Developer CD Projekt RED has announced that the team behind Project Orion, the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 announced for October 2022, has added a number of high-profile employees.

Project Orion is in early development under CD Projekt RED North America, based in the United States and Canada. The development is being led by studio veterans who were involved in the creation of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Ghost Freedom expansion.

As part of today’s announcements, the team is joined by:

• Dan Hernberg joins the team as executive producer. He previously served as Head of Production at Amazon Games, Head of Production and Product Management at Panic Button, and worked at Blizzard Entertainment as Lead Product Manager. He has made significant contributions to games such as New World, Apex Legends, and Diablo III.
• In the past, Ryan Barnard has held senior positions in the video game industry, including Game Director at Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft, and Director of Gameplay at Hitman game developer IO Interactive. He is currently embarking on a new role as Director of Design.
• Alan Villani joins the Project Orion team as CTO. He previously served as VP of Technology for various WB game products, including managing the technical aspects of several games in the Mortal Kombat series.
• Anna Megill is an award-winning author and screenwriter with more than 20 years of experience in the video game industry. She joins Project Orion as Lead Writer after successfully contributing to Control (Remedy), Dishonored: Death of The Outsider (Arkane Studios), Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (Massive Entertainment), Guild Wars 2 (ArenaNet), and the upcoming Fable (Playground Games).
• Alexander Fried will continue his work on the script for Project Orion. He previously held the position of Lead Scriptwriter at BioWare, where he worked on Star Wars: The Old Republic, among other things. He has also scripted and consulted for various major studios including DICE, Obsidian Entertainment and Wizards of the Coast.

Prior to this announcement it was known that the leading roles in the project team are occupied by the following persons: Gabriel Amatangelo (game director), Pawel Sasko (deputy game director), Igor Sarzinski (creative director), Andrzej Stop (cinematic director), Kasper Nepokolczycki (environment art director), Sarah Grummer (acting lead quest designer) and Kasper Kosciński (technical director).

By the end of the year, 80 people will be working on the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel

A sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 may still be in the concept stage, but CD Projekt expects to ramp up production later this year and is considering multiplayer options for the new game.

This was announced by co-CEOs Adam Badowski and Michal Nowakowski in a new interview with Reuters. Badowski said that the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, which is still codenamed “Orion,” is still in the “conceptual phase,” meaning it is not yet in active development.

However, Badowski said that CD Projekt plans to have 80 people working on the sequel by the end of 2024. This indicates that the developer expects the sequel to be out of pre-production by the end of the year.

Nowakowski added that the developer is “considering” multiplayer elements for the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, but did not go into details. This means that Orion could very well include the multiplayer side of Cyberpunk 2077, which was eventually abandoned in favor of a strictly single-player RPG.

Badowski ended by adding that he believes CD Projekt has “better control” over game production, and that the developer will “avoid a premiere like the one we faced with Cyberpunk 2077.”

Cyberpunk 2 may feature more branching storylines based on players’ backstory choices

Cyberpunk 2, codenamed Orion, may feature more branching storylines defined by the player’s starting life path, such as Nomad, Corporat and Street Child in Cyberpunk 2077.

Speaking on the Answered podcast, CD Projekt Red narrative director Philipp Weber said that the lack of backstory influence in most parts of Cyberpunk 2077 is something the studio wants to improve on in future games. While Weber is currently working on the next major Witcher game, codenamed Polaris, the Cyberpunk sequel is also in the conceptual stage of development.

I think, for example, the backstory gives you the promise that you can play more diverse characters. I think we’d like to improve on that as an example in the future. Since I think we made a promise that we may have ended up not fulfilling.

Cyberpunk 2077’s plot changes depending on the life path chosen, but within an hour, all three options merge into one main story. While there are various offshoots and choices, the impact of the life paths is subsequently limited to the occasional additional dialog.

The game starts with a very specific thing, you can be a nomad, a corpo, a street kid, but then it gets a little bit sidetracked sometimes. We move it all together. Then sometimes you can do that. As a quest designer, I think looking back, we can see the old theme, given more experience, given more time, I think maybe we would have made it less confusing than we made it there.

Polaris’ lead quest designer, Blazej Augustynek, who also worked on Cyberpunk 2077, says the starting backstories aren’t too important to the game’s main plot. “I think backstory is the life you leave V,” he said.

No matter what you’ve done before, there comes a point when it all falls apart, right? And you start a new life with Jackie. Of course, we wish it had more meaning, but I think as it’s happening now, it’s like you’ve come from a certain life. And that life is over. It’s in the past, and now you’re living a new life that ends, spoilers, in the prologue, and then you have to deal with the consequences of that.