CDPR's Project Sirius is aimed at fans of the Netflix Witcher series, not "hardcore" RPG players

(Image credit: Netflix)

Project Sirius, the Witcher game in development at The Molasses Flood, is a different from previous entries in the series, aimed more at "broader demographics" rather than "hardcore" RPG fans.

The Molasses Flood was once an indie studio known for survival titles like the single-player The Flame in the Flood and the co-op Drake Hollow. The official description of Project Sirius suggests that it will offer "multiplayer gameplay on top of a single-player experience including a campaign with quests and a story," and job listings have suggested it will combine hand-crafted and procedural elements for its world.

In a Q&A after yesterday's financial report, business development SVP Michał Nowakowski said "I can definitely say Project Sirius is not a mobile game. When we were talking about it, I think we actually were talking about broader demographics, which means we want to reach to people that we were not necessarily efficiently reaching through the Witcher games that we've been making so far. So imagine people who maybe watched the TV show but are not necessarily into playing very dark-themed, hardcore RPG games. So this is more the kind of thinking behind that."

Later in the call, Nowakowski contrasted Sirius against Project Polaris, which is similar to previous Witcher games and "a continuation of the core series. Project Sirius is the one reaching out to broader demographics - to people who are interested in the franchise and IP, but are not necessarily into playing the hardcore role-playing games like The Witcher series we've presented so far."

But Nowakowski says you shouldn't think of Sirius as a smaller game - but while he calls Project Canis Majoris a "triple-A, standalone project," he simply refers to Sirius as "an ambitious project. It's different than what you got used to in the main Witcher series. However, as I mentioned earlier, we're fully going behind it, and it's a big project for us as well."

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.