Pawel Sasko of CDPR, associate director of Cyberpunk's next game (codenamed "Orion," but we'll call it Cyberpunk 2 for now), in a new interview with Aftermath, discusses the infamous Cyberpunk 2077 He discussed the production changes the studio has made since the failed launch. The tight situation just prior to launch was so intense that several key team members left CDPR shortly after launch, and the then-CEO had to apologize to employees after stating that the situation "wasn't that bad."

Sasko talked about the internal changes CDPR made after this experience and then briefly discussed the studio's two major future projects; according to Sasko, Polaris, aka Witcher 4, is currently "being worked on intensively" and the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel is "in very early stages."

CDPR first announced the project, called Polaris, in October 2022; in March 2023, then-CEO Adam Kicinski revealed this during an earnings call. At the time, Kicinski stated that he wanted to release three major Witcher games within six years, "starting with the release of Polaris, the Witcher 4."

At the beginning of 2024, Adam Budowski, co-CEO of CDPR, said that production was ramping up and that "we want to have about 400 people working on [Polaris] by the middle of this year." This is a big team, but thanks to the 2023 quarterly results, we already knew that CDPR was working on this project last year with about 300 people.

Cyberpunk 2 is being developed at three studios (Boston, Poland, and Vancouver), and "most of the managers and directors who worked on Cyberpunk and Phantom Liberty are working on Cyberpunk 2."

"We want to make sure that its entire DNA is preserved and remains in the game.

Sasco also spoke briefly about CDPR's decision to move on from Cyberpunk 2077 after the well-received Phantom Liberty, which was not universally well received. You can see both sides of the story here. Phantom Liberty marks the end of the game's Redemption Arc, and it is certainly as good an endpoint as "Cyberpunk 2077" could have hoped for. On the other hand, players had to wait a while for the game to reach this level of polished quality, and they also had to accept the complete cancellation of things like the multiplayer elements.

"If you look at our previous expansions, we have The Witcher 3, Hearts of Stone, which shipped six months after release, and Blood and Wine, which shipped a year after release. Phantom Liberty shipped almost three years after release," We're working on another expansion," Sasco said. Working on another expansion would mean another years in production, wouldn't it?"

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The developer points out that while it may have only been about three years since "Phantom Liberty" was released, many of the staff working on the game had been working on "Cyberpunk 2077" for "four and a half or five years" before that. Sasco said, "I like the fact that we got to work on another game," he said. Even in patch 2.1, we tried to give players what they wanted, like the subway system and hangouts." But there is a moment when you know that the story has been told and it's time to tell another story."

CDPR certainly has enough new projects in the works. Polaris is a new trilogy of games, as well as The Witcher 4, which Adam Kicinski of 2022 describes as "the second installment of The Witcher Saga." Alongside this are two Witcher stand-alone projects, "Project Sirius" and "Project Canis Majoris," plus "Cyberpunk 2," and as if this were not enough, both the new Witcher and Cyberpunk will have multi will have a player component. Then there is Hadar, which CDPR has not said much about or talked about for years. This all sounds pretty exhausting, but consider the developers.