Epic Games opened its annual State of Unreal showcase with the grand reveal of a tech demo of The Witcher 4.
Developer CD Projekt Red formally unveiled the sequel at The Game Awards in December in a CG trailer, but now, we have a much clearer idea of what it will actually look like thanks to State of Unreal. In a nearly 15-minute Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) demo, CD Projekt and Epic Games showed off protagonist Ciri roaming through the mountains and forests of Kovir to reach the bustling port town of Valdrest with her horse Kelpie. The companies were quick to point out this wasn’t actual gameplay, instead serving as an example of the “direction” they’re taking with The Witcher 4.
To learn more about the tech demo, MobileSyrup sat down with CD Projekt’s Michał Janiszewski, environment art director, and Wyeth Johnson, senior director of product strategy for Unreal Engine, at Unreal Fest Orlando after the State of Unreal. They talked about their long-running collaboration, how UE5 enables creativity, achieving 60fps and more.
When you first announced that The Witcher 4 was going to be made with UE5, you mentioned that you don’t necessarily view this as a standard licensing agreement; it’s more of a “long-term fulfilling tech partnership.” As you’ve been working together for at least a few years now, what does a “long-term fulfilling tech partnership” mean for CD Projekt and Epic?
Wyeth Johnson: We have a million opinions about what’s right for Unreal Engine. And we have this big ecosystem and this broad sense of all the different areas that we could push, and there are a bunch of areas where we don’t necessarily know best. We have not made massive AAA open-world games like CD Projekt RED has, and so that partnership is about confirming that our instinct is correct — that there are areas we think we should push on, areas that we believe would help not only open-world development, but also all developers. And so then we get to have these really amazing conversations where we can say, “What have you done before? What has behooved you that might be missing? What are things that we could do to supercharge making open-world development better?” But also raise the water level for everybody else who uses Unreal. And so the output for us has been confirmation that those choices are correct. And what was amazing is that building this demo together has allowed us to say, “Yep, that was right,” and really confirm for ourselves that the instinct we had about how to improve Unreal for open-world dev was correct. And this was kind of the fruit of that.
Michał Janiszewski: This opportunity to work with the Epic guys. We were developing new technologies like the FastGeo [streaming tech], the nanite foliage [fills forests without sacrificing performance]… for me as an environment artist, is a huge opportunity to build huge open-worlds. Like you’ve seen in the demo, [we] have like an endless forest almost, and it’s working really well when it comes to the performance. So that’s a great, great collaboration. And looking at the Unreal Engine is a really nice way to go.
What was really surprising to me is that we knew that this game was going to be here, but it was a 15-minute tech demo, which was really substantial, and covered so much in it. When you knew that you were going to be showing this here, how did you decide the sort of tone setting that you wanted to convey to people?
Janiszewski: So remember that this is a technical demo, so we were developing all of the features that we needed to create the game itself. But nevertheless, we wanted to give you a glimpse of what kind of stuff we are working on from a background that we’re developing the Witcher, and showing you the development with the Epic guys, and how we can make it work as well. That’s one of the big steps that we did.
Johnson: And for us, when we talk about showing something, we’re working back from, “Okay, we’ve had these amazing conversations. We have some opinions about what we could do better — how we could enhance the things that we do have? How do we improve performance?” Whatever it may be, we had that list. And so the reason you got a really extensive demo is because we had a really extensive list of improvements, and we wanted to do each one of them respectful service in a way that not only made it clear that Unreal was going to be awesome for open-world games, but also showed off the world of The Witcher in a really favourable light. So both of those things needed to be true.
As a developer, what does UE5 afford you in terms of enhancing the creativity that you’re trying to achieve?
Janiszewski: Definitely how much dense[r] the elements on the on the screen could be. How much of it we can push, the fidelity on the screen? And I would say the beautiful corners that were there. All of the foliage over there was very, very dense. And this is the creative. [It’s] bringing us the creativity and how we can work it out, and how much we can push the level of the decorations not only inside of the forest, but inside of the village. You’ve seen each one of the decoration sets that were created over there and how much of it we can push forward. All of it [is] in the low-performance cost. So Unreal is giving us this kind of opportunity with FastGeo that we co-developed with Epic to make it really nicely work for me, as an environment artist, as developer — it means that kind of opportunity.
Sitting in the crowd, everyone’s obviously tech-savvy there. They hear “nanite foliage” and have a very enthusiastic response. But for someone who is just a regular The Witcher fan who maybe doesn’t know what that means, how would you say it will benefit their playing experience?
Janiszewski: It’s a good thing that you’re speaking about the average Witcher fan. Witcher is all about the nature. So sometimes, multiple times, you have 95 percent of the screen [being] the foliage itself. So you are exploring the world. So that’s why all of these features that we have right now, and all of the density of the forest itself, it’s not only helping us with the amount of individual species that we can create in the forest, but the way that we can just populate the fast open spaces with this. This is one of the important [things] for me personally, and how that is affecting [different things]. You’ve seen a couple of really nice vistas over there. This is all co-developed with the Epic guys and I have the freedom of creating this kind of landscape. And it’s very, very important for us and very important for the players that we can introduce to you this really nice kind of world.
Something I like about these technical deep dives, especially as someone who’s not super knowledgeable about this sort of thing — they make you think of things that you might not have considered. Like, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” For instance, you talked about the motion matching between Siri and Kelpie and the “root motion” on Kelpie to get a more natural sort of movement. How difficult is it to normally achieve that sort of thing, and how does Unreal Engine make it more easily attainable for you?
Johnson: It’s not really about difficulty. The way it was expressed to me is that this relationship between Ciri and Kelpie is very important. And if you imagine moving through this vast world, the amount of time that you spend with this character is incredibly important. And so it was worthy of some cycles that make it feel grounded and responsive and authentic to the world that these two characters kind of occupy together. And so much of it is about immersion, and when you have all of these different tools, the ability to have the vastness of these environments, incredibly high density of objects, great fidelity and control, animation, synchronization — all of those points are an opportunity to pull you out of your experience. And so the goal is to introduce all of this technology, which allows you to stay in the experience. And that’s the purpose of them. Because you want it to feel good, and you want your immersion to be satisfied.
You talked a bit about co-developing the FastGeo technology. And as you said, a big part of The Witcher is exploring nature. So as the player is going through the world, how is the FastGeo tech enhancing the sort of immersion in the experience?
Janiszewski: We have a huge possibility to have, like, vast open spaces. This is very important for us. As a player, you would like to see where you are going without any kind of hitches or any kind of problems. When it comes to the streaming, you would like to have a flawless game, because this is the way that we would like to introduce you. You need to get just deep dive into the game, not having any kind of things that will be popping and anything that will be not making your play flawless. So this is one of the goals that we would like to achieve when it comes to this collaboration of working — this implementation of this tech into our game.
When some people hear the words “tech demo,” they think “Oh, it’s not going to look like that,” or “there’s going to be a downgrade,” or something like that. And you’ve obviously been very open about this being a tech demo and that it’s not necessarily The Witcher 4 itself. But for people who are apprehensive about that, what would you say to them to let them know that this is the level of experience you’re targeting?
Johnson: Yeah, everybody’s [saying] that is a tech demo. We are showing you how all of the co-developed elements between CD Projekt and Epic are getting up to run. So that was just like an introduction to the game. But it’s not like a [piece of] gameplay. But we are reaching really nice goals right now for what we are showing you. It’s still in development, so stuff can be changed. But having these tools will definitely help us to reach our goals and what kind on each one of the platforms — what kind of elements we would like to have? Like, visuals are really important for us.
In the press release, CD Project says it wants to “push open-world technology forward.” We talked about some of the specific elements, but in a larger sense, what does that mean? How are you using it to create the best possible open-world game?
Johnson: I think when you look at this release of Unreal Engine, look at [the just-released] Unreal Engine 5.6, and there’s all these huge swath of amazing things that went in. But if you had to pick one word, it would be “performance.” And this is often such a big barrier to open-world development; you become burdened by the infrastructure, and it’s hard to be playful and expressive inside of these worlds at such massive scale. And so that’s the most exciting outcome, for me. What we’re trying to do is take the noise level down, allow a shorter amount of time required to achieve amazing fidelity, and take some of the pressure off open-world developers so they can just build the worlds that they want. And we’re trying to have Unreal step out of the way and just let them be artists, and that’s the absolute ideal outcome for us. And the amount of progress we’ve made towards that goal in this one release is, I think, remarkable.
Janiszewski: Basically, artists can focus on painting all of the environments and not focusing on too much of the tech behind it. So this is what we would like to achieve.
Geralt in the hot tub from The Witcher 3 is one of the most iconic scenes from The Witcher. Given that ML Deformer improves animations, and even as you showed [with Kelpie], it creates more realistic muscle movements, can we expect some sort of similar steamy scene in The Witcher 4 that will showcase these more realistic muscles?
Imagine this sort of scene with UE5’s improved muscle movements.
Janiszewski: [laughs] I cannot say anything about it.
I’m not sure how specific you can be, but in a general sense, talking about how you can have more improved animations, especially with living creatures that aren’t necessarily human, like Kelpie, for instance. The Witcher has such a wide array of creatures that are very memorable. How does that technology empower you to come up with a more diverse lineup of sort of creatures and wildlife and that sort of thing?
CD Projekt: You’ve seen the manticore. We introduced the manticore in this demo. We will have definitely a vast majority of monsters. But I won’t go into the details as it’s still being in the development — all of the elements of how will you be approaching the monsters. This is an element that we would like to still make really nice, but it’s a work in progress.
I’m sure you can’t talk too much about specifics, but in a general sense… Part of the appeal of an open world, and The Witcher 3 had this as well, is when you explore the world and find different sorts of biomes and geographical diversity. Like, there’s an area that might be more snowy or an area that might be more of like a swamp. In a larger sense, how is Unreal Engine 5 allowing you to create these more diverse landscapes?
Janiszewski: In the demo, we introduced Kovir, the northern part of whole Witcher world with the very harsh environments. From the top of the mountains, you’ve seen the snow that was lying down, and you’ve seen a couple of little swampy areas when you are going to meet Siri with Kelpie. So this is one of the elements that we wanted to introduce to you guys. And definitely you’ve seen, because of the introduction of the nanite foliage, we have a possibility to change the biomes for each one of the regions. And this is very important for us, that we can focus in this area. We can have this kind of foliage and this might be a little bit different, like a spruce forest or a pine forest. And the FastGeo is giving us the opportunity to load it really, really fast, and the voxelization from the vast open space is giving us that really nice form fitting.
We talked about all the different little elements in here, like the FastGeo. This might be a difficult thing to single out, but is there anything in particular, as a designer — and both of you can chime in, please — that stands out? That you were particularly proud of having accomplished from a technical perspective?
Janiszewski: Oh, there’s a lot of it. That’s a very, very good question. But like Wyeth was [saying] earlier, the performance and the co-development of the nanite foliage. These are two very, very important elements that all of the developers were thinking about. “Okay, how about the streaming? We have it. And how about the foliage?” And it’s being developed right now. So this is two of them that are very, very important, personally for me, that we are developing, and looking at how vast environments we are creating, and what kind of stuff we would like to deliver.
Johnson: Performance, 100 per cent. The other thing I would just mention, too, if it wasn’t clear: that entire demo, including the cinematic from start to finish, is 60 frames a second, [on] PlayStation 5, all interactive, all the way [from] start to finish. I think that’s a wonderful result, and it’s going to make the impression of sitting down in front of Unreal Engine in your next project feel better than it did yesterday. So that’s where a huge amount of our pride lies.
This interview has been edited for language and clarity.
A release window for The Witcher 4 has not yet been confirmed, but CD Projekt has said it won’t be coming until at least 2027, if not later.
Image credit: CD Projekt Red
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