Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 premieres to strong reactions at Anime Expo 2026

CD Projekt Red and Studio Trigger screened the first episode of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 at Anime Expo 2026 in Los Angeles, with roughly 6,000 people watching the premiere at Crypto Arena. The show hits Netflix in fall 2026 and follows an entirely new cast of characters — still set in Night City, but with no direct narrative connection to David Martinez's story from season 1.

The new season centers on a character called King — real name Weak — a edgerunner who nearly tips into full cyberpsychosis during a heist gone wrong, loses everything including his implants, and ends up barely alive. A second character, Roman, is a filmmaker who captures the chaos on camera, with cinema and memory serving as core themes of the episode. Studio Trigger's Kai Ikarashi said the team deliberately chased the visual energy of 90s animation, and early viewers say it shows. CD Projekt framed the tonal shift explicitly: if season 1 was Michael Bay, season 2 is aiming for Martin Scorsese — slower, more grounded, more intimate. CDPR also described the anthology approach as bringing individual Cyberpunk tabletop campaigns to the screen rather than building one connected saga.

Press reactions out of Anime Expo are uniformly strong. Polygon called the first episode a stunner "packed with incredible colors, gorgeous framing, and punchy sound design", while Gizmodo described it as "exhilarating" — both a bold, ambitious expansion and a viscerally small-scale story at the same time. Kotaku called it "a very different beast from its predecessor". The timing lands well for CDPR: Cyberpunk 2077 just crossed 40 million copies sold and recently hit a one-year Steam peak of 101,558 concurrent players, suggesting the IP has plenty of momentum heading into the new season.

CDPR global PR director Radek Grabowski publicly thanked all 6,000 attendees for honoring a no-spoilers agreement, writing "thank you so much for keeping your promise properly" — a rare and apparently successful piece of large-scale opsec. Edgerunners Season 2 arrives on Netflix this fall.