CD Projekt Red’s new original IP, codenamed Hadar, remains a mysterious project, but a new job ad has finally revealed a few important details. The studio behind The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 is building an emotional open-world experience that it wants to stay with players long after they finish it.

CD Projekt Red has been working on the project codenamed Hadar for years, but the studio has shared very little concrete information about it so far. The game was first announced in October 2022, and it represents a major milestone for the company because it will be CD Projekt Red’s first fully original IP. The Witcher was based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy novels, while Cyberpunk 2077 grew out of Mike Pondsmith’s tabletop role-playing world, so Hadar is the studio’s first chance to build a new universe from the ground up rather than adapt an existing one.

The studio is still not ready for a proper reveal, but a new job ad offers a clearer sense of direction. The listing, spotted by GamesRadar, is for an engineering director at the Warsaw office, and says the successful candidate will help push the studio’s next immersive game in the world of Hadar. Its most telling line describes the goal as creating “an emotional, open-world experience that will stay with gamers”. That confirms two important things: CD Projekt Red is once again working in an open-world structure, and narrative weight will remain central to the experience.

The job ad also confirms that the game will use Unreal Engine 5. That is not surprising, since CD Projekt Red has already shifted its future major projects to that technology, but it matters for Hadar because the studio has to build the technical and artistic foundations of an entirely new world on it. CD Projekt Red’s strongest work has never been only about large maps, but about filling those spaces with characters, political tensions, personal tragedies, and consequences. If Hadar follows that tradition, players should not expect an empty sandbox, but a new role-playing world with its own mythology, tone, and emotional pressure.

The project is still very early, however. CD Projekt’s latest earnings report showed that only 24 people were working on Hadar by the end of April 2026, compared with 513 developers on The Witcher 4. Another 163 were working on Cyberpunk 2, while 83 were assigned to Sirius, the multiplayer project set in The Witcher universe. Those numbers make the situation clear: Hadar is likely still a long way from release, probably in a world-building, concept, and foundation phase rather than full-scale production.

CD Projekt co-founder Michał Nowakowski already suggested back in 2022 that although Hadar will be a new IP, players should not expect the studio to abandon the kind of games it is known for. “When it comes to the genre, we do certain types of games and I think it’s safe to assume that we want to continue to do the games within that kind of genre, so you can imagine what kind of game to expect,” he explained at the time. That makes Hadar less a clean break from CD Projekt Red’s identity and more a test of whether the studio can create a third major universe, after The Witcher and Cyberpunk, that can leave the same kind of mark on players.

Source: VGC