Twenty-six people are the team currently breathing life into CD Projekt Red's next big bet, an entirely new franchise hiding under the codename Hadar. The latest job listing for an Engineering Director in Warsaw promises "an emotional, open-world experience that will stay with gamers." Those are heavy words for a project that, as of late February 2026, fit in a modest room.
From a tease without teeth to working prototypes
CDPR first muttered the name Hadar years ago, a tease without teeth. Then, suddenly, the real work surfaced in early 2026, right when joint CEO Michał Nowakowski told investors the team had "established the foundations of this entirely new IP" and things were "progressing dynamically." By March, that foundation had sprouted multiple prototypes, built right in Unreal Engine, the same toolset powering the Ciri-starring tech demo for The Witcher 4. The small group was designing specific gameplay elements, testing mechanical ideas before anyone dared commit to full production. The approach feels deliberate, almost skittish, and it reeks of a studio still rubbing the scar tissue from Cyberpunk 2077's disastrous birth. That game needed years of patch work and the Phantom Liberty expansion to salvage its name.
A job ad doing a trailer's job
And yet, the hiring page speaks as if the emotional weight of The Witcher 3 and the moral gut-punches of Night City are already coded into Hadar's DNA. The listing's exact phrasing is "push the envelope for the next, immersive game in the Hadar world." That is a mission statement disguised as a recruitment post. It's strange, that the clearest glimpse of a secretive third pillar arrives not through a glossy trailer but through a dry job ad. Stranger still, the role's main ask is establishing architecture for gameplay systems. Mentoring engineering teams and enforcing a religious standard for C++ code quality round out the list. This isn't a studio hiring for spectacle. It's hiring for structural integrity, a quiet apology to anyone who played Cyberpunk on a base PlayStation 4.
A third pillar growing in parallel
CDPR has multiple Hadar-related openings now, a signal that the prototypes are convincing enough to warrant more bodies. That hiring push runs parallel to a full-production Witcher 4. Cyberpunk 2 is in early churn, and a side project like Sirius is also in the works. The company keeps reminding us it's committed to single-player, story-rich experiences, an oath that feels almost rebellious as industry money sloshes toward live-service models. Hadar is the first fully original universe CDPR has built, unshackled from Andrzej Sapkowski's Continent and Mike Pondsmith's tabletop lore. The freedom is intoxicating, but it also means there are no crutches.
What we still don't know
Gameplay footage has never been shown. There is no setting, no release window, no platform list. The studio has said precisely nothing beyond an earnings call soundbite and a handful of job posts. Right now, the project is a 26-person kernel, a handful of Unreal Engine prototypes, and a promise that this will feel like something that stays with you. The restraint could be mature caution, could be quiet terror. The line is blurry. The Cyberpunk launch taught CDPR that overpromising burns a scar that even a Phantom Liberty can't fully erase. Now they're hiring an engineering lead with wording that sounds broad enough to soothe fans but specific enough to worry anyone paying close attention.
The project's DNA is not hard to imagine. You can feel the ghost of Geralt and V in the job listing's call for emotional weight, moral dilemmas, personal relationships that outlast the credits. If Hadar works, it'll join The Witcher and Cyberpunk as a pillar in a very particular kind of storytelling canon. If it doesn't, the whole thing dissolves into early-access vapor. For now, the only tangible artifact is a careers page that quietly insists another world is taking shape in Warsaw. And there is the knowledge that twenty-six people are trying to build something that can carry the weight of all those words.
