Progress on Project Hadar: CD Projekt Red Begins Gameplay Testing of Its New Franchise

CD Projekt Red has reached a significant milestone in the development of Project Hadar, its first fully original franchise. According to the company, the stage of laying the groundwork and shaping the overall vision of the world b

Game studio CD Project Red has reached an important milestone in the development of Project Hadar, its first completely original series.

According to the announcement of this company, the stage of establishing and shaping the general vision of the game world has been largely completed and the production team is now making prototypes and testing different gameplay ideas and mechanisms; However, the project has not yet officially entered the pre-production phase.

Describing the current state of the project, CD Project co-CEO Michał Nowakowski stated that the creation of the world of Hadar was one of the studio's largest world-building efforts and took several years. According to him, the development team has now achieved a coherent image and understanding of this new world and its fundamental elements and has started working on the game itself; However, the development process is still in the very early stages.

It is important to understand this structural distinction: the Hadar title is currently still in the conceptual phase, not the pre-production phase. During the financial meeting of the first half of 2026, Carolina Gnasch, Vice President of Investor Relations of CD Project, clearly emphasized that the development team is testing various approaches and ideas and making prototypes for some gameplay elements. Therefore, the existence of a prototype does not necessarily mean that the game has fully entered the pre-production stage.

As of September, more than 30 developers were working on the Hadar project, and CD Project plans to increase this number to around 40-50 by the end of 2026. These dimensions, compared to the giant development teams of works such as The Witcher 4 and the second part of Cyberpunk, still seem very small; The issue suggests that Hadar is currently at a stage where it needs to establish its identity, key systems and mechanisms before fully expanding the team.

However, work on Hadar is not a fledgling project. CD Projekt confirmed in 2022 that the conceptual and basic activities of this work were keyed from 2021, and finally, Project Hadar was officially introduced to the public in October 2022. At the same time, the Polish gaming giant announced that, for the first time in its history, it is creating an entirely new intellectual property (IP) and world from scratch.

Accordingly, unlike The Witcher and Cyberpunk titles, the Hadar project is not adapted from any pre-existing series or universe. While the Witcher franchise was based on the novels of Andrei Sapkowski and Cyberpunk was based on the board game by Mike Pandasmith, Hadar's intellectual property was born from the ground up within CD Projekt Red's own studio. This company refers to the mentioned project as the third main production line of its products, next to the two mentioned franchises.

Consequently, one should not expect any overlap or connection between Hadar's universe and The Witcher or Cyberpunk. CD Project's strategic and organizational documents explicitly categorize the project as a third fully independent IP and a brand new universe; Therefore, there is currently no indication that this title will be placed in a common universe with the previous two series.

From the point of view of game style and genre, all the evidence indicates that Hadar is walking in the direction of its creators' usual specialty, story-based role-playing games. However, the studio has yet to provide any official details about the camera angle, combat system, mission structure, or even the exact look and feel of the game world.

On the technical side, it has been confirmed that Hadar will be powered by the Unreal Engine graphics engine. The management of the CD project previously announced that the developers have built several prototypes and implemented them directly in the Unreal Engine in order to test possible game elements. This decision is part of the studio's big plan to migrate from its old proprietary engine, REDengine, to the new technologies of Epic Games for future projects.