With Cyberpunk 2077 receiving its last major update and the Phantom Liberty expansion, the development team at CD Projekt is focusing on its sequel, Project Orion. There is no release window, and it’s currently in the “conceptual design” stage, and is being developed on Unreal Engine 5.
In a new interview with The Neon Arcade (transcription via Rock Paper Shotgun), lead quest designer Pawel Sasko shared his thoughts on working with the engine. He noted that the team have been working on it “for quite some time already.”
“There’s a lot of work to be done with the toolset specifically, and so on because there are so many, I would say, specific things that our RED engine was tailored for,” he said. “So, of course, we need to make sure that all of that is built properly so that we can do the games exactly the way we want to. And you know, the work is ongoing here.”
While he didn’t provide explicit details, Sasko said, “the advantages of Unreal are probably quite apparent.”
As for working with Epic Games, who owns Unreal Engine, Sasko said it’s challenging but also an opportunity to “do something awesome.” “Working together with Epic is a completely new thing for us, it’s a challenge for one thing, but also an honor. It’s a huge studio – they have an incredible amount of engineers, very seasoned engineers. So it’s something that we can also learn from.”
“I don’t understand the challenge as a difficulty, but more as an opportunity – I see so much space to actually do something awesome, so I’m looking forward to that, but there’s a lot of work to be done on that front.”
Stay tuned for more details and updates on Project Orion, though it will be a while. In the meantime, Cyberpunk 2077 is available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC, though Update 2.0 and Phantom Liberty are exclusive to current-gen platforms. Check out our review for the latter, which sold three million copies in its first week.
