A first look at in-game gameplay of The Witcher 4 has just been shown off during today’s State of Unreal stream.
During its time on the stage, we saw some in-game cinematics of a monster attacking a wagon, and Ciri coming across the scene some time later. It then transitioned into gameplay, with Kajetan Kapuscinski cinematic director at CD Projekt Red playing through it.
All this while Wyeth Johnson, senior director and project strategy at Epic Games, and Sebastian Kalemba, VP and game director at CD Projekt Red, narrated what we were seeing. This build was running on a standard PS5 at 60fps with ray tracing enabled, according to those on stage.
We see some horse riding courtesy of Ciri’s horse Kelpie. Kelpie has realitic muscles and skin movement thanks to the Unreal Chaos Flesh Solver and machine-learned deformations, so the horse will look natural without performance issues. We also see Nanite Foliage in action, which according to senior director Wyeth Johnson allows for fast-rendering high quality shrubbery and scenery.
Ciri eventually comes to the city of Vargrest, filled with lots of NPCs rushing around and doing their own thing, be it looking at a bear or shopping at stalls. The build shows Ciri transition smoothly from gameplay to another in-game cinematic, leaning on a fence while talking to a quest giver.
From here, the trio pull away from Ciri and look around the town some more, zooming in at NPCs chatting about fish with various nifty bits of tech at work. The idea expressed by Kalemba is that the difference between Ciri and your regular old NPC isn’t too drastic.
The build then has a circus added, with its crowd ramped up with an increasing number of NPCs reacting to the show without any visual stuttering or lag. Following this, Kalemba pulls back to Ciri one final time stating, “We’re making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious open world Witcher game ever, and we’re making this a reality thanks to our work on Unreal with the team at Epic.”
Recently in a CD Projekt financial report, we learned development progress on The Witcher 4 was well underway. We also know The Witcher 4 won’t be out until 2026, so consider this an early technical peak at what’s to come.