CD Projekt Red is working on more games set in The Witcher and Cyberpunk galaxies, as agreeably as a brand new franchise being designed in-house, the studio revealed in a design update on Tuesday.
There are two other recent Witcher games in the creations, too. One pointed to as “Canis Majoris” is a “full-fledged” Witcher label separate from the new trilogy.
An external studio will design it. In Tuesday’s update, CDPR stated it is open to functioning on more games with exterior companions.
The other new Witcher title, “Sirius,” will include multiplayer gameplay “on top of a single-player venture including a campaign with investigations and a story,” CDPR said in a tweet. Project Sirius is in consequence of the Boston-based The Molasses Flood, which CDPR obtained in October 2021, and it could be a distinct type of game from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. “Don’t expect another story-driven open-world RPG like The Witcher 3,” Kici?ski stated on the investor call. “It’s a distinct project targeted for a wider audience.”
CDPR announced a “new saga” in March, and we now understand that the first game in what is designed to be a trilogy will be codenamed “Polaris.” The game is molded to be developed using Unreal Engine 5. CDPR wants to deliver the games over six years “starting from the liberation of Polaris,” joint CEO of CDPR, Adam Kici?ski, said in a strategy update video. So despite the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, CDPR is diving headfirst into a slew of new games.
Polaris probably won’t be released anytime soon. Pre-production on Polaris just began this year, and based on a reply from Kici?ski to a question in an investor webcast, the game could be at least three years out. He said that all three games in the saga are planned to be full-fledged AAA RPGs.
“To people who are interested in the franchise, interested in the IP, but are not necessarily into playing a hardcore roleplaying game like The Witcher series we’ve presented so far,” Micha? Nowakowski, CDPR’s SVP of enterprise development, said on the investor call. CDPR is also operating on the next-gen release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It is set to launch before the end of this year.
CDPR’s new and third major franchise is codenamed Hadar, and it’s very early in development. “The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting,” CDPR tweeted.
There’s no timeline for while we can expect to play a game from this franchise so we might be waiting a while. But it appears the first game will be another big RPG like The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077. “We do specific kinds of games,” Nowakowski stated on the investor webcast. “You can guess what kind of game to expect.”
The next Cyberpunk game is codenamed Orion, “which will take the Cyberpunk franchise additionally and continue harnessing the possibility of this dark future universe,” CDPR tweeted. Orion will be designed by a new studio based in Boston alongside the company’s Vancouver team, which CDPR collectively guides as CD Projekt Red North America. The new Boston studio is distinct from The Molasses Flood.
CDPR hasn’t started on Orion yet, Kici?ski said on the webcast. However, once it finishes work on the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 expansion, titled Phantom Liberty and set to release in 2023, CDPR will begin initial work on Orion.
Another thing to look forward to is that it sounds as if CDPR is looking to incorporate multiplayer into more of its upcoming games because it’s using Unreal Engine 5. “UE5, our new engine, offers a solid tech framework allowing us to develop multiplayer for most of our future titles,” Nowakowski said in the update video.
Alongside the new games, CDPR also announced that co-founder and joint CEO Marcin Iwi?ski would be stepping down from the joint CEO position. Instead, he plans to serve as the company’s supervisory board chairman.