Polish developer CD Projekt Red has announced a slew of future projects this week.
CDPR made an announcement on Twitter about the five new projects. The tweet highlighted them as code names with brief descriptions on what they would be about.
Here’s what we know about the five games:
- Orion: Orion is a codename for our next Cyberpunk game, which will take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe.
- Polaris: Polaris is a codename for the next installment in The Witcher series of games, which we recently announced was in pre-production. It is the beginning of a new saga: we aim to release two more Witcher games after Polaris, creating a new AAA RPG trilogy.
- Canis Majoris: Canis Majoris is a full-fledged Witcher game, separate to the new Witcher saga starting with Polaris. It will be developed by an external studio headed by experienced developers who have worked on past Witcher games.
- Sirius: Sirius is a codename for the game developed by [Molasses Flood], set in The Witcher universe and created with support from CDPR. It will differ from our past productions, offering multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story
- Hadar: Hadar is a codename for a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CDPR. The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting.
There’s a lot here and a lot that sounds quite interesting.
For instance, fans have been curious about the future of the Witcher franchise following the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The premiere and success of the Netflix show only made us more curious about the next game.
And now, it seems that we are getting not one but three new games in the Witcher universe. Plus, multiple development teams working on them might give us some really interesting takes on what a Witcher game could even be.
Moving on from that, we have the next Cyberpunk game. Following its disastrous launch, many had written it off as yet another high-budget AAA failure. However, with almost a year’s worth of patches and fixes, along with some new story DLC being announced and an anime being aired on Netflix, it looks as though public opinion on the game is changing.
And then there is the new IP. There are very few details about it, of course. What we do know is that this is the first project in the history of the studio that an IP is being incubated entirely within CDPR. In other words, it is apparently a wholly original idea.
This is interesting. It is strangely somewhat uncommon for major AAA companies to take a chance on a brand new RP these days. Most tend to lean on tried and true franchises, reboots, or remakes.
So to see CDPR take a shot at bringing something new to the table is quite refreshing. What this game will be, only time will tell.
For now, we have a lot of Witcher content to look forward to, along with a new Cyberpunk game. Let’s hope this time, the launch goes better for the latter.
If you want to check out our initial review of Cyberpunk at launch, you can do so below:
Emmen Gaming 