CD Projekt latest: next Cyberpunk game might have multiplayer, Witcher 4 enters "production phase"

22.01.2024 - 18:10 / rockpapershotgun.com / Adam Badowski

The next Cyberpunk game from CD Projekt - currently codenamed "Orion" - might have multiplayer in it, according to co-CEO Michal Nowakowski. Please let it be some kind of deckhead 'passenger-seat-driver' mode, where you get to play a crusty celeb uploaded to another character's brain implants, who strolls around the landscape as a hologram, offering gritty commentary on your Night City-based endeavours. Watch those corners, samurai! Hey, you missed an ammo pack. SAMURAI ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME.

It'll be a while till we find out for sure: Orion is still in the conceptual phase, with CD Projekt expecting to have about 80 people working on it by the end of this year. The higher priority in 2024, it seems, is the next big steaming helping of The Witcher.

All that's from a little collection of CD Projekt quotes posted by Reuters. According to CD Projekt's other CEO, Adam Badowski, the next Witcher game - codenamed "Polaris" - should enter the production phase this year. "We'd like to have around 400 people working on the project by the middle of the year", he said. It's the first in a series of Witcher releases, including an "an innovative take on The Witcher universe" from The Molasses Flood.

As for the new Cyberpunk game, little is known other than that it won't necessarily be first-person, though CD Projekt members have shared a few thoughts on how they will avoid a repeat of Cyberpunk 2077's infamous crunch conditions and disastrous launch.

Multiplayer could be a common theme of CD Projekt's next few games. Back when they revealed the impending avalanche of Witcher games in October 2022, the company teased plans to introduce multiplayer "to most of our new games to enrich the single-player experience". That was before the massive "restructuring" exercise that was 2023, however.

The Reuters piece includes some exceedingly brief commentary on the company's hiring plans. Nowakowski says CD Projekt will continue to expand in North America, having set up a new studio there last year; hiring in Poland, however, will be "rather low". Like many of the games industry's largest outfits, CD Projekt laid off a substantial number of people last year, prompting some Polish employees to form a new union in the hopes of "having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis."

In surely encouraging news, CD Projekt have also recently set up a team to explore how they could use generative AI tools in game development. "We think that AI is something that can help improve certain processes in game production, but not replace people," Nowakowski told Reuters. The grim near-future depicted by the Cyberpunk games doesn't exactly bear this idea out, as you'll know if you've ever