Cyberpunk 2077 sequel taps Fable, Control and Dishonored expansion writer

A Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, currently called "Project Orion", is currently in the early stages of development at CD Projekt Red's new Boston studio. Today, CDPR announced several new high profile hires were joining the project, most notably Anna Megill. Megill, who will serve as lead writer on the project, has previously worked on games such as Control, Dishonored: Death Of The Outsider, and the upcoming Fable reboot.

Megill has also worked on Guild Wars 2 and Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora. Alexander Freed is also joining the writing team on Project Orion, having previously been lead writer at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Other hires announced today include Ryan Barnard, a former game director from The Division developers Massive Entertainment and a gameplay director at Hitman developer IO Interactive.

Not much is known about Project Orion at this stage, beyond it being in early development, that it might have multiplayer, and that it might not be first-person.

It's also being built on the Unreal Engine, rather than the in-house engine CDPR used for Cyberpunk 2077, and it's being developed in a new studio based in Boston, Massachusetts rather than at Poland as the original was. In an interview late last year, lead quest designer Pawel Sasko spoke about the switch to a new engine, as well as the importance keeping the original developers together despite the change in continent.

"It's so important when you have a group of leaders, managers who just know each other, know each other's quirks, know each other's strong and weak sides, know how to work with each other," he said. "I think this is very powerful. It's really, I would say, an understated and really unseen element of game design and game dev in general, just retaining that spine of directors and leads, who can basically build around and sort of retain that knowledge."

Notably, the press release announcing these new hires begins by listing the "studio veterans" who are "spearheading" the new project, including "Gabriel Amatangelo (Game Director), Paweł Sasko (Associate Game Director), Igor Sarzyński (Creative Director), Andrzej Stopa (Cinematic Director), Kacper Niepokólczycki (Environment Art Director), Sarah Grümmer (Acting Lead Quest Designer) and Kacper Kościeński (Engineering Director)."