Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in Night City, a fictional metropolis in a dystopian setting where corporations have the power and the law of the strongest reigns, but developer CD Projekt RED feels it hasn’t gone far enough with the dystopia in the video game and wants to better capture the issues Americans face within the sequelcodenamed Orion, which is currently under development at CDPR’s new studio in Boston. The first game was developed in Poland, remember.
In a new episode of the AnsweRED Podcast, Pawel Sasko, associate director of the next Cyberpunk, talked about the topic, also explaining how having moved the production of the game to the USA helped.
The USA will help the team create a better sequel to Cyberpunk 2077
“I think we didn’t push the envelope enough in some places,” Sasko said. “For example, regarding the homeless crisis, when I look at it I tell myself that in Cyberpunk 2077 we didn’t handle this the right way. We thought we were dystopian, but we only scratched the surface.”
Dan Hernberg, executive producer of the Cyberpunk sequel, joked that Cyberpunk 2077 had “a homeless guy in a tent somewhere” and that the team thought that was enough, only to be told by the Americans that they would need more. “an entire city” of homeless people in Night City to capture the homelessness crisis in the country. Sasko says living in America has given him a better perspective on how widespread these problems are.
Sasko also says that work on Orion in America it will help them notice discrepancies that might seem less impactful but which have value, such as how the manholes are made, the street lamps, how the bins are positioned along the odd lines. He admits that in Poland and more generally in Europe things are different compared to the USA and therefore having a clearer vision (also from a cultural point of view, not just objects) of the nation in which Cyberpunk is set can only be help.
Obviously the move to Boston also has other reasons.
