It's a new year, and the devs at CD Projekt Red are turning their eyes away from Cyberpunk 2077 to focus on its upcoming sequel from the studio's new Boston office. In a tweet, Cyberpunk narrative director Igor Sarzyński said that the team is ready to "officially kickstart our Orion [the codename for Cyberpunk's sequel] journey" in the wake of Cyberpunk the first's very successful Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 update.
And gosh, they sound confident. In the same tweet, Sarzyński declares that—after all its trials and travails—"2077 was just a warm-up" for whatever CDPR has in mind for its next Cyberpunk. That's both an eminently understandable thing for someone excited about their next project to say and a profoundly wince-inducing thing to say about Cyberpunk 2077 in particular.
First day in the Boston office! So good to meet old friends and officially kickstart our Orion journey. I couldn't be more excited for this project and i'm sure we can make it something special. 2077 was just a warm-up 🔥January 8, 2024
After all, to quote some of my colleagues at PCG, if Cyberpunk 2077 can be described as a "warm-up," it's the kind where you accidentally obliterate your own shinbone and have to spend three years in recovery. The game may be riding high on its 2023 redemption arc—and hey, I played it myself for the first time after 2.0 hit and loved every minute—but we can't really pretend the game's launch-out-of-nightmares and crunch didn't happen, or that it didn't subsequently require massive labour to fix.
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Nevertheless, I'm an optimistic sort, and I'm hoping that CDPR learnt the right lessons from Cyberpunk 2077, warm-up or not. My own excellent experience with the game in its current state has left me predisposed to be very excited about Orion, whatever it turns out to be, and I can't help but be intrigued by the news that the devs are now properly heads-down on the work at hand as we enter the new year. I just want to hang out some more with my best friend for life Johnny Silverhand, to be perfectly honest with you.
We will, of course, learn more about the various Cyberpunk and Witcher-related irons CDPR has in the fire as time goes on, and let's hope the teams working on them are given all the time they need to finish them this time round, especially after the layoffs CDPR endured last year. And if the company is going to put anything out early, at least have the forethought to take a leaf from my colleague Ted Litchfield's book and call it early access from the start. It doesn't matter how warmed up you are, it's better to walk before you run.
