“We’re going to create the most immersive and ambitious open-world RPG of all time,” the CD Projekt RED team just declared on stage at State of Unreal 2025. The Unreal Fest conference, held in Orlando, Florida, had promised to share clips from the next The Witcher game: a promise that was quickly kept. The famous role-playing game served as an introduction and did not fail to shock the spectators.
After a cinematic with stunning photorealism, Unreal and the developers of The Witcher IV presented a technical demo serving as a showcase for future innovations of the Unreal Engine. The American company seeks to achieve levels of performance, optimization and realism so ambitious that it is still hard to believe. Here's what The Witcher IV is (supposedly) capable of on a base PlayStation.
Fantastic performance that's just fantasy?
If we take the Unreal and CD Projekt RED teams at their word, today's technical demonstration is running on a base PlayStation console, with ray tracing enabled and a frame rate of 60 frames per second. Yet, the visuals presented on stage benefit from a realism never before seen on Sony's console, not even on the PlayStation 5 Pro, let alone at such a high frame rate.
Unreal and the developers of The Witcher IV explain, however, that the innovations in version 5.6 of the Unreal Engine will allow for more realistic but less resource-intensive graphics. On paper, Such feats will become possible thanks to new rendering techniques, including the famous Nanite geometry, which the company has been working on for several years now.
These technologies will also limit the differences in realism between NPCs and Ciri, but also generate crowd scenes with as little slowdown as possible. “What we’re developing hand in hand (with Epic, editor’s note) will allow us to give birth to a new generation of open-world RPGs,” said Sebastian Kalemba, vice president and game director at CD Projekt RED, suggesting developments that will revolutionize the entire industry.
Suffice to say that the show sold a dream, but it’s better to be careful to avoid a disappointment worthy of Watch Dogs in 2014. Patience is required since The Witcher IV still doesn’t have a release date. Developers can take advantage of these innovations now via the experimental version of Unreal Engine 5.6.
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