In a huge reveal at this week’s Unreal Fest Orlando, Epic Games and developer CD Projekt Red showcased a technical demonstration of The Witcher 4. Built in Unreal Engine 5 using many of the latest tools and technologies, it offers a window into the future of The Witcher; not just in terms of what Ciri’s saga will (hopefully) look like, but also the people we’ll meet, the places we’ll go, and the general vibe of the game we’ll one day get our hands on.
There was plenty to see in the 14 minutes of demonstration footage, so we’re here to break it down with the help of CD Projekt Red and Epic Games. Here are the 10 most important things we’ve learned about The Witcher 4 and its new tech demo.
1. The Demo is Not Gameplay
The demo we saw was played live on stage by CD Projekt Red’s Cinematic Director, Kajetan Kapuściński. But while Kapuściński was literally moving Ciri around the game world, the studio is keen to emphasise that the demo is not a true slice of the game. While the mountain region, forest, and port town you saw will be part of The Witcher 4, the quest being played and the characters Ciri interacts with may not be featured in the final game.
As Kapuściński explains to me, this “was a demo that [CD Projekt Red and Epic Games] crafted so both companies can work on some technology that will be powering The Witcher 4 in the future. So it's not gameplay of The Witcher 4, per se.”
So if it’s not gameplay, what can we learn from it? “It shows our artistic direction and how we would like to approach some things,” Kapuściński explains. And so everything you see – the scope of the world, the density of the foliage, the way Ciri and NPCs react to each other, and how cinematic cutscenes blend with the interactive parts – is CD Project Red’s ambition. It’s how the studio currently envisions the game and what the team is working towards.
“But everything you saw is subject to be changed, because that is a snippet of what we have now,” Kapuściński says. In short, this is not a full representation of the final version of The Witcher 4.
2. Will The Witcher 4 Look Like That?
The visual quality of this tech demo is astonishing, but we’ve been here before. Many people will remember the first footage of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Cyberpunk 2077, which turned out to be more ambitious, at least visually, than the final product. In The Witcher 4’s case, it’s especially easy to be skeptical, as this demonstration was running on a regular PlayStation 5 (not even a PS5 Pro!) at 60 frames per second. I asked Wyeth Johnson, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Epic Games, if this quality was genuinely something players could expect to experience on a base PS5.
“Oh absolutely. We can't lie here,” he says. “I mean the technology that we're making has to be directly relevant for what players expect, and players across the entire hardware spectrum are asking for amazing 60 frames per second gameplay.”
The new advancements in Unreal Engine 5.6 are allowing developers to run complex tech more efficiently. As explained in an Unreal blog post, “The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements are designed to deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. By eliminating key CPU bottlenecks, you can author more complex scenes while maintaining a smoother 60 FPS frame rate.” The promise of all this is that the experiences that are currently typically locked behind a 30 frames-per-second ‘Quality’ mode will be available at 60fps – all without requiring new hardware.
“The goal that we set at the very beginning, to make this demo and play it live on a standard PlayStation 5 in 60 frames per second, that was a challenge on its own,” says Kapuściński. “And pushing towards that allowed us to achieve these optimizations that allow us to use technology on a bigger scale.”
3. We're Headed North. Very North
The technical demo takes place in Kovir, a region in the very north of The Continent, the world in which The Witcher takes place. It’s situated north-west of the lands of Redania and Temeria, locations you’ll be familiar with from The Witcher 3. Its mountainous terrain is resource-rich, and so mining is one of the kingdom’s key industries. Kovir is the world’s leading exporter of minerals, and among those minerals is salt; you’ll have noticed that Ciri’s quest in this demonstration is to investigate a salt merchant’s missing cargo.
Fans of The Witcher books have waited a long time to visit Kovir, but creating it for a video game is no easy task. As Game Director Sebastian Kalemba explained as part of the demonstration, “So much of The Witcher world is natural, organic, especially Kovir with its dense forests and wild nature.” The Witcher 3 featured some grand woodland environments that remain impressive even 10 years later, but the forest shown in this demo is a league ahead of them. It stretches as far as the eye can see, with detailed pine trees creating a blanket of green through the mountain’s ravine. Both vertically and horizontally, there’s an astonishing amount of foliage detail.
“I think for the Witcher franchise, the forest is definitely the soul of the game,” says Charles Tremblay, VP of Technology at CD Projekt Red. “And this is something that we were struggling [with] since the beginning of the project. How are we going to make the next generation of foliage?” The answer was Nanite Foliage, a new Unreal technology that has a whole new approach to how assets like leaves, flowers, and pine needles are loaded into the environment. It allows for a much more detailed natural world without the need for constant load times and pop-in – and it was that that has helped CD Project Red work on a seamless forest environment that is so richly detailed.
4. A Horse Named Kelpie
For hundreds of hours we travelled around The Continent on a very beloved steed. But Roach was Geralt’s horse. Ciri needs her own mount, and luckily she has one. Kelpie is a black horse and we can see her in action for the first time in this tech demo. While Kelpie is new to the games, this horse has roots in The Witcher books. Originally belonging to a member of the Guild of Merchants named Hotspurn, Ciri took ownership of Kelpie when he died. Recognised as a magnificent horse wherever she goes, Kelpie’s best trick is that she can be summoned by rubbing a magical bracelet (it’s as if she were written to be a video game horse).
In the books, Kelpie is said to be able to jump over seven-foot-tall walls with ease. Anyone who’s played The Witcher 3 will tell you that’s an impossibility with Roach – he’s more likely to disappear and end up on a roof. And so all this begs the question: will Kelpie be easier and more enjoyable to control than Geralt’s old steed?
“No offense to Roach, but when you have this jank it can get you out of the immersion, that's for sure,” admits Tremblay. “We want [players] to explore the world with [Kelpie] as a companion and it has to be close to perfection, for sure.” New tech like Unreal’s multi-character motion matching should hopefully ensure riding Kelpie is a smooth experience.
Like so many of The Witcher’s creatures, Kelpie has a mythological connection. In Scottish folklore, a Kelpie is a shape-shifting water spirit that has the ability to disguise itself as a horse when on dry land. Could this name hint at Kelpie also being able to take Ciri across spans of water? We’ll just have to wait and see.
5. The Quest and The Manticore
As we’ve established, this showcase is a technical demonstration rather than a slice of the game, and so there’s not really a quest to see, at least not in the game sense of the word. But Kalemba wanted to ensure the demo had a sense of narrative running through it – this is CD Projekt Red, after all.
“The big challenge was how to make a tech demo, but in a way that we'll also be able to incorporate story and bits and pieces from this world,” he explains. “I love that narrative layer in this entire piece, [it] actually even helps to boost the technical achievements behind the entire demo.”
In that narrative layer, we see that Ciri has taken on a classic bit of Witcher work. She’s accepted a contract from a salt merchant to find his missing cargo and crew. Unluckily for him, both his salt and men are long gone. Luckily for Ciri, their grisly fate arrived via the blood-soaked jaws of a manticore. And, as we all know, killing monsters is exactly what Witchers are known for.
It’s a pleasant surprise to see a manticore in this demo. Production materials that were leaked during the development of The Witcher 3 suggested that manticores were planned to be part of Wild Hunt, but they were cut from the final game. While this tech demonstration is by no means confirmation of anything appearing in The Witcher 4, we at the very least have been able to see one of the beasts rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Hopefully we’ll get to fight it in the final version of the game.
Including this quest was important to Kalemba. “One of the common denominators between the writing [in the] books and the games is a cocktail of genres. It's a cocktail of experience,” he says. The reveal trailer shown at The Game Awards last year, he explains, was a more “grounded” experience that showed the ugly realities of living in the world of The Witcher. “Here you have this adventurous vibe, you know what I mean?”
6. Welcome to Valdrest, Population: Over 300
As Ciri adventures through Kovir, she returns to Valdrest, the port town that’s home to the trader who gave her the salt contract. It’s also home to over 300 other people, thanks to a whole host of tech optimisations and Unreal Engine’s new animation framework. That means larger, more realistic crowds – Novigrad will hopefully feel primitive in comparison.
Among the town’s population we see men, women, and children, a marketplace full of traders and guards, several dwarves, a few sex workers, entertainers, and a number of different animals, including a tamed bear. Perhaps most impressive is the variety of body types and unique animations on display; it feels like everyone is an individual, something emphasised by unique characteristics, such as a disabled man walking with a crutch, or a mother wrapping her arm around her child. It’s an example of Epic’s metahuman technology bringing ever-increasingly lifelike and varied characters to video games. Something that can also be seen in the way they interact with each other…
7. A Responsive, Living World
The NPCs in Valdrest are interesting for many reasons beyond just their visual variety. As Kalemba explained during the demo, “Notice how responsive the world is. Character actions directly affect what happens around you, sometimes even setting off chain reactions. Everything is working together.” We see this in action as Ciri bumps into a merchant carrying a crate of apples, which causes him to lose balance and drop his fruit all over the floor. The apples, fully rendered with physics, begin to roll down the hill. A nearby chicken, startled by the noise, clucks and flaps away.
We also see how NPCs can react to Ciri – upon spotting her, a guard says “Oh bugger, not her again,” and spits at Ciri as she walks past. It’s reactive behaviour like this that helps sell a Witcher’s shadowy reputation. Many people are prejudiced against these mutated monster hunters. “The idea is that there are physical interactions that when you get poked at, you get a reaction to it in a way that feels plausible to you,” says Johnson. “All of these things keep you in the world.”
There are a number of other cool events we see, such as a man being thrown out of a tavern (apparently for cheating at Gwent – does this mean our beloved card game will be back for another round?). It’s unclear if these behaviours are scripted or dynamic based on schedules or routines à la The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and when asked, CD Projekt Red would not say what its ambitions were there. But the goal is a living, breathing world.
“For us, the world words we are creating, it's super important for us to actually make them as vivid and as believable as possible,” says Kapuściński. “Naturally behaving, properly looking NPCs are an important part of it. So yeah, we've proved that with previous games, and we're not aiming any lower than that.”
8. Seamless Cinematics
Because this is a technical demonstration and not actual gameplay, we didn’t see a lot of “game” – you’ll no doubt have noticed how the camera swung away from Ciri’s conversation with the merchant before any kind of dialogue system and UI could be shown. But what we did see is a vision of how dialogue sequences in The Witcher 4 will begin, and it’s completely seamless. The Witcher 3 featured brief loading screens as it transitioned from the gameplay camera to the cinematic camera, but all that’s gone now thanks to Unreal Engine’s tools. Now, as Ciri approaches the geographic trigger point for a dialogue – in this case, a balustrade – the camera automatically ‘unhooks’ itself from its regular game position behind Ciri and begins to frame the scene as required for the cinematic.
CD Projekt Red first achieved seamless game-to-cinematic transitions in Cyberpunk 2077, where it was vital to maintaining the first-person immersion. While things are a little different here, thanks to the third-person perspective, it’s cool to see the studio’s vision for keeping the experience flowing naturally.
9. A Small Gift for All Witcher Fans
Right at the end of the demo, Kalemba said that the demo was going to finish with “a small gift for all Witcher fans.” That gift was a first look at Lan Exeter.
While it is briefly mentioned by characters in both The Witcher 3 and its expansion, Blood and Wine, this is the first time we are seeing this grand city rendered for a video game. Lan Exeter is a port city in Kovir and the kingdom’s winter capital (there is also a summer capital, called Pont Vanis) that features in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books. With no pedestrian walkways, the only way to navigate Lan Exeter is via its canal network. Unsurprisingly, the city is essentially a wintry, fantasy Venice.
The Great Canal that runs through Lan Exeter leads to a number of important places, but the most important of them all is Ensenada Palace; the residence of the King of Kovir and Poviss. On the boat ride to the palace, a visitor would also be able to see the grand homes of many admirals and business magnates. It seems a sure bet that we’ll be visiting at least one or two of those estates when we visit Lan Exeter in The Witcher 4.
10. The Next Generation of Open World RPGs
As the demo draws to a close, Kalemba says, “I think what we’re doing together [with Epic Games] is going to bring in a new generation of open world RPGs.” But what exactly does that mean?
“For us, story [and] quest is always key,” says Tremblay. “And now with the immersion, we want people to experience this world, but the technology should not be in the way. We want people to feel like they belong to this world, they interact with the world, that they can experience the emotion of the character, feeling that they are connected to the story. With our partnership and all the tools we build and all the technology, I think it'll be yet another level for us going forward.”
“For us, we don't want to get in the way of artistic vision,” says Johnson. “We want everybody who uses Unreal Engine to come at the tools and the technology unburdened by what they imagine and believe that it can't do. We want [them] to come to the technology with a vision of ‘Here's what we want to achieve. We're going to dream big, and we hope that the engine moves out of our way as efficiently and effectively as possible and allows us to achieve it.’”
Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.
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