Cyberpunk 2 Quest Team är hälften före detta moddare, säger Pawel Sasko

Pawel Sasko, associate game director on Cyberpunk 2, said during a CD Projekt Red REDstream on 21 October that roughly half the sequel’s quest team came out of the Cyberpunk 2077 modding scene. Quest designers write a game’s objectives and the story segments hanging off them, which makes that one of the teams whose work a player touches most.

The claim is not brand new. Sasko said something close to it in 2024, and it resurfaced because the stream was about the Edgerunners 2 update and the studio’s decision to open modding on consoles. It also lands in the middle of an argument running on social media, where Western and Japanese players have been pulling in opposite directions on community patches, mods and emulation, with a rollback netcode mod for Tekken 6 currently splitting the fighting game community along the same line.

“The modding community is really keeping the game alive. I’m very often looking at what our modders are doing, what they’re building. It’s very exciting. There’s so much creativity. We as a studio always try to support our modding community as much as we can.”

— Pawel Sasko

Sasko’s framing for the hiring is blunt. Modding is the cheapest way to learn how a game is assembled, because you have to open the thing before you can change it, and the comment was spotted by IGN after the stream went up.

“For me, this is a foot-in-the-door technique, and a gateway into game dev. You can see, and you can learn how things are made, how things can be built. We actually hired so many modders. I would say, at this point, half of the quest team is all former modders.”

— Pawel Sasko

The studio handed that scene more room a day later. Cyberpunk 2.5 shipped on 22 October for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with Switch 2 and Mac following a few days behind, and it carries mod support through mod.io that installs from the in-game menu on PS5, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series X|S and Mac. CD Projekt Red calls it a first step, and a modded save on console switches off achievements and trophies.

Mods on a console are a different proposition from mods on a PC, where the scene has run on its own since 2020. I read the hiring line as a career ladder rather than a staffing detail, because taking a finished game apart is the cheapest apprenticeship this industry hands out, and the studio has just extended it to people who do not own a gaming PC.

The update exists because of Edgerunners 2, which arrived on Netflix on 20 October with all ten episodes at once, directed by Kai Ikarashi with Bartosz Sztybor back as showrunner and Trigger animating again. The season drops David and Lucy for four new leads and no single protagonist: Weak Kingsley, a legendary merc who had his implants stripped out after going cyberpsycho, the netrunner D, the corporate heiress Talia Yang, and the film obsessive Roman Carax. Reviews have mostly praised Trigger’s animation and the fight scenes while splitting on whether a multi-character story hits as hard as David’s did. Update 2.5 pulls the season into the game through Clampdown, a side quest set before the series, a five-piece gear set built around King, and the HKGN 102.0 FM radio station playing tracks from the show.

Most of the rest of 2.5 is quest-team and systems work rather than anime tie-in. V can now dual-wield Power pistols and revolvers through the Double Trouble perk, swap the look of Mantis Blades, Gorilla Arms, Monowire and the Projectile Launch System at five Glamdoc shops, and take a guided tour of Night City narrated by its founder in a second new quest called Welcome to Paradise. Twelve Minor Arcana tarot cards are scattered across the map on top of that. Console players also get a field of view slider at last, saves are grouped by playthrough, and the PC build picks up DLSS 4.5 with up to 6X Multi Frame Generation alongside ray tracing and PS5 Pro optimisation work.

Night City is the kind of dense, drivable world I will reinstall for, and two new quests plus a tour of the city is a better reason to go back than a sequel nobody has given a window to. Cyberpunk 2 has a name, an associate game director and a quest team, and that is where the public information currently stops.

The studio keeps growing the universe sideways rather than retelling it. Co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has said the Paramount Cyberpunk 2077 Movie will not be a one-to-one translation of the game’s story and will follow the Edgerunners approach of telling something new inside the same world. Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing, with no director or cast confirmed.

The same transfer runs inside the company, and Sasko is the person carrying it. He has said The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered was inspired by Cyberpunk 2.0 update work he led himself, with the revamped skill tree built through the same process and the upscaler work done with NVIDIA, Intel and AMD on Red Engine 4 brought back to Red Engine 3. The remaster briefly held the highest Metacritic score of 2026 at 94 before dropping a point.

Cyberpunk 2077 has sold 40 million copies and Phantom Liberty 15 million, which is the commercial reason the studio keeps the game open instead of closing the book on it. CD Projekt Red has also called several previous patches the last one, so the mod pipeline Sasko described runs on a support window the studio can close whenever it wants.

I think the number worth keeping is not the forty million but the share of a quest team that learned the craft on a game whose code they were never given. That route produced the people now writing the sequel, and it only stays open while somebody at the studio keeps deciding it should.