Project Orion Is CD Projekt RED's Chance to Get It Right the Second Time

TL;DR: CD Projekt RED officially confirmed Cyberpunk 2077's sequel — codenamed Project Orion — is in active development, set in a futuristic Chicago. Senior writer Adrian Fulneczek revealed the studio has overhauled its development structure to prevent another catastrophic launch. The shared codebase with The Witcher IV team, unified documentation, and a new definition of "done" are the real story here — not the city setting.

Adrian Fulneczek has one of the strangest jobs in gaming right now. As a senior writer at CD Projekt RED, he's helping build the successor to a game that launched as an unplayable wreck in December 2020, became the subject of lawsuits and Sony refunds, then somehow clawed back to being considered one of the greatest RPGs ever made. That's Project Orion — the working title for Cyberpunk 2077's follow-up. And unlike most studios in this position, CD Projekt RED is actually talking about what went wrong.

In a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Fulneczek didn't dodge the chaos. He named specific failures. He explained the fixes. He spoke like someone who lived through a genuine disaster and came out the other side determined not to repeat it.

What's Actually Confirmed About Project Orion Right Now

Let's separate what we know from what we're guessing.

The basics:

Codename: Project Orion
Setting: A futuristic Chicago — described by Cyberpunk tabletop creator Mike Pondsmith as "Chicago gone wrong"
Developer: CD Projekt RED (Warsaw-based)
Confirmation date: October 2022
Release window: Unknown. Development is early.

The sequel exists alongside The Witcher IV in CD Projekt RED's pipeline, which means neither game is shipping soon. Don't expect a title reveal or release date for at least another year or two.

Here's what's harder to quantify but matters more: Cyberpunk 2077 itself has recovered. The game currently sits at 76/100 on OpenCritic, with 66% of critics recommending it — numbers that would have seemed impossible at launch. The free next-gen upgrade for PS5 and Xbox Series X helped. The Phantom Liberty DLC (September 2023) helped more. But the real shift came from the studio's refusal to abandon the game, even when shareholders sued them.

Movie OTT tracks where to watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners across regions — including Netflix India, which introduced millions of viewers to Night City without requiring a 100-hour game commitment first. That streaming footprint matters for how the sequel will eventually be marketed.

The Development Disaster That Forced a Complete Rethink

Fulneczek didn't mince words about what broke in Cyberpunk 2077's development. "It was chaos," he said. But he went deeper than that.

The studio had documentation tools. They had proof-of-concept systems for "living" documentation. They thought they were ready. They weren't.

The real problem was fragmentation — split between platforms, divided tools, siloed teams. "With fragmented documentation, it can clearly correlate to burnout," Fulneczek explained. That's an unusually specific admission from inside a major studio. Most companies would hide behind "scope challenges" or "unforeseen technical hurdles." He named the actual root cause: the way teams couldn't see what other teams were doing.

The burnout part is worth sitting with. Cyberpunk 2077's development became infamous for crunch culture — developers working 100-hour weeks, management promising features that weren't feasible, quality assurance flagging issues that never got fixed before launch. A fragmented documentation system doesn't cause crunch, but it absolutely accelerates it. If you don't know what the other team is building, you can't plan your own work. Deadlines slip. People panic. Hours pile up.

For Project Orion, CD Projekt RED's fix is simple on paper, radical in practice: unified documentation, no split tools, shared infrastructure across the entire studio. "We now have new requirements, especially a new definition of 'done,'" Fulneczek said.

What does "done" actually mean when you're building an open-world RPG? That's the question nobody's answered yet.

Why the Shared Codebase With The Witcher IV Is the Story Everyone's Missing

Here's the detail most coverage glosses over: Project Orion and The Witcher IV aren't just being made by the same company. They're sharing code.

That means when The Witcher IV team solves a problem — say, an NPC pathfinding issue or a rendering optimization — the Cyberpunk team can adopt that solution immediately. Not months later. Not in a patch. Now. "If a team working on The Witcher figures out a solution to a specific issue, the Cyberpunk team can see it, benefit from it, take it into their own code," Fulneczek said.

That's engineering knowledge flowing in real time. It's genuinely uncommon at a studio running two massive open-world RPGs simultaneously. Most trade coverage treats the shared codebase as a footnote, a technical detail to skim past on the way to speculating about Chicago's map size. That framing is backwards. The shared infrastructure is the single highest-leverage bet CD Projekt RED is making — if it works, it rewrites how mid-size studios (they employ roughly 1,100 people, not Ubisoft's 19,000) can compete on two AAA fronts at once. If it fails, it drags both flagships down together.

Why does this matter more than "the new game is set in Chicago"? Because it's predictive. The shared codebase either works — which means both games ship cleaner — or it doesn't, which means both games suffer. There's no hiding behind "Cyberpunk had unique problems." The entire studio will know, immediately, if something's breaking.

The Witcher IV will likely ship first. When it does, watch for this: Does it launch clean? Are the reviews praising the technical stability, or are they mentioning frame rate drops and bugs? That's your real preview of Project Orion's chances.

The Edgerunners Effect and What It Means for the Sequel

Something unusual happened in September 2022. Netflix released a 10-episode anime called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — a standalone story set in Night City, produced by Trigger Studio, starring characters nobody from the game knew.

It was good. Actually good.

The anime tells the story of Lucy and David, two people trying to survive in a city that's explicitly designed to crush them. It's cyberpunk in the way the tabletop game is — gritty, violent, focused on individuals fighting impossible systems — rather than the way the video game often felt (which was more: go shoot corpo executives in a purple neon-soaked sandbox). That Episode 6 rooftop scene between David and Lucy, where the moon becomes this impossible promise of escape? It does more worldbuilding in ninety seconds than the game managed in some entire questlines. Edgerunners doesn't require you to have played Cyberpunk 2077. It doesn't even reference the game's story.

What it did was reintroduce the IP to audiences who'd written it off after the launch disaster. Movie OTT tracks where Edgerunners is streaming across platforms — it's on Netflix globally, including Netflix India, with English and localized audio. Within weeks of the anime's release, Cyberpunk 2077's concurrent Steam player count surged past 85,000 (up from roughly 15,000 the month prior, according to SteamDB). People watched the show, got curious, downloaded the game.

That's the template Project Orion will follow. The sequel won't launch alone. It'll arrive as part of a media push — probably another anime, maybe a live-action series (Netflix has shown appetite for this), possibly a film. By the time the game ships, the audience will already be primed.

For Indian viewers specifically: The Edgerunners anime is freely available on Netflix India with subtitles and English audio. No Hindi dub yet, which is a gap. But it's the best introduction to the franchise if you haven't played the game.

The Redemption Arc That Actually Worked

Let's be clear about the scale of Cyberpunk 2077's failure. The game launched on December 10, 2020, was pulled from the PlayStation Store within days, and faced a shareholder lawsuit. Sony offered full refunds. Game reviewers who'd given it 9s and 10s issued corrections. It was, by any reasonable measure, a catastrophe.

Most studios would've abandoned it. Moved on. Cut losses.

CD Projekt RED didn't. They patched it. Updated it. Released a free next-gen upgrade for PS5 and Xbox Series X in early 2021. Then, in September 2023, they shipped Phantom Liberty — a $20 DLC expansion that was widely praised as some of the best narrative RPG content in years. The expansion reportedly sold over 5 million copies in its first week. Remarkable for paid DLC, especially for a game most people had written off.

What's striking is how Phantom Liberty changed the conversation. It didn't just patch Cyberpunk 2077's reputation — it suggested the game had always had potential that wasn't unlocked at launch. The DLC's spy-thriller storyline, its new district, its density of side quests — people were saying things they never said before: "This is what Cyberpunk should've been."

That's the weight Project Orion carries. The studio's proven they can course-correct. The question is whether they can skip the disaster phase entirely and go straight to the acclaimed phase.

What Actually Needs to Happen for Project Orion to Succeed

Here's what CD Projekt RED is claiming, boiled down:

Unified development infrastructure — no fragmented tools, no siloed teams
Shared codebase with The Witcher IV — real-time knowledge sharing, not post-launch patches
A new definition of "done" — Fulneczek mentioned this but didn't elaborate on what it actually means

The third one is the wildcard. "Done" means something different depending on who you ask. A QA tester says a feature is "done" when it doesn't crash. A producer says it's "done" when it's shipped. A creative director says it's "done" when it matches their vision. CD Projekt RED survived Cyberpunk 2077's launch partly because different departments had incompatible definitions of done. The producer said "ship it," the testers said "it's broken," and both were right.

The shared codebase is a genuine structural fix. The unified documentation is a legitimate operational change. But the definition of "done"? That's a culture problem, not a tool problem. It requires discipline. Accountability. And the willingness to delay a game when it's not actually finished — which is always a harder sell than it sounds when you've already announced it's coming. Every studio that ships a broken game says afterward they should have delayed; almost none of them actually do it when the quarterly earnings call is breathing down their neck and marketing spend is already committed, because the financial pressure to hit a date is a force that good intentions alone can't overcome.

The part I am most curious about is whether the "definition of done" language signals a real cultural overhaul or just better-worded internal memos. I keep coming back to one fact: The Witcher IV ships first. That's the real test. If that game launches with technical problems, Project Orion's chances drop significantly. If it launches clean, the shared infrastructure actually works, and maybe — maybe — we're about to see a studio that finally learned its lesson.

Where to Track Project Orion's Development

No release date. No title. No confirmed cast. That's honest. Studios don't let their senior writers discuss internal development methodology in credible outlets unless they want the narrative managed. This isn't spin — it's an admission of vulnerability.

Over the next 18 to 24 months, watch for:

The Witcher IV's launch — this is your real preview of whether the shared codebase model works
Any official title reveal — "Project Orion" is a codename; the actual name matters for marketing
Screen adaptations — Netflix has the relationship and appetite for Cyberpunk IP; a second Edgerunners season or a new series timed to the game's launch would fit the playbook
Community messaging — if CD Projekt RED keeps discussing internal process this openly, that's a good sign; if they go silent, that's a warning

Movie OTT tracks gaming IP across streaming platforms, which is worth bookmarking if you want to stay current on where Cyberpunk content lands in your region (Edgerunners availability, future series drops, etc.).

The comeback story is real. Whether Project Orion becomes a blueprint for how to rebuild a broken game's franchise — or just another expensive launch failure dressed in better PR — won't be clear until The Witcher IV ships and we see whether the studio actually meant what they said about unified infrastructure.

Either way, we'll know soon.

Watch the official trailer: