•Cyberpunk: Edgerunners returns with a new season arriving on Netflix October 20, and IGN’s Fall Fan Fest featured a fresh teaser to mark the occasion.
The first season followed David Martinez, a student gifted at tolerating cyberware enhancements, alongside netrunner Lucyna “Lucy” Kushinada as they tried to survive Night City’s criminal underworld. Season two introduces new characters: Roman Carax, a youth fond of old-fashioned movies, and Talia Yang, who belongs to the cyberware-adjacent gang Maelstrom.
After a special fan screening at Anime Expo, IGN spoke with Bartosz Sztybor, VP of Franchise at CD Projekt Red, and Saya Elder, Executive Producer for Anime, about continuing the story after David and Lucy, how New French Extremity horror shaped the show’s gorer scenes, and which character serves as a love letter to cinema.
A new crew with no David or Lucy
Sztybor said the success of season one was both encouraging and intimidating. “I’m a person that is never one hundred percent happy with what I wrote,” he said, noting the acclaim gave CD Projekt Red confidence that audiences want such projects—but also raised the question: “how do we top that?”
Elder added that it gave the team motivation and confidence to pursue more anime.
On writing a completely new cast for an audience attached to the original, Sztybor said the biggest challenge was stopping himself from artificially repeating what fans loved or deliberately doing the opposite. He said he already had ideas while writing season one, so he split his focus—one half staying true to Edgerunners’ core principles, the other keeping fresh.
Gore and New French Extremity
Sztybor cited David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike, and Julia Ducournau as influences, along with the early-2000s “New French Extremity” wave—listing Martyrs, Haute Tension, Trouble Every Day, À l’intérieur, and Frontier(s). He named Evil Dead as a favorite horror series.
“When you ask me about gore — I will always say more is better,” he said, adding that he was glad co-creator Kai Ikarashi shared the sensibility. He referenced Cormac McCarthy and Michael Haneke for showing violence in a “cold, unemotional way,” claiming viewers have never seen violence depicted so before in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe.
Elder said TRIGGER is typically given room to explore gore and sex organically during storyboarding. She recalled Sztybor conveying the ideal level of violence through onomatopoeia—”his head goes CRUSH” or “the building goes BOOM”—which TRIGGER then amplifies.
The child protagonist
Roman Carax, obsessed with filmmaking, shaped season two’s story. Sztybor said an old idea to include braindances led to narrative and visual choices with TRIGGER, resulting in a kid who sees value in the past—in a cinematic experience—versus being plugged into a braindance.
Elder admitted she initially resisted having a child protagonist: “I knew the audience would string us up by our thumbs the second anything happened to this baby.” She said Night City doesn’t take it easy for anyone, and Roman’s desire to capture stories through his camera keeps leading him into places where no child should be.
Telling stories in a changing world
Sztybor called Roman “a self-referential character”—his own, Kai Ikarashi’s, and Masahiko Otsuka’s “love letter to cinema,” drawing on the team’s dreams of being filmmakers as well as a metaphor for cinema’s condition.
Elder said a theme she wanted to explore was the generational loss of storytelling methods. Recalling that her younger cousins didn’t know what a VHS tape was, she described old film and cinema as “a form of storytelling that is disappearing from Night City.”
Sztybor linked the art style and animation to 90s inspirations, saying some visual choices—particularly how violence appears—are sometimes meant to be uncomfortable, reflecting a pivot toward realism rather than revenge. Elder highlighted TRIGGER’s specific approach to trauma through nightmare sequences, noting one detail she loves: “how sweat is animated. It’s very wet, and heavy, and unpleasant to look at.”
Fall Fan Fest featured 90 exclusive reveals across games, movies, TV, comics, and collectibles.
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