di Giuseppe Genga / Neural P 6 giu 2025 13:22

This week CD Projekt RED tickled our imagination with the tech demo The Witcher IV, which we learned was not the actual game while still giving us a taste of what the final game would like to offer us.

The demo catapulted us into a vast world, where thousands of trees stretch as far as the eye can see and the dense forests, managed by Nanite technology, maintain incredible visual density even from great distances, all without sacrificing performance. We were also able to admire advanced character animations and a realistic deformation of the horses' muscles, a more natural animation system that will ensure fluid and coordinated movements for Ciri and her mount as we venture into the mountains of Kovir.

Next, the presentation transported us to a market teeming with NPCs, each engaged in dozens of different routines. The inhabitants chat, discuss and react to our passage. Vendors praise their wares and children applaud as a man incites a tame bear to perform for the crowd. Shortly after, hitting a passerby, his crate of apples falls and each fruit rolls independently along the slope, attracting a child who runs to pick one up and a pair of pigs that until a moment before were rolling in the mud.

But how much of this will we really find in the final game? The DBLTAP site interviewed the director of development Przemysław Czatrowski, who confirmed that this is exactly the direction the studio wants to take in the game. The demo shows the technology that will be used to build the game, and while it doesn't represent the final product, it embodies its artistic vision and ambitions.

Czatrowski also confirmed that the setting shown is Kovir, one of the regions of The Witcher universe that we will explore in the game, explaining that we can expect open spaces, snowy mountains, dense forests and monsters that roam the world, with a living and interactive ecosystem. The goal is to create an extremely rich and responsive world, where not only will we be able to interact with the environment, but the elements of the world themselves will interact with each other, as demonstrated by the apple scene.

Czatrowski explained that the studio is still experimenting on many fronts, such as the possibility of having more dynamic and cinematic conversations, in the wake of what was seen in Cyberpunk. The technology for muscle deformations, shown on the horse, could in the future be applied to every creature in the game, although it is still too early to say. The team is working closely with Epic Games to push the Unreal Engine to the maximum, but bringing with it all the baggage of ideas and ambitions gained over the years of development of the RED Engine. Physics, a crucial element, has been highlighted by Ciri's cloak, which moves in a natural and believable way even when he gets on horseback, and by the apples themselves, whose rolling is not a predefined animation but is managed entirely by the physics engine.

The most stunning aspect, as proudly pointed out by Czatrowski himself, is that the entire presentation was in real time, performed by a person with a controller on a regular PS5 connected to a screen. It wasn't a similar-spec PC or a pre-recorded video. Being able to achieve this visual fidelity at 60 FPS and with ray tracing active on a 5-year-old hardware is certainly a remarkable result, which can give us hope for the results that the game will be able to achieve.