CD Projekt Red has substantially reworked plans for the upcoming Witcher spin-off game which has resulted in dozens of employees being laid off.
The spin-off game will tell a story removed from the main series of games and will offer a multiplayer component for the first time in the franchise. The game is being developed by The Molasses Flood which was acquired by CD Projekt Red in 2021. The developer team is best known for its survival game, Flame in the Flood. VGC reports that 21 US-based employees were caught up in the layoffs along with eight developers based in Poland.
A CD Projekt Red spokesperson provided an official statement to VGC saying:”Because the project changed, so has the composition of the team that’s working on it – mainly on The Molasses Flood’s side.”
It was reported back in March that development on Project Sirius had restarted from scratch which was seemingly confirmed by a regulatory report last week. The report states that work on “defining a new framework” for Project Sirius was now complete. It’s likely that this new framework was a major factor in the round of layoffs which affected staff in The Molasses Flood’s art department and the studio’s technical narrative director, Robert Bailey.
Project Sirius was first announced back in October 2022 as part of an ambitious line-up of releases from CD Projekt Red. The studio’s roadmap also includes an entirely new trilogy of Witcher games which will pick up after the events of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. A remake of the original game is also in development and will be built from the ground up. The next major title from CD Projekt Red is Cyberpunk 2077’s first and only expansion, Phantom Liberty which is set to release later this year.
Are you hoping to hear more about Project Sirius soon?
For more Insider Gaming, check out our report on Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO.
