The Witcher 4 development team aims to take full advantage of the generational shift since the release of The Witcher 3, and their ambition to deliver a true next-gen experience had to be shown right from the get-go with the tech demo shown during this year’s edition of Unreal Fest.

Speaking with GamesRadar+, Engineering Production Manager Jan Hermanowicz said that the studio is adapting to the generational shift in hardware, engines, and technology since the release of the third entry in the series. The studio wants to take full advantage of this shift to deliver a true next-generation experience.

This ambition had to be shown right away, which led to the showing of the village of Valdrest in The Witcher 4 tech demo. This village featured over 300 NPCs, a huge character density comparable to The Witcher 3’s biggest city, Novigrad, which provided clear proof of how serious CDPR is about stepping up from the previous entry in the series. The city players get to explore as Geralt is searching for Ciri actually served as a basis for the creation of Valdrest’s NPC density, according to Hermanowicz, as the team spent a lot of time looking at recordings of Novigrad, looking at what was done in the past, what worked and what couldn’t be accomplished at the time. As such, the studio is definitely not stepping into upping the ante blindly, but is actually building on what was already done in the past.

Though just a tech demo that may not be entirely representative of the final game, The Witcher 4’s first showing was indeed impressive, and not just for how alive the village of Valdrest looked. The tech demo was running on base PlayStation 4 at 60 FPS with ray tracing, and with the studio making the game with a console-first approach, there’s no doubt that we won’t see a repeat of what happened with Cyberpunk 2077’s console launch, although Xbox Series S owners may not be able to enjoy the game as PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X owners, as getting the game to run at 60 FPS on the system will be extremely challenging.