Yesterday’s gameplay reveal of Cyberpunk 2077 took many by surprise and it also put a smile on the faces of many. The game, well let’s be honest, the footage looked great and if the actual product ends up looking like this it will be one hell of a technical marvel. As we wait for a release date, which won’t be coming out anytime soon, the developers in CD Projekt Red have decided to do something unexpected; apologise.

A Reddit user spotted this during the final frame of the demo and later translated it for the world to see. It’s a heartfelt message that explains why the developers didn’t show it off during E3, instead choosing to show another trailer. The developers revealed that they didn’t think the game was ready and let professionals see it first behind the curtain. Once it was approved, they began to make plans for a worldwide release of the gameplay trailer.

Here's the apology in full:

Sorry to have kept you waiting for this for so long! Did you like what you saw? Because for us, the fact that we’re finally showing you Cyberpunk 2077 is HUGE. Please go to our forums, twitter, facebook, discord, and do tell what you think. Is the game world how you imagined? Do you see what we meant by “immersion” when we talked about CP2077 being an FPP RPG? How does our vision of “cyberpunk by day” make you feel? We really want to know. Aside from that, we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we’re showing you this gameplay now, some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and gamescom. Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this “we’re not 100% sure” limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gameplay footage from their game, it means that this is how the game is going to look or play like. It’s not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development. We have a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics being playtested, but we don’t know what we’ll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you just saw risky –we don’t want gamers saying ‘but in that previous video that gun was shooting differently’, or ‘why did you change the interface?’. Change is inherent to game development and there’s a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you’ll think what you just saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like 1:1. What gave us that extra confidence to show you a work in progress game? Good initial feedback from people who are accustomed to see games at various stages of development. What they told us (and they told us they really liked what they saw) gave us the boost we needed to show the current version of Cyberpunk 2077 to the most passionate and insightful audience –you. So… here’s what Cyberpunk 2077 looks like today (or rather looked like when we recorded the video). We sincerely hope you liked it. Again, thank you for your patience and all the thoughts you shared with us. Yours, CD PROJEKT RED

Much like the gameplay trailer, it’s a long apology but one that fans are willing to accept. They did not have to go out of their way to do this but chose to do so anyway. Good on them.

Cyberpunk 2077 does not have a release date but is expected to come out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

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