Is The Witcher 4 Tech Demo What The Witcher 4 Will Actually Look Like? We Asked CD Projekt

The Witcher 4 tech demo offered a stunning look at what CD Projekt has insisted is just that: a tech demo. As IGN has reported, it is not representative of The Witcher 4 gameplay. But it’s hard not to look at the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo set within the world of The Witcher and wonder if it gives us a clear sense of what to expect from the game, which is still years from release.

The tech demo, captured on a PlayStation 5 and running at 60 frames per second, follows Ciri as she explores the never-before-seen region of Kovir in the midst of a monster contract (CD Projekt confirmed Kovir is a playable area in The Witcher 4).

There is an incredible amount of detail in the tech demo, with fluid animations on a level we have yet to see on the current generation of consoles. Ciri and her horse Kelpie have particularly impressive movement and interactions with each other, NPCs, and the game world as they make their way through the mountains of Kovir to the bustling port town of Valdrest. At one point in the demo, CD Projekt upped the NPC count in the market scene to 300 individually animated characters. The showcase ended with a first look at Lan Exeter, the winter capital and a major port city in Kovir.

CD Projekt, of course, knows what it’s like to set expectations for one of its upcoming video games and then miss them. Just look at the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2020, which the company spent years recovering from. So, there is an inevitable question for CD Projekt: is what we’ve seen in The Witcher 4 tech demo what The Witcher 4 will look like?

That’s a question we put to Kajetan Kapuściński, Cinematic Director at CD Projekt, at Epic’s State of Unreal 2025 event. His response was as vague as you’d expect from a developer working on a game that won’t be released until 2027 at the earliest, but he did say this: the tech demo “shows our ambition.”

Here’s Kapuściński’s response in full:

“So what you’ve seen today is a tech demo that was powered by Unreal Engine 5, and that was a project that we worked on together with the Epic team. That was a demo that we crafted so both companies can work on some technology that will be powering Witcher 4 in the future.

“So it’s not gameplay of The Witcher 4 per se. What you have seen shows our ambition, our cutting edge technology that we co-developed to make the game possible to be made. And it shows our artistic direction as well, and our, let’s say, how we would like to approach some things.

“But everything you saw is subject to be changed. That is a snippet of what we have now. We wanted to show it to the public, we wanted to show what we worked on together. And now having these tools, having these possibilities, we are working with the game.”

In the same interview, we asked Wyeth Johnson, Senior Director, Product Strategy at Epic Games, if the tech demo’s performance (60fps with ray tracing on a base PS5) reflects what players can expect to play on a PS5 in a released product.

“Oh absolutely. We can’t lie here,” he replied. “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 frame per second gameplay.”

60fps with ray tracing in a big open-world game like The Witcher 4 on base PS5 is beyond the performance we’ve come to expect from the current generation of consoles, but Johnson said working with CD Projekt on The Witcher 4 tech demo “allowed us to push very rapidly and aggressively towards far higher performance at incredible fidelity.”

This, clearly, is beyond what we’re expecting from the five-year-old PS5. Players have become conditioned to believe that if they’re playing on a PlayStation or an Xbox and they want ray tracing, it’s 30 frames per second and that’s it. But Johnson insisted the console hardware “is incredible” and there’s more performance to be squeezed out of it.

“What you have to do is you have to be clever about how you take advantage of that hardware,” he said. “And I think if you were to summarize many of the things that we did, it’s to take things that normally happen serially one after another and make them go wide, make them go parallel. Much more hardware capability is harnessed when you take that approach.

“When you look at things like our new Unreal animation framework and this fast geometry streaming, letting you move through the environment at whatever speed is desired, all of these things are there to go much more wide, and that enables you to unlock the hardware a little bit more easily. And these are intrinsic to Unreal Engine going forward.

“You have to take time to understand how you can unlock all these little amazing capabilities that were handed by the hardware manufacturers. You work with it and you find the areas, you find the bottlenecks and you optimize.

“It’s somewhat remarkable; if you look at some of our more early demos, you’re seeing two, three, 10x improvements in performance with very, very similar visuals, and that’s just you’re finding the edge cases, you’re finding the ways to improve, and then you go right down to the bottom and make those intrinsic to what Unreal can do. Then amazing developers like CD Project Red get to then build on top of that.”

Expectation for The Witcher 4 is sky-high, and fans want to know exactly what to expect from the game right now. On this, Kapuściński kept his cards close to his chest. But he did offer a tease of sorts:

“If you analyze the flow of the demo, you can actually pick up some elements that can show the direction that we are heading to, and the possibilities that come with our cooperation and what we’ve achieved so far. So for example, looking at the forest, there’s this vista bit when you can see a huge forest, which is now using Nanite foliage. The ability to render such amount of trees and foliage of such fidelity, that’s something that unlocks new powers.

“And also the Unreal animation framework, the optimization that comes with the amount of NPCs, so moving characters that you can see in the screen space. We have another vista moment with the huge crowd, like over 300 animated actors there. And that’s something we need, and that’s something that if you connect some dots that shows the direction we want to go to.”

So, huge, highly detailed forests and huge, highly detailed crowds confirmed for The Witcher 4!

One of the big questions about The Witcher 4 is target launch platforms. With this tech demo on PS5, the suggestion is it will be a cross-gen game that also runs on the next-gen consoles (PS6 and the next-gen Xbox). But if it’s due out on current-gen, does that also mean it will be available on the underpowered Xbox Series S? It’s worth remembring that Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto VI is, as it stands, also due out on current-gen consoles including the Xbox Series S. So if GTA 6 is possible on Microsoft’s cheaper console, perhaps The Witcher 4 is, too.

CD Projekt has indicated The Witcher 4 won’t be out until 2027 at the earliest, so it may be some time before we find out.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.