It's been ten years since CD Projekt RED's masterpiece, The Witcher 3, was released. However, it had to make concessions due to the technical limitations of the time, particularly the recalcitrant RED Engine. This will likely not be the case for The Witcher 4, which will be better able to deliver on its enormous ambitions, thanks in part to Unreal Engine 5. This should be particularly noticeable in the cities Ciri will visit in the Kovir region, as Jan Hermanowicz, production manager at CD Projekt RED, explained in an interview with GamesRadar.
The Witcher 4 is seriously going up (Novi)grad
The recent tech demo for The Witcher 4 during State of Unreal 2025 may have been too good to be true, but it did introduce us to Valdrest, a port city in Kovir home to over 300 NPCs. That's roughly the same number of inhabitants as Novigrad, the largest city in The Witcher 3. Ten years earlier, CD Projekt RED had to cheat with the proportions of the largest city in the North in the books, due to numerous technical limitations. For Ciri's next adventures, the Polish studio wants to think bigger, and will be able to do so thanks to Unreal Engine 5.
"We don't want to miss this generational transition. Our ambition is to take full advantage of it to deliver a truly next-gen experience," explained Jan Hermanowicz in an interview with GamesRadar. The Kovir region that we will visit in The Witcher 4 should therefore contain numerous towns and villages on a scale never before seen in the saga. "We studied what we've done in the past, including Novigrad in The Witcher 3, and we retained the coolest elements, and what we couldn't do at the time, to see what we can improve."
At the end of The Witcher 4's tech demo, we can see Lan Exeter, a major city in Kovir. This glimpse alone already gave us a glimpse of a city of magnitude. This time, CD Projekt RED should therefore be able to properly represent this emblematic place from Andrzej Sapkowski's universe. In any case, this is the Polish studio's ambition, and we hope that it will be able to bring it to life when The Witcher 4 is released in 2027/2028.
Source: GamesRadar
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