CD Projekt Red's mysterious Project Hadar will be an 'emotional, open-world experience' similar to The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk

CD Projekt Red currently has more irons in the fire than Geralt of Rivia's favourite blacksmith. There's The Witcher 4 and Cyberpunk 2, which on their own are enough to keep the studio busy for the next decade. But there's also the mysterious Project Hadar, which we know very little about despite it being in the works for years.

A few details have emerged over that duration. It's a new IP rather than a licensed game, one that CD Projekt had "established the foundation of" as of March 2026. Now though we have some idea of what those foundations are, thanks to a new job listing posted to CDPR's open positions page.

The listing (via Eurogamer) is for an engineering director—someone who will oversee the game's architecture and technical strategy. "In this position, together with the rest of the team, you will help push the envelope for the next, immersive game in the Hadar world, creating an emotional, open world experience that will stay with gamers."

Latest Videos From

From a developer that specialises in emotional open-world games, it's hardly a revelation. But I suppose it tells us that CDP is sticking to what it knows with Hadar rather than trying something radically different—at least as far as the structure of the game is concerned—and it's more likely to be defined by its world and theme than by offering a completely new type of game experience.

The Witcher 4 - Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo | PS5 Games - YouTube

Watch On

I had a recce around the rest of the jobs page to see if the listings revealed any further details, but the best I could come up with is that Hadar will have quests and NPCs, which is a bit like saying "this book will have nouns and verbs in it". Another job posting from last year suggested Hadar will feature melee combat, which is a bit more specific, but not much.

Given that the Hadar team is still small—26 people at last count—I expect it will be some time before the game properly breaks cover. In other CD Projekt-related news, what did break cover was the heavily rumoured third expansion for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. It's called Songs of the Past, is being developed by Fool's Theory—the team behind the (currently postponed) Witcher 1 remake—and will be "closer to Blood & Wine in scope"—in other words, massive.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.