraid to convey such bad news'. Between the massive years-long hype, delays and bad press about crunch time around the title, not to mention being the most lucrative time of year for a game release, it's very likely that management egos were fully engaged in this release. When that happens reality is no longer driving, or even on, the bus. There may have been one or two brave souls who spoke up and when no good came as a result of speaking up (at best they were disregarded, at worst it was a career limiting move), everyone else tends to fall in line. So when management holds their various last minute go/no go meetings, people tend to nod their heads in agreement recognizing the futility of trying to point out the obvious.
I heard an interesting take: that CDPR knew that this would happen, but had to choose between "missing the holidays" and "launching even though it's broken" and decided the latter was just less of a problem.
Launching broken isn’t an unexpected thing for this type of game. Everyone is used to falling-apart-at-the-seams Bethesda games, constant patches, even full-on crashes are now apparently acceptable on a console. I saw some people saying “I bought it, but I’ll wait a few months to play until they’ve patched it,” and they think that’s fine. I totally understand why CDPR made that choice. A console game being broken on release is no longer a disaster.
Maybe. It's also quite possible that they felt so much pressure that they believed what they needed to believe rather than the reality.
IMO they should have just delayed the last-gen consoles. Would have sucked, but that would have avoided most of the backlash for another delay as well as that for the buggy console release.
They announced the game in a Microsoft E3 presentation and were supposed to be a launch title on the new consoles. That probably comes with contractual obligations, like the requirement to release on PS, XBox and PC at the same time, with materially the same game (plus/minus graphics).
It's not like the PC version was ready. It has issues that can not be fixed in another 6 months of development. But as bad as the PC version is, it's at least somewhat playable in contrast to the console version.
I've watched a few streams; while there are bugs, they are more of the variety found at Skyrim's or Witcher 3's launch. Annoying, frustrating maybe, but not to the point of making the game unplayable as it stands on PS4. The severe performance issues appear to be solved by just flipping a setting or two.
I believe tsss is referring to things such as terrible AI on PC, and other complaints about the game such as a lack of interactability with the world outside of quests. Not bugs necessarily (although the AI certainly is in a grey area) but issues with the game, certainly. Whether they'll be fixed remains to be seen
It could be like a Bethesda game where there’s more bugs than actual game content, it’s never fixed, but nobody actually cares because everyone plays with a hundred mods.
Witcher 3 was very buggy on launch, the bugs were fixed over time and it runs flawlessly nowadays.
Skyrim still has plenty of content-related bugs (i.e. not graphical or performance related); Bethesda never fixed them but oddly enough, modders did and you can download a bugfix mod from Nexus or Steam.
Not just game companies where this happens - I've worked at more than a few places in normal software development where management ego rather than cold hard reality drives the bus and yeah, speaking up is definitely a career limiting move.
