Edgerunners season two takes place in 2078 and erases the Cyberpunk 2077 ending from canon

Games with multiple endings sooner or later run into an awkward question: what actually happened? As long as the universe lives inside a single title, "however you played it" works for everyone.

Once an anime or a sequel shows up, though, five endings that someone sobbed over at three in the morning turn into a minefield for writers.

CD Projekt RED has already taken the first step across it. Patrick Mills, the studio lead lore keeper, confirmed that season 2 of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners from Studio Trigger takes place in 2078.

The timeline is tidy. Season 1, released in 2022, is set in 2076, Cyberpunk 2077 follows a year later, and the anime continuation comes after that. Mills explained that time in the universe doesn't stand still, and every new story moves the world forward.

The series itself steers clear of the game events, but it drops plenty of hints. David Martinez is mentioned in the past tense, Adam Smasher is nowhere to be seen, Arasaka has clearly lost ground, and Kang Tao got a copy of Soulkiller through a mole who is easy to recognize as Hellman.

The bigger point is that characters say outright that transferring a consciousness into another body has never worked for anyone. That rules out the Devil ending, where V makes a deal with Hanako Arasaka.

The decision makes sense, since Devil is the only ending that radically reshapes the world. In Sun, Star, Temperance, and even Tower, the corporation weakens one way or another, and the Phantom Liberty epilogue shows Militech running Night City by 2079.

The creators of the Fallout series pulled a similar trick: they cut some of the game endings and left the rest hanging. There is a grimmer reading, though. Roman, recalling the assault on Arasaka Tower, names David but not V, and only Devil and Tower skip the attack on the tower. Skeptics counter that the words of anime characters prove nothing. One commenter put it well:

Even if the Devil ending occurred there's no chance in hell that Arasaka would allow even rumors of the details to leak. In fact if I were Arasaka then I'd deliberately leak rumors that the body transfer hasn't worked or is impossible to accomplish with current technology.

Moving forward on the calendar has practical reasons too. The further back writers go, the more they bump into the tabletop lore of Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red, which remain the domain of Mike Pondsmith and R. Talsorian Games, while the end of the 21st century is nearly a blank slate.

Shadowrun offers a parallel. The tabletop game has advanced its timeline almost every year since 1989 and reached the 2080s long ago. The sequel, codenamed Orion, will likely take place in a world where Arasaka is no longer the top predator, judging by the hints the game builds up about a fifth corporate war.