Throughout 2025’s Unreal Fest Orlando, developer CD Projekt Crimson has proven a tech demo for The Witcher 4, giving us our first glimpse on the upcoming RPG’s sprawling world whereas delving deeper into the expertise that powers it.
The studio has moved away from its proprietary REDEngine, partnering as a substitute with Epic and utilizing Unreal Engine 5 for its subsequent entry within the collection. Going by the tech demo, the choice would possibly simply repay.
The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo
The video runs for roughly 14 minutes, beginning with a sequence targeted on a service provider and his private guard touring in a carriage. Shut-ups and darkish cramped environments showcase the sport’s quite spectacular facial animations and lighting options earlier than introducing a deeply unsettling manticore.
Following the introductory sequence, Cinematic Director Kajetan Kapuscinski performs by the rest of the demo, controlling Ciri because the digicam often drifts away to showcase particular items of tech.
Unreal Engine 5 permits the sport to extra realistically emulate musculature – as seen throughout a sequence during which Ciri rides Kelpie, her trusty horse – whereas rendering dense, detailed foliage in addition to quite a few crowds with out bringing the {hardware} of the bottom PS5 to its knees.
The Witcher 4’s tech demo is beautiful however, maybe extra impressively, it runs at a gentle 60 FPS, with raytracing enabled, on the usual model of Sony’s console.
One other attention-grabbing element is tied to the situation Ciri explores, which occurs to be Kovir, a spot the collection has but to go to. Other than the “dense forests and wild nature” that it appears to supply in spades, its structure seems to be fairly totally different from that of the locations we’ve seen previously.
You’ll be able to try The Witcher 4’s tech demo for your self beneath, however it’s price preserving in thoughts that, because the developer tells VGC, it exhibits off a bit of the sport’s world however will not be “The Witcher 4 itself.”
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