The Witcher 4 tech demo ran on a base PS5 to ‘show how much we can optimize'
Arguably the highlight of Epic's State of Unreal keynote was the opening: a sprawling technical demo that showed just how good The Witcher 4 looks in Unreal Engine 5. It showcased a bustling market in a port city, a beautiful forest landscape, and a horse that looked and acted like, well, a horse. Even more impressive was the fact that the demo was running at 60 frames per second on a base model PlayStation 5. According to Julius Girbig, a senior technical animator at Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, the choice of hardware for the demo was very intentional.
'Everyone has the idea of how fast a PS5 is and what kinds of games it can run,' he tells The Verge. 'That's why we specifically wanted to go that route of: let's start with the consoles, let's show how much we can optimize this engine together with Epic and make it work on current gen, instead of running it on some high-end hardware.'
Now, to be clear, the UE5 demo is not actually a slice of the final game. Girbig describes it as 'a demonstration of the tools that we are currently building that will eventually power The Witcher 4,' and something that 'does show the style and direction that we're going for, and the fidelity that we're aiming at with the final game.'
But whatever it ends up being, and whenever it launches, The Witcher 4 will be a pivotal release for CDPR. After previously creating open-world games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 with its own proprietary engine — sometimes with technically disastrous results — the studio announced in 2022 that it was switching to Unreal.
According to Girbig, who didn't work at CDPR until after the shift to Unreal, the decision was made because UE5 'across the board, gives us what we're looking for.' That includes an increased sense of scale necessary for open-world games, with the ability to render hundreds of non-playable characters with more elaborate AI guiding their actions, and also a better production pipeline for managing multiple projects. (An upcoming remake of the first Witcher game is also being made in UE5.)
But from an artistic perspective, Girbig says, the move to Epic's engine has a different kind of impact: getting out of the way to allow for more ambitious ideas. 'It allows an artist to express themselves much more easily when the engine isn't a limitation anymore,' he says. 'That's what we're aiming for here. As an artist, for me, this unlocked myself to think bigger, and on bigger scales.'
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