CD Projekt RED is continuing to grow its development teams while it keeps quietly working on The Witcher 4 and the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. As reported by GamesRadar, the latest additions to the studio are veterans of the RPG genre and include Karel Kolmann, who previously worked on both of the Kingdom Come: Deliverance games as a lead gameplay designer, and is now a senior quest designer at CD Projekt RED.
Joining Kolmann is former Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 lead level designer Zdeněk Glatz, who joined CD Projekt RED earlier this year as a senior open-world designer. Along with them, Warhorse Studios’ former lead technical designer Zbyněk Zelinka has now joined the Cyberpunk 2077 developer as a senior gameplay designer. Zelinka seems to be the latest addition to the team, having only joined last month following his tenure at Warhorse Studios that lasted over seven months.
CD Projekt RED pursuing industry veterans that have quite a bit of experience with RPGs that give players plenty of choices to make should come as no surprise. According to the studio’s joint CEO Adam Badwoski, The Witcher 4 will give players choices that will “leave a lasting impression.” The team has been putting an “immense focus” on the game’s narrative, and will have plenty of major emotional beats that will leave an impact on players.
In the meantime, CD Projekt RED has also been working on another secretive project dubbed Hadar. Just last month, co-CEO Michał Nowakowski spoke about how the team now has a “coherent vision” for the project, and that it is the studio’s “biggest undertaking to date.”
“It’s been the biggest undertaking so far that has taken us a few good years, but at this point we can say that we have a coherent vision of this world and its key elements. The team has started work on the game, although it is still not yet in pre-production,” he said (via machine translation). “Some small prototypes are currently being created, and gameplay elements are being tried.”
As for what Hadar will be, CD Projekt RED has been largely silent on the matter. However, a job listing has indicated that it will be an “emotional, open-world experience”. Nowakowski himself had spoken about development progress on the project back in March, and at the time, he said that “multiple prototypes” were in the works that would help set a proper vision for Hadar.
“Now, we have clearly defined distinguishing features of this world, and established key pillars that will not only provide the foundation for the game itself, but also, potentially, for other future products.”
As for CD Projekt RED’s larger ambitions, Nowakowski said back in June that the company has no plans to flood the market with constant releases. While big games might start coming out from the studio at some point on a yearly basis, he said that “this is not the goal.”
“We have a rough ten-year rolling plan, but the goal is not to flood the games market with CDPR games. We just want to make really cool games, and we don’t want to have a ton of IPs either. We’re not planning to grow in that way.”
