Cyberpunk 2077's engine lead says that some of the legendary launch bugs occurred because the alternative was worse: 'Either show a T pose, or you hard crash... We prefer not to hard crash.'

I'm confident in saying that Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite RPGs from the last decade. As soon as I completed the first playthrough, I picked it up again to complete the game using a Netrunner version.

Was it always like this? Cyberpunk had a historically bad launch four years ago. It was removed from the PlayStation Store after a wave of bug reports. Do you think Bethesda's games are messy from the start? Cyberpunk 2077 screamed onto digital distribution platforms in a thousand different pieces, and they were all on flames.

It could have been worse. Charles Tremblay, Cyberpunk lead engine programmer, explained just why back then the game was so infamously buggy. As you might expect, it was a combination of factors. First, the old spinning hard drives were not up to the streaming required by the game. But also? The developers prefer the first option.

Tremblay says Cyberpunk had memory leaks. Tremblay says that the game, in theory, could run forever, but at some point, we would encounter fragmentation or memory issues. Once you reach that point, which is not difficult with the 8GB RAM of the PS4/Xbox One consoles of the era, you run out of room to handle anything else. "Then you have to make a decision," says Tremblay. "Either you show the T-pose or you hard crash. What would you prefer? "We prefer not to have a hard crash."

I am also brave enough to admit I would rather not hard crash. T-posing can be funny or immersion-breaking, and sometimes both. Sacrificing progress for a crash feels like a defeat. No wonder the developers made the choices they chose: Letting the crash happen rather than smashing hard into the wall that there was no RAM left.

It's likely that other developers on other games make the same choice every time. This is not news to them. To laymen, however, this is a fascinating insight to the many weird trade-offs made in development. This is especially true for games with such a large and unwieldy size as Cyberpunk. It gets strange when you put that thing in the hands a lot of players. "You multiply all those conditions by one million, and then you get one weird bug. You're like 'Oh my God'." Or, you might have heard about the launch of Cyberpunk.