In a big 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 utilizing many of the latest instruments and applied sciences, it gives a window into the future of The Witcher; not simply in phrases of what Ciri’s saga will (hopefully) appear like, but additionally the people we’ll meet, the locations we’ll go, and the basic vibe of the game we’ll sooner or later get our fingers on.
There was a lot to see in the 14 minutes of demonstration footage, so we’re right here to interrupt it down with the help of CD Projekt Red and Epic Games. Here are the 10 most important issues we’ve discovered about The Witcher 4 and its new tech demo.
1. The Demo is Not Gameplay
The demo we noticed was performed stay on stage by CD Projekt Red’s Cinematic Director, Kajetan Kapuściński. But whereas Kapuściński was actually shifting Ciri round the game world, the studio is eager to stress that the demo just isn’t a true slice of the game. While the mountain area, forest, and port city you noticed might be half of The Witcher 4, the quest being performed and the characters Ciri interacts with is probably not featured in the last 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 study from it? “It shows our artistic direction and how we would like to approach some things,” Kapuściński explains. And so every part you see – the scope of the world, the density of the foliage, the approach Ciri and NPCs react to one another, and how cinematic cutscenes mix with the interactive components – is CD Project Red’s ambition. It’s how the studio at present envisions the game and what the staff is working in direction of.
“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 visible high quality of this tech demo is astonishing, however we’ve been right here earlier than. Many people will keep in mind the first footage of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Cyberpunk 2077, which turned out to be more bold, at the least visually, than the last product. In The Witcher 4’s case, it’s particularly simple to be skeptical, as this demonstration was operating on a common PlayStation 5 (not even a PS5 Pro!) at 60 frames per second. I requested Wyeth Johnson, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Epic Games, if this high quality was genuinely one thing gamers may anticipate to expertise 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 developments in Unreal Engine 5.6 are permitting builders to run complicated tech more effectively. As defined 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 that is that the experiences which can be at present sometimes locked behind a 30 frames-per-second ‘Quality’ mode might be accessible at 60fps – all with out 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 area in the very north of The Continent, the world wherein The Witcher takes place. It’s located north-west of the lands of Redania and Temeria, places you’ll be accustomed to 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 main exporter of minerals, and amongst these minerals is salt; you’ll have seen that Ciri’s quest on this demonstration is to analyze a salt service provider’s lacking cargo.
Fans of The Witcher books have waited a long time to go to Kovir, however creating it for a video game is no simple activity. As Game Director Sebastian Kalemba defined as half 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 stay spectacular even 10 years later, however the forest proven on this demo is a league forward of them. It stretches so far as the eye can see, with detailed pine bushes creating a blanket of inexperienced by means of the mountain’s ravine. Both vertically and horizontally, there’s an astonishing quantity of foliage element.
“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 reply was Nanite Foliage, a new Unreal technology that has a entire new method to how belongings like leaves, flowers, and pine needles are loaded into the surroundings. It permits for a a lot more detailed pure world with out the need for fixed load instances and pop-in – and it was that that has helped CD Project Red work on a seamless forest surroundings that’s so richly detailed.
4. A Horse Named Kelpie
For lots of of hours we travelled round The Continent on a very beloved steed. But Roach was Geralt’s horse. Ciri wants her own mount, and fortunately she has one. Kelpie is a black horse and we are able to see her in action for the first time on this tech demo. While Kelpie is new to the video games, this horse has roots in The Witcher books. Originally belonging to a member of the Guild of Merchants named Hotspurn, Ciri took possession of Kelpie when he died. Recognised as a magnificent horse wherever she goes, Kelpie’s greatest trick is that she could be summoned by rubbing a magical bracelet (it’s as if she have been written to be a video game horse).
In the books, Kelpie is claimed to have the ability to bounce over seven-foot-tall partitions with ease. Anyone who’s performed The Witcher 3 will inform you that’s an impossibility with Roach – he’s more prone to disappear and finish up on a roof. And so all this begs the query: will Kelpie be simpler and more pleasing to control than Geralt’s previous 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 movement matching ought to hopefully guarantee using Kelpie is a easy expertise.
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 potential to disguise itself as a horse when on dry land. Could this identify trace at Kelpie additionally with the ability to take Ciri throughout spans of water? We’ll simply have to attend and see.
5. The Quest and The Manticore
As we’ve established, this showcase is a technical demonstration somewhat than a slice of the game, and so there’s probably not a quest to see, at the least not in the game sense of the phrase. But Kalemba needed to make sure the demo had a sense of narrative operating by means of it – that 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 traditional bit of Witcher work. She’s accepted a contract from a salt service provider to search out his lacking cargo and crew. Unluckily for him, each his salt and males are long gone. Luckily for Ciri, their grisly destiny arrived by way of the blood-soaked jaws of a manticore. And, as everyone knows, killing monsters is strictly what Witchers are recognized for.
It’s a nice shock to see a manticore on this demo. Production supplies that have been leaked during the growth of The Witcher 3 recommended that manticores have been deliberate to be half of Wild Hunt, however they have been cut from the last game. While this tech demonstration is by no means affirmation of something showing in The Witcher 4, we at the very least have been in a position to see one of the beasts rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Hopefully we’ll get to fight it in the last model 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 proven at The Game Awards final yr, he explains, was a more “grounded” expertise that confirmed the ugly realities of dwelling 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 by means of Kovir, she returns to Valdrest, the port city that’s home to the trader who gave her the salt contract. It’s additionally home to over 300 different people, because of a entire host of tech optimisations and Unreal Engine’s new animation framework. That means bigger, more real looking crowds – Novigrad will hopefully really feel primitive compared.
Among the city’s population we see males, ladies, and kids, a market full of merchants and guards, a number of dwarves, a few intercourse staff, entertainers, and a quantity of totally different animals, together with a tamed bear. Perhaps most spectacular is the selection of physique varieties and distinctive animations on show; it appears like everyone seems to be an particular person, one thing emphasised by distinctive traits, reminiscent of a disabled man strolling with a crutch, or a mom wrapping her arm round her little one. It’s an instance of Epic’s metahuman technology bringing ever-increasingly lifelike and diverse characters to video video games. Something that may also be seen in the approach they work together with one another…
7. A Responsive, Living World
The NPCs in Valdrest are fascinating for a lot of causes past simply their visible selection. As Kalemba defined 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 service provider carrying a crate of apples, which causes him to lose stability and drop his fruit throughout the flooring. The apples, totally rendered with physics, start to roll down the hill. A close-by hen, startled by the noise, clucks and flaps away.
We additionally see how NPCs can react to Ciri – upon recognizing her, a guard says “Oh bugger, not her again,” and spits at Ciri as she walks previous. It’s reactive behaviour like this that helps promote a Witcher’s shadowy status. Many people are prejudiced in opposition to 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 quantity of different cool occasions we see, reminiscent of a man being thrown out of a tavern (apparently for dishonest at Gwent – does this imply our beloved card game might be back for one more spherical?). It’s unclear if these behaviours are scripted or dynamic primarily based on schedules or routines à la The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and when requested, CD Projekt Red wouldn’t say what its ambitions have been there. But the goal is a dwelling, respiratory 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 that is a technical demonstration and not precise gameplay, we didn’t see a lot of “game” – you’ll no doubt have seen how the digital camera swung away from Ciri’s dialog with the service provider earlier than any sort of dialogue system and UI could possibly be proven. But what we did see is a imaginative and prescient of how dialogue sequences in The Witcher 4 will start, and it’s fully seamless. The Witcher 3 featured temporary loading screens because it transitioned from the gameplay digital camera to the cinematic digital camera, however all that’s gone now because of Unreal Engine’s instruments. Now, as Ciri approaches the geographic set off level for a dialogue – on this case, a balustrade – the digital camera mechanically ‘unhooks’ itself from its common game place behind Ciri and begins to border the scene as required for the cinematic.
CD Projekt Red first achieved seamless game-to-cinematic transitions in Cyberpunk 2077, the place it was very important to sustaining the first-person immersion. While issues are a little totally different right here, because of the third-person perspective, it’s cool to see the studio’s imaginative and prescient for maintaining the expertise flowing naturally.
9. A Small Gift for All Witcher Fans
Right at the finish of the demo, Kalemba stated that the demo was going to complete with “a small gift for all Witcher fans.” That present was a first have a look at Lan Exeter.
While it’s briefly talked about by characters in each The Witcher 3 and its enlargement, Blood and Wine, that is the first time we’re seeing this grand metropolis rendered for a video game. Lan Exeter is a port metropolis in Kovir and the kingdom’s winter capital (there’s additionally a summer season capital, known as Pont Vanis) that options in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books. With no pedestrian walkways, the solely option to navigate Lan Exeter is by way of its canal community. Unsurprisingly, the metropolis is basically a wintry, fantasy Venice.
The Great Canal that runs by means of Lan Exeter results in a quantity of important locations, however the most important of all of them is Ensenada Palace; the residence of the King of Kovir and Poviss. On the boat trip to the palace, a customer would additionally have the ability to see the grand properties of many admirals and business magnates. It appears a sure wager that we’ll be visiting at the least one or two of these estates after we go to Lan Exeter in The Witcher 4.
10. The Next Generation of Open World RPGs
As the demo attracts 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 precisely does that imply?
“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.