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Project Hadar Has a World, but Not Yet a Game in Pre-Production
While CD Projekt Red is deep into work on The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, its mysterious third franchise is beginning to move beyond years of conceptual development. Codenamed Project Hadar, the game will be built around CD Projekt Red’s first completely original IP, rather than adapting an existing universe like Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher novels or Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk tabletop games.
Four years after publicly announcing the project, the studio has now completed one of its most fundamental milestones: deciding what Hadar’s world actually is. Speaking with PAP Biznes, joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said CD Projekt Red now has a coherent vision for the world and its key elements after several years of work.
Project Hadar Is Now Testing Gameplay Ideas
The team has begun creating small prototypes and experimenting with gameplay elements, but Nowakowski stressed that Project Hadar has still not entered pre-production. That distinction gives us a much clearer sense of how early the game still is.
CD Projekt Red first revealed Hadar in October 2022, although early conceptual work actually began in 2021. At the time, the studio described the project as an internally incubated IP still focused on basic concepts and laying the foundations for a new franchise.
The latest update shows those foundations have become considerably more concrete, but no genre, setting, protagonist, platform list, or release window has been publicly confirmed.
CD Projekt Red Spent Years Defining Hadar’s Universe
Nowakowski described establishing the world vision as a significant undertaking that took “several good years”. That wording has led some reports to describe Hadar as CD Projekt Red’s biggest project yet, but context matters.
His comment specifically concerns the work of defining the new universe and its key elements, not confirming that the finished game will surpass The Witcher 4 or Cyberpunk 2 in budget, scale, or development size. That makes sense given what CD Projekt Red is trying to do. Unlike The Witcher 4 or the next Cyberpunk, Hadar has no decades of existing lore, characters, or world-building to draw from.
The studio has to create that foundation itself before deciding how a game should fit inside it. CD Projekt Red has already said it expects Hadar’s development team to grow to around 40 to 50 developers by the end of 2026, indicating that work is gradually scaling up even while the project remains conceptual.
For now, though, anyone hoping for a reveal should probably temper expectations. Finishing the vision for Hadar’s world is a meaningful milestone, but CD Projekt Red is still prototyping what players will actually do inside it.
