Cyberpunk 2077 has been reborn with the release of Phantom Liberty. With the expansion now out, CD Projekt Red is turning its attention to a sequel.
The studio held an investor presentation last Thursday and gave updates about the sequel. CDPR’s chief creative officer, Adam Badowski, briefly discussed the status of the sequel, known internally as Project Orion, and the company’s plans for Cyberpunk over the next year. Badowski confirmed during the presentation that Project Orion is now in early development.
“This project is on a conceptual design level right now, and it’s going to be designed by a team of veterans who were responsible for fine-tuning Cyberpunk 2077 and designing Phantom Liberty,” Badowski said.
He adds, “We’re going to work out of North America, Vancouver, and Boston locations, team leadership are already there. And late in 2024, we’re going to work with teams comprising several dozen people, while as a target, half of the developers are going to work out of northern US and the other half out of Poland.”
The development of the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel will reportedly be handled by a new US-based studio called CD Projekt Red North America. Core members of the Cyberpunk 2077 team, including quest director Pawel Sasko, will be leading the new studio and the development of Project Orion.
During the investor presentation, CD Projekt Red CEO Adam Kiciński announced that Cyberpunk 2077 has sold over 25 million units since December 2020, selling selling at a “far faster” pace than The Witcher 3.
“The phenomenal Witcher 3 achieved a similar level in 4.5 years and here [in Cyberpunk’s case], a little bit over two years [since its release], so we are selling far faster than we were selling the Witcher game,” Kiciński stated.
To add to the phenomenal sales numbers of the base game, Cyberpunk: 2077 Phantom Liberty, which was released on September 26, reportedly had over 3 million in sales over the last two weeks. “Sales for the first week until October 3 were three million copies,” he shared with investors. It is quite a feat considering that the only paid expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 is available only on PC and current generation consoles.
The upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 sequel will be using the Unreal Engine 5 as its game engine. The studio struck a deal with Epic Games to use the game engine for its upcoming titles including the next installment of The Witcher series and Project Hadar.
