CD Projekt Red showed off some of the fruits of their co-operation with Epic Games and their switch to Unreal Engine with new in-game footage of its upcoming game The Witcher 4.
Revealed as part of the State Of Unreal showcase, this tech demo showed the video game debut of the region of Kovir. We see protagonist Ciri and her horse Kelpie traverse through the forests and visit the port town of Valdrest.
The Unreal Engine isn’t known to be associated with open-world games, not that there isn’t any (see Final Fantasy VII Rebirth). But the partnership between CDPR and Epic here is purposefully so that Unreal Engine has the tools to make better open world games. And based on the tech demo, with in-game footage running at 60 FPS on a base PS5, the results look mighty impressive.
Though with caveat that this by no means represent the gameplay of the final release, and we’ve seen CDPR fumbled with a rough launch before as seen with Cyberpunk 2077.
The tools and tech used to create this tech demo, which includes Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage rendering and MetaHuman technology with Mass AI crowd scaling, will be rolling out to all Unreal Engine developers as part of Unreal Engine 5.6.
The Witcher 4, dubbed as “the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game to date,” has no release date yet, but it’s coming to PS5, PC and Xbox Series X|S.
