With Cyberpunk 2077’s redemption arc firmly in the rear-view mirror, CD Projekt Red is now full throttle on three separate projects. We already know, more or less, what two of them are: One is a new trilogy of Witcher games codenamed Polaris, and the other is a Cyberpunk sequel codenamed Orion. But one mysterious star-themed codename remains: Hadar, which we know is a “new IP” and, well, actually that’s all we know.
Until today that is. Get out your game genre Guess Who boards everyone, because CDPR co-CEO Michał Nowakowski has taken to Twitter to let us all know what Hadar isn’t. A few hundred more tweets like these and we’ll probably be able to figure out just what the heck this thing is gonna be.
Can only tell it’s definitely NOT a cosmic horror in feudal Japan 😉 Time will come, we will spill the beans. Worry not 🙂 https://t.co/O21IleS7P9February 16, 2024
“Can only tell it’s definitely NOT a cosmic horror in feudal Japan,” said Nowakowski in response to a tweet from TheNeonArcade speculating that Hadar could be a either “cosmic horror,” or “feudal Japan,” or maybe even “modern day crime thriller.” Update your Excel sheets accordingly, folks. We’re still left with racing game, flight sim, football manager, Doom clone, Habbo Hotel-like, MUD and, well, every other genre on Earth.
In fact, it still technically leaves open the three genres/settings proposed by TheNeonArcade originally. After all, Nowakowski only said that the game is “NOT a cosmic horror in feudal Japan.” It could still be a cosmic horror in Norfolk, or a feudal Japan-themed rhythm game. Still, Nowakowski did joke—in response to a comment remarking that Hadar smelled “of hard [science-fiction]—that there are “no smells on [Twitter]”. I can’t quite tell if that comment counts as a point for or against a CDPR hard sci-fi game, but I have to say I’d be very curious to see the studio try its hand at a Starfield-esque project.
Alas, we’ll no doubt have to wait years upon years to even get a taste of what Hadar is going to be. When the project was announced in 2022, CDPR said that “early stage conceptual works commenced in 2021,” and that the project was “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.” Believe what you want, I’m banking on a Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F-like starring Idris Elba.
