As Unreal Fest 2025 commenced, CD PROJEKT RED joined Epic Games on stage to debut an early tech demo of The Witcher 4, offering a glimpse at the next chapter in the franchise powered by Unreal Engine 5. The demo highlights some of the features and collaborative tools being developed, with a mindset of enhancing open-world design, performance, and immersion.
The Witcher 4 marks the beginning of a new saga, shifting the focus to Ciri as the lead character in a single-player, open-world RPG. Built from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5, it is being designed as the most ambitious and immersive title in the series to date. The game will launch across multiple platforms, with development ongoing.
Set in the previously unexplored region of Kovir, the demo follows series protagonist Ciri as she undertakes a monster contract. Accompanied by her horse, Kelpie, Ciri traverses mountainous terrain, dense forests, and eventually arrives at the bustling port town of Valdrest. Throughout the presentation, CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games broke down the UE5 features supporting the visual and technical fidelity of the game.
Running on a PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second, the demo incorporates several features and functionalities, including:
- Unreal Animation Framework, delivering fluid, realistic character movement
- FastGeo Streaming, enabling seamless environmental loading
- Nanite Foliage, creating dense, detailed natural environments without performance loss
- MetaHuman and Mass AI systems, supporting believable crowd dynamics
- ML Deformer, simulating fine-grained muscular animations for characters
Many of these tools, developed jointly by CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games, are included in today’s release of Unreal Engine 5.6 and are intended to benefit developers across the industry aiming to build expansive, performant worlds.
The tech collaboration between the two studios began in 2022, with a focus on enhancing Unreal Engine’s capacity to support CD PROJEKT RED’s signature open-world RPG design.
Speaking about the demo, CD PROJEKT RED Joint-CEO Michał Nowakowski said:
We started our partnership with Epic Games to push open-world game technology forward. To show this early look at the work we’ve been doing using Unreal Engine running at 60 FPS on PlayStation 5, is a significant milestone — and a testament of the great cooperation between our teams. But we’re far from finished. I look forward to seeing more advancements and inspiring technology from this partnership as development of The Witcher 4 on Unreal Engine 5 continues.
Meanwhile, Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games, added:
CD PROJEKT RED is one of the industry’s best open-world game studios, and we’re grateful that they’re working with us to push Unreal Engine forward with The Witcher 4. They are the perfect partner to help us develop new world-building features that we can share with all Unreal Engine developers.
