The new episode of the AnsweRED podcast mainly focuses on a chat with the developers leading the work on Project Orion, the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, and what the newly built Boston studio can bring to the game. Acting Executive Producer Dan Hernberg explained:
I think Cyberpunk is obviously a uniquely American story. It's got a lot of like punk energy, and it was written by an American, so it just seems right to do it in America.
Associate Game Director Paweł Sasko also shared a specific example: Cyberpunk 2077, which was made in Poland, had the wrong manhole covers for a US-based city.
There's this interesting story after the release of Cyberpunk 2077 that blew up on Reddit at some point, and it's the manhole debacle. Like, the manholes that are covering the roads, right? There was this post with the guy saying that there is this immersive breaking bug in Cyberpunk, and the bug was about the fact that the covers for manholes for a sewer were the manholes that you use normally in Europe, in Germany, for a pavement. Those are not manholes that you normally cover in America on the streets.
This is basically showing you the differences, right? When you go to America, there's things like hydrants, where they are placed and how they look like. The street lights, the positions of that, the trash bins, right? They're in the front of the house, right by the street. In Poland, in Europe, you don't see it almost anywhere. There's so much nuance. Dan, when we talk about it, he calls it the Americana.
Dan Hernberg then said:
Our curbs are different, our color is different on all of our signs. Everything's just slightly different. It doesn't break immersion, but it's just that little thing where you're like, "Well, maybe this wasn't made by people who live here or people who fully understand all of American culture."
I also think that being in America, it allows us to have those cultural touchpoints with the larger American, you know, kind of influence with Hollywood. Obviously, Cyberpunk 2077 took place in LA, and so there's just kind of all these cultural touchpoints and things that we can kind of interact with, whether that's from music or story or just different parts of America that are interesting to explore.
One of the perks of the Boston studio is that CD Projekt RED will be able to tap into the North American talent pool, including graduates from high-profile universities like Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Moreover, they are collaborating with the existing Vancouver studio on Project Orion, with Hernberg teasing that the Canadian team is working on some 'really cool stuff' for the sequel.
The Cyberpunk 2077 sequel is undoubtedly going to take a while to materialize. That said, CD Projekt RED obviously built the new studio specifically to build the game in parallel with the new The Witcher saga. Indeed, the developer aims to speed up the cadence of its game releases, so you can hold on to that hope of playing Orion within this decade.
