CD Projekt RED is working on an all-new franchise - Project Hadar

Storied RPG development studio CD Projekt RED has revealed that it plans to introduce a third Intellectual Property to stand alongside Cyberpunk and The Witcher - and it's now in the earliest stages of development.

Codenamed Project Hadar, the franchise really is in its infancy, however - as actual game development has not yet started. The studio says that "IP incubation" has been ongoing since late 2021, and that the game currently has a "strike team" in the "conceptual phase". 

"Hadar is a codename for a third, entirely distinct IP, created from scratch within CDPR," the studio tweeted today, following on from mention of the project during a wide-reaching Investor Relations call. "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."

Notable is the wording that this is created "from scratch" - a first for the studio, where The Witcher was based on books and Cyberpunk on a successful tabletop RPG. That, in itself, is exciting.

Today's CD Projekt investor call took a movie studio style approach to projects, outright revealing the next decade-plus of plans for the studio instead of trying to keep secrets that'll only end up getting leaked online by clout-chasing insiders. As part of the call, the Project Hadar announcement was flanked by the reveal of a suite of new games in The Witcher universe, and the confirmation that a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 will be developed by a new CD Projekt studio currently being set up in the USA.

And will Project Hadar be a role-playing game? Should we be writing about it here, on RPG Site? Well - the answer is - probably, yes. During the investor call, CD Projekt representatives repeatedly described the studio as a developer of role-playing games - even when talking in the context of these new, upcoming titles.

"We are here to create revolutionary role-playing games with memorable stories that inspire gamers," said studio bigwig Adam Kiciński, addressing investors in a video package shown during the call. This language seems pretty definitive, and so it leaves us gingerly placing Project Hadar onto our calendar as an upcoming, immediately hotly-anticipated RPG. We might be waiting a while, though...