Four years since the announcement of Project Orion: why no one is rushing the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel

Game anniversaries usually come up when the countdown is measured in months. But sometimes all a title has is a codename and a line in quarterly reports. Then the anniversary feels more like a wake, and fans mark it with a mix of longing and resignation.

In October 2022, CD Projekt RED announced Project Orion, the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, as part of a major strategy update.

Exactly four years later, fans on Reddit remembered the date, and the reaction was surprisingly calm. Instead of demanding to see anything at all, players keep repeating "Let them cook," and that patience has some understandable reasons behind it.

The reason, of course, is the history of the first game. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012, a CGI teaser followed in January 2013, and the game finally launched in December 2020, in such a state that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store and started handing out refunds.

The game only got into proper shape with update 2.0 and the Phantom Liberty expansion in 2023, so there is plenty of truth in the joke "It was actually released in 2023. We don't acknowledge the disaster that was the original launch date." The game was undone by the very things it criticizes.

That means shareholder pressure and corporate deadlines, and after that experience, few people want a repeat. Besides, Project Orion is not being built by the main Warsaw team but by the North American division in Boston together with a studio in Vancouver.

CD Projekt RED has most of its resources tied up in The Witcher 4, which will not arrive before 2027, and full production on Project Orion is generally expected to ramp up only after that release. For comparison, The Elder Scrolls 6 was announced back in 2018, which makes four years look modest.

Another topic causes far more concern. The studio dropped its in-house REDengine in favor of Unreal Engine 5, and UE5 has a mixed reputation: many games on it look alike, suffer from stutters, and lean heavily on temporal anti-aliasing and lighting techniques.

Still, CD Projekt RED has worked with Epic Games under a strategic partnership since 2022, gained access to the source code, and is tailoring the engine to its own needs. The Witcher 4 tech demo at Unreal Fest 2025 showed an open world running on a base PS5 at 60 frames per second, and skeptics might recall that Cyberpunk 2077 was hardly a model of optimization at launch either.