CD Projekt Red's First Original IP Has a Name

CD Projekt Red has been building the foundations of a world that has never existed anywhere before — no Sapkowski novels, no Mike Pondsmith rulebook, nothing to adapt. Just a team of eighteen people and a codename.

That codename is Hadar. CDPR first announced the project publicly in October 2022 as part of a broader strategy update that also confirmed the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel and a new Witcher trilogy. At the time, the studio was explicit about what it was and wasn't: "The project is in the earliest stages of the creative process, which means we are not developing any game yet, but working exclusively on the foundation for this new setting." That phase — pure IP incubation, world-building without a game attached — is now over. At CDPR's 2025 Annual Financial Results presentation on March 19, CFO Piotr Nielubowicz confirmed that Hadar has moved on to the conceptual phase of the first video game. The distinction matters. What was an exercise in lore and world design has become an exercise in figuring out what the actual game is going to be.

The team has described where things stand with a degree of detail that is careful to set expectations without raising them too high. The foundational distinguishing features of the world have been established, along with what they describe as key pillars intended to underpin not only the game itself but potentially other future products built in the same setting. The team is now designing specific elements that may or may not make it into the final product, building multiple prototypes and testing them directly in Unreal Engine 5 to see how selected mechanics and gameplay elements actually perform in practice. That last part — live-testing in a real engine rather than theorizing on paper — marks a meaningful transition from one kind of work to another.

What kind of game Hadar will be has not been officially described, but a job listing for a Senior Gameplay Designer surfaced requiring at least five years of experience in RPG and action titles with melee-oriented combat. For a studio whose last two games were defined by sword-and-signs fantasy combat and a guns-heavy cyberpunk shooter, a new IP built around close-quarters melee fighting would represent a distinct creative direction. The listing also specified Unreal Engine 4 and 5 experience, consistent with CDPR's studio-wide shift away from their proprietary REDengine.

All of this is happening in parallel with four other active projects at CDPR: The Witcher 4 in full production with over 400 developers, the Cyberpunk sequel Project Orion in pre-production across studios in Boston, Vancouver, and Poland, an early-concept remake of the original Witcher game, and the beginning of plans for what follows Witcher 4 in the new trilogy. Hadar sits at the far end of this pipeline with the smallest team and the furthest horizon. CDPR's cash position — over 1.3 billion PLN at the end of 2025 — gives the studio the runway to fund all of it simultaneously without external pressure to rush any single project. The studio has stated explicitly that it intends to remain independent and develop on its own terms. Hadar, whenever it arrives, will be the clearest expression of what that actually means: a world, a story, and a game that came entirely from inside the studio that made it.