With the New Year upon us, CD Projekt Red developers are trying to turn their attention away from "Cyberpunk 2077" in their new Boston office and focus on the upcoming sequel, Cyberpunk narrative director Igor Sarzyński said in a tweet, Following the huge success of Cyberpunk the first's Phantom Liberty expansion and 2.0 update, the team is ready to "officially begin the journey of Orion (the codename for Cyberpunk's sequel)."

And they seem confident. In the same tweet, Szajinski declared that "2077 is just a warm-up" for what CDPR envisions as the next cyberpunk after trials and tribulations. This is a very understandable statement from someone who is excited about the next project, and at the same time, it is a particularly tantalizing statement to say about "Cyberpunk 2077."

After all, to describe Cyberpunk 2077 as a "warm-up," in the words of my PCG colleagues, is like accidentally erasing your shin bone and having to spend three years recovering. The game may be thriving in its 2023 redemption arc, and I myself loved every minute of playing it for the first time after 2.0 hit, but you can't pretend that the game wasn't a nightmare and a crack-up at launch and didn't require a huge amount of work to fix afterwards. I can't.

That said, I'm an optimistic kind of guy, so warm-up or not, I'm hopeful that CDPR has learned the right lessons from "Cyberpunk 2077". And as we enter the New Year, I can't help but be intrigued by the news that the development team is properly engaged in the task at hand. Frankly, I'd like to spend a little more time with my lifelong best friend, Johnny Silverhand.

Of course, in time we will learn more about the various cyberpunk and Witcher-related weapons CDPR has in its arsenal, especially after CDPR endured layoffs last year, and the team working on them will be given all the time they need to complete them this time around Let's hope they do. And if the company is going to announce something early, at least have the forethought to take a page from my colleague Ted Litchfield's book and call it Early Access from the start. No matter how warmed up you are, it's better to walk before you run.