Eight. Years.
Why not just ship the dev tools
with the gayms like Todd Howard does?
It's highly unlikely they spent the last 8 years making this game
Considering how game dev works and reading from the
wikipedia article, what probably went around their offices was something like this:
-it's mid 2012, Witcher 2 EE has been released and Witcher 3 entered production almost a year ago (dialogue was already being recorded by this time)
-so CDPR higher ups started thinking about their next big project after W3
-the previous year Deus Ex HR had come out with a good amount of success and also maybe some of the higher ups were fans of the Cyberpunk PnP system, so the choice was made to make a Cyberpunk open-world rpg
-so they get into talks with Pondsmith, a deal is made and so in their excitement they cook up a teaser trailer and upload it in early 2013 to hype both the consumers and investors
-in the next 2 years however CDPR is pretty much just focused on getting Witcher 3 out, with perhaps only a handful of devs talking with Pondsmith and coming up with ideas
-2015, W3 is out so they can now properly start working on CP77, but there's still alot of updates, DLC's and 2 Expansions planned for the next year so they relinquish only a small part of the staff to work on CP (50 acording to wikipedia)
-Blood & Wine releases, so finally all hands on deck can work on CP77
-But oh no, not yet, to achive the scope they want their engine must be upgraded, and as such at least a year was spent making RED Engine 3 wich acording to the wikipedia meant alot of parterships (and 3rd party software crammed in)
-in the meantime the concept artists start designing the assets and the city (apparentely they even hired urban engineers to help them with the latter), and script writers plan the campgain
-so it's like mid 2017 and only now they're making the game proper
-for the next year they cobble up enough stuff together to make a gameplay demo for 2018's E3
-around which time they approach Keanu to play Johnny Silverhand (so only by then was the script in a somewhat finished state)
So all and all this is like what?
2 and half years of actual development?
No wonder a project of this size would fuck up...