Following the stunning The Witcher 4 demo shown during the State of Unreal presentation earlier this month, Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia had the unique opportunity to fly to Poland and meet CD Projekt RED (and Epic) to discuss what went into the demo and what kind of work the studio has ahead of itself for the full game.
During the lengthy interview, Charles Tremblay, VP of Technology at CD Projekt RED, revealed that the team switched to a console-first approach to development to achieve its ambitious goal of delivering an open world game with hardware ray tracing running at 60 frames per second on a Sony PlayStation 5 console. This will be easier than scaling down, which the studio had to do with their previous projects.
When we started the collaboration, we had super high ambitions for this project. We always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down, but then we had so many problems in the past that we
tried to see, okay, this time around we really want to be more of a console first development. Then we worked with Unreal and we saw the challenge to realize the ambition that to make what we want, 60 fps on PS5, there would be work. This is why we started to talk, to figure out what needs to be done with the technology and we also decided, okay, we need to have all those things that need to be developed. Where we go from there, it’s hard to say, but right now we really wanted to focus on what does it mean to make this ambition on a console. We really wanted to aim for 60 fps and not go back to 30 fps.
At this stage, we are perfectly aware that we still have a lot of work ahead of us. This is a tech demo, not the whole gameplay loop is implemented, there’s no combat, there’s a lot of things that don’t work, but still, the ambition is set, so this is where we want to aim for The Witcher 4. It’s too early to say if we manage to nail it, but we’ll work as hard as we can to make it for sure.
The PS5 is not, however, the lowest of current-generation consoles when it comes to hardware performance. There’s the Xbox Series S, and Tremblay admitted that the developers haven’t begun to optimize The Witcher 4 for it yet, adding that it will be ‘extremely challenging’ to get it to run at 60 fps.
I wish we did a lot of work already on that, but we did not, so this is something that is next on our radar for sure. I will say that 60 FPS will definitely be extremely challenging on Xbox Series S. Let’s just say that this is something that we need to figure out.
Interestingly, Epic considers software Lumen ray tracing to be a thing of the past due to several limitations, which is why the demo created for The Witcher 4 already implements hardware RT Lumen. CD Projekt RED, on the other hand, mentioned that they’ll want to scale up for a high-end PC, although the form that scaling will take remains to be seen at this point.
The Witcher 4 will likely be released in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. Stay tuned to Wccftech for the latest rumors and reveals.
