Cyberpunk 2077‘s sequel has shed its Project Orion codename and will now be known as… Cyberpunk 2. CD Projekt revealed the name change in their latest earnings results, according to which the new Cyberpunk RPG has just entered pre-production – roughly defined, the point in a game’s gestation when designers, artists, programmers and so forth meet to flesh out the concept, but before they’ve actually started making anything that’s supposed to form part of the finished game. There are now 96 people working on the thing, versus 422 for The Witcher 4, 49 on multiplayer Witcher spin-off Project Sirius, and 19 for an unannounced original game, Project Hadar.
The grousing, dilettante reader will object that this is scant material for a news post, especially given that CD Projekt are offering no guarantees that “Cyberpunk 2” will be the project’s final name – as they commented to the Verge, Cyberpunk 2 “just means it’s another game in the Cyberpunk universe.” But the dextrous maven of online news-mongering will notice that “Cyberpunk 2” is, in fact, an extremely compact and subtle piece of worldbuilding.
After all, Cyberpunk 2077 is set in the year 2077 CE. By logical extrapolation, Cyberpunk 2 is set in the year 2. Combine that with a hint from Cyberpunk tabletop creator Mike Pondsmith that nu-Cyberpunk will take place in Chicago, and we can make deductions about Cyberpunk 2’s setting by copy-pasting bits of this randomly googled Living History Of Illinois, with its trust-inspiring emblem of a sickly and loquacious bald eagle attempting to disentangle itself from a discarded shield.
Here is what the nauseous avian scholars of the Living History of Illinois think occurred in the years 500 BC to 900 AD: maize agriculture, village-building, burial mounds, pottery, and the invention of the bow and arrow. That’s pretty much a video game, right there. But is it a Cyberpunk game? I have now completed a forensic control+F search on that PDF several hundred times, and can disclose zero mention of “ripperdocs”, “braindancing”, or “taxi missions that are secretly better than the main storyline”. If the indigenous peoples who lived on the banks of what would later be called the Mississippi River had access to aerodynes and quickhacking, they kept it on the down-low. Possibly instead of aerodynes they had barfing bald eagles.
CD Projekt have yet to explicitly confirm anything about the new Cyberpunk’s setting, beyond saying that they want to explore problems like homelessness and the wealth gap. I’d email them a link to this report, asking for a statement, but I love CD Projekt like my very own children, and do not wish to encumber them with some abject nonsense. You, on the other hand, are welcome to leave a comment.
