It turns out CD Projekt Red had much more to show off at Unreal Fest than I had anticipated. At the event this afternoon, CD Projekt Red showcased a chunk of Witcher 4 gameplay footage for the first time, giving us a look at the region of Kovir, which is making its first appearance in the videogame series.
The Witcher 4 tech demo follows Ciri in the midst of a monster contract in the region of Kovir. While Kovir has not appeared in any of the games so far, it is a prominent location in the books, rich in natural resources thanks to its mountains and lush forests. So far, the game is looking fantastic:
Since the strategic partnership was announced in 2022, CDPR has been working with Epic Games to develop new tools and enhance existing features in Unreal Engine 5 to expand the engine’s open-world development capabilities and establish robust tools geared toward CD PROJEKT RED’s open-world design philosophies. The demo, which runs on a PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second, shows off in-engine capabilities set in the world of The Witcher 4, including the new Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage rendering, MetaHuman technology with Mass AI crowd scaling, and more.
The tools showcased here will soon be available to all Unreal Engine 5 developers as part of the engine's 5.6 update. Speaking on tech demo, CDPR co-CEO, Michał Nowakowski, tempered expectations, stating that the game is still “far from finished”. Previously, CDPR confirmed that The Witcher 4 would not release until 2027 ‘at the earliest', so we're a good 2 to 3 years away from getting to play the game for ourselves.
The Witcher 4 is described as a new open-world RPG from CD Projekt Red, kicking off a brand new saga where players will take on the role of Ciri, Geralt's successor. While not confirmed yet, rumour has it that Geralt will indeed still be alive in The Witcher 4, so while he isn't the main character anymore, he will still play a role in the story ahead.
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KitGuru Says: What did you think of The Witcher 4 gameplay shown this week? So far, the game looks incredible, but I'm a little hesitant to take things at face value. After all, The Witcher 3 did look vastly different in its original E3 tech demo, only for the art direction to completely change for the final release in 2015.