During Epic Games’ recent State of Unreal presentation, CD Projekt Red made an appearance, showing off a vertical slice gameplay demo of The Witcher 4 running on a base PlayStation 5. Though still years away from launch, the team have shared some of their mentality behind the game’s development – including the fact that The Witcher 4 is being built with a focus on console for the first time.

Following the recent State of Unreal presentation, known analysts Digital Foundry broke down The Witcher 4’s tech demo while revealing some interesting titbits of information shared by CDPR during their interview.

According to CD Projekt Red, the decision to run the demo on a PlayStation 5 instead of PC was an intentional one, with The Witcher 4 being the first game from the studio to be made with a console first approach – meaning it is being built for consoles and will then be scaled up for PCs; as opposed to the other way round.

Interestingly, despite this, the team made note of some struggles which they expect to encounter; in particular when it comes to the Xbox Series S and getting its version of The Witcher 4 to run at high frame rates, claiming “60fps would definitely be extremely challenging,” adding that “this is something that we need to figure out.”

As mentioned, previous CDPR titles have been developed with a PC first approach – owing to their lineage in the space. Even so, it seems as though the Series S will remain a challenge somewhat (far from the first title to struggle in this regard).

All that said, even with greater ambitions, hopefully the console versions of The Witcher 4 wind up being better than the launch state of Cyberpunk 2077.

KitGuru says: What do you think of the interview? Are you disappointed to see them moving to a console-first approach for development? Will The Witcher 4 manage to hit 60fps consistently on Series S? Let us know your thoughts down below.

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