Good news on a Wednesday! Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel has officially entered the pre-production stage of development, CD Projekt has confirmed. The game also looks to have ditched its codename, Project Orion, instead now being referred to exclusively as Cyberpunk 2.
This news was announced as part of the studio’s latest financial results presentation, with the Cyberpunk sequel team being congratulated for hitting this milestone as CD Projekt prepares to release the first game in the series on Nintendo Switch 2.
“Several weeks ago the CD Projekt Red team responsible for the next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe completed the project’s conceptual phase,” CD Projekt wrote in a release about these results, “As a result, Cyberpunk 2 – previously known under the codename Project Orion – has progressed to preproduction.”
Checking out the full presentation, we can see that as of April 30 this year, the number of devs at CDPR working on Cyberpunk 2 is now at 96, up from 84 as of February this year. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 422 listed as working on the closer-to-completion Witcher 4 as of that April date, but it’s still the studio’s second biggest-staffed ongoing project. That’s putting aside the 131 devs in the “shared services” sector that handles general stuff like localisation and quality assurance across multiple games.
This reveal comes alongside the news that the Phantom Liberty expansion’s now shifted 10 million copies, while The Witcher 3‘s landed at 60 million copies sold as it’s celebrated its 10th birthday. That’s a lot of visitors to Dogtown and grumpy lad monster hunting.
It’ll be interesting to see if CD Projekt sticks with the Cyberpunk 2 moniker or eventually opts to shift to something with a year in it to more closely mirror Cyberpunk 2077’s naming convention, but what we do know thanks to legendary TTRPG creator Mike Pondsmith is that it’ll involve a visit to a city that “feels more like Chicago gone wrong”.
