The writer and producer of sci-fi anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners said he doesn’t want to write a jolly story for the series, because “when people are sad”, it makes him “a bit happy”.
Edgerunners is an animated spin-off of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, which first debuted in 2022. Following acclaim, a second season is now in production for Netflix.
News of this next season arrived during Anime Expo, along with a new trailer. “Night City lives on,” reads the official blurb. You can check out the trailer below.
At the same event, a Cyberpunk: Edgerunners panel was held, where writer Bartosz Sztybor was asked about the human stories told within Edgerunners’ dystopian world. Here, the show’s writer replied that this type of narrative is incredibly important for CDPR, and the team always wants to “write stories that are character driven”.
Sztybor then elaborated on this point further stating: “But the other thing is that we are a company from Poland. I’m from Poland and people in Poland are sad. They are born sad, they die sad, so I just wanted to make the whole world sad.” This was met with plenty of laughter from his audience.
When asked if he had ever considered changing things up a bit, and perhaps offering up some joyful story lines, Sztybor replied, “no”, with the panel’s host joking the writer liked to feast on others’ misery.
You can listen to the exchange below.
We don’t have a release date for the second season of Edgerunners yet, with the team merely saying it will arrive on Netflix when it is ready. We do know, though, that it will comprise 10 episodes, and feature a standalone story within the world of Cyberpunk 2077.
The Edgerunners team promise “a raw chronicle of redemption and revenge” on the second season’s debut. “In a city that thrives in the spotlight of violence, one question remains: when the world is blinded by spectacle, what extremes do you have to go to make your story matter,” the blurb teases.
As for Cyberpunk 2077 itself, it is now available on Switch 2. Our pals at Digital Foundry have taken the game out for a spin on the Switch 2 already, asking the question: Can the new Nintendo console handle it?
In addition, the team at CDPR are currently cooking up another update for Cyberpunk 2077, which will have “scope similar” to 2.2.