So they decided not to release a completely unfinished product well that's commendable.
If I remember correctly Witcher 3 had a similar situation. It was at first scheduled to come out in like September, but they kept pushing it like two or three times and it eventually came out in May.
Their work environment is pretty chaotic since there is a lot of employee turn over. It's not surprising they couldn't meet the deadline.
This is the first I've heard of this. Any idea why their turnover is bad?
Around 2013 I was at a convention where polish game devs attended. Adrian Chmielarz was there, some other guys I don't remember and a dude from CDPR. They were still working on Witcher 3 at that time.
He basically tried to to dissuade or disillusion people about what work in CDPR looks like. For example he mentioned that compared to other companies CDPR has much higher standard when hiring employees. Meaning that for example in a western company concept artist and 3D model artist would be different positions but at CDPR when you create a concept work you also need to know how to implement in it as a 3D model. This also was true for other positions like level designer also needs to know how to code the level in himself etc.
So as he said, people work two times harder for half (or less) the pay. He also said that working hours are pretty long and you need to be basically immune to stress. Because working for 16 hours and sleeping in the office was not something out of the ordinary. This made people burnout really fast.
He also mentioned a "joke" that was going around at the time. That soon because of the turn over rates all programmers/artists in Poland will be able to say they worked on Witcher 3.
More recently I heard from a girl I know that worked as a concept artist in polish game dev scene, that CDPR became a resume goal. Everybody know how shitty working for them is, so people would get hired and quit as soon as they could add working at CDPR to their resume. Which only fuelled the turn over problem.