In 2023, CD Projekt RED will launch Phantom Liberty, Cyberpunk 2077’s first and only expansion, which currently has team of over 350 people working on it. Immediately afterward, however, the Polish company will quickly move on to its sequel, with CD Projekt recently announced that the title, codenamed Project Orion, is on track to enter pre-production not long from now.
The sequel is set to be developed by CD Projekt RED North America, a new studio being established by the company in Boston- but how much of the original game’s development team will be involved with the new studio and the sequel?
As per CD Projekt RED’s Paweł Sasko, who is currently quest director on Cyberpunk 2077, the open world action RPG’s “core” development team will move to Boston to establish the aforementioned new studio and work on Project Orion. While work on the sequel will be led by the North America studio, CD Projekt RED Vancouver and the main studio in Warsaw will also provide support.
CD Projekt RED has said that the majority of its future releases will also feature multiplayer elements, so it should be interesting to see whether the Cyberpunk sequel incorporates that (especially seeing as the studio had originally planned on making a standalone Cyberpunk multiplayer game).
In addition to Cyberpunk, CD Projekt RED also has a new trilogy of The Witcher games in development, in addition to two major The Witcher spinoffs. One of these is being developed by The Molasses Flood, while the other, which will be an open world story-driven single player RPG, is being made by a third party studio, under CD Projekt RED’s supervision.
CD Projekt RED is also working on Project Hadar, the studio’s first ever new internal IP, which is also going to be an RPG.