CD Projekt’s Boston studio is currently hard at work on Cyberpunk 2 with over 150 developers working on the upcoming sequel. Developed on Unreal Engine 5, as the studio leaves its iconic REDEngine behind, the sequel is being crafted with a new team, on a new engine, with new ideas.
In a new interview, Cyberpunk 2 creative director Igor Sarzynski and game director Gabriel Amatangelo explained that the sequel is being built in a more collaborative nature than its predecessor, learning from the failures of Cyberpunk 2077’s development.
In the interview, Sarzynski explained that the new studio in Boston is picking up from the improvements made during Phantom Liberty’s development. “We just completely switched our method,” he said.
“You don’t work really in disciplines. You work only in player-oriented pods which create player experiences. But to create player experiences, you need a little bit of everyone. You need someone from art, from audio, from gameplay, from narrative. And they always go totally hand-in-and talking to each other all the time. And that’s like an enormous change. And I think it served us really well on Phantom Liberty, and we would like to stick to it.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s launch development followed similar issues to other major games like Bethesda’s Starfield where there were a lot of developers siloed away from everyone else. “Overall, constant communication is just like the absolute life system of game development,” Sarzynski said. “Without it, everything falls apart immediately, especially with a project of our complexity.”
Amatangelo explained that not every developer is working in these player pods, adding that the team has a “hybrid approach” when needed. However, the game is being developed with a more collaborative mindset from the beginning, allowing more people to spot issues and provide feedback without getting lost in email chains.
Associate game director Pawel Sasko, who was the quest director for the first game, explained that the prior development structure of Cyberpunk 2077 was not effective. “In Cyberpunk, we’d been totally siloed, right?” he said. “The teams were working in waterfalls, in their bubbles. Like, art here and narrative here. And making all those people work together, communicate more… it qas a difficult process for our people internally here.”
Amatangelo recalls that this process was integral to the final outcome of Phantom Liberty, the only expansion for Cyberpunk 2077. “It’s like, beat up the ideas, you’re not beating up the person, you’re beating up the idea,” he said as he recalled wanting more people to deconstruct and improve his ideas for the expansion. “And that is the process of what you need to do. And everyone needs to feel comfortable with it or try to.”
Cyberpunk 2 is still years away with the game’s team size currently around a third of the size of The Witcher 4’s ongoing development. Right now, it’s unsure when the game will release or what platforms the game will release on, but the game is in active development at the time of writing.
