At the State of Unreal 2025 conference, the first look at The Witcher 4 gameplay was presented — we are going to travel to Covert.
CD Projekt RED showed the city of Valdrest — the new port center of the northern kingdom of Qovir, which was only mentioned in previous role-playing games. Kovir is located north of Redania in the Gulf of Praxeda. In the trailer, the capital city of Valdrest — Lan Exeter — was seen from above as a manticore (a previously cut monster from The Witcher 3) flies overhead. This region is known as the largest exporter of mineral resources, rich in mountains and mines.
The city is teeming with NPCs going about their daily routine: someone is looking at a bear, someone is buying something in a stall, and somewhere a circus troupe is performing. In another shot, an NPC calls Ciri «witch»while a child picks up apples that a passerby has dropped. In The Witcher 4, Ciri interacts with the world as a full-fledged witch: she takes orders, hunts monsters, and investigates dark events in a new region.
Her faithful horse — Kelpie — has its own muscles, hair physics and movements. Thanks to sophisticated motion animation and new chaos physics, the horse’s mane, tail, and body react regardless of the angle of view. And the approach to the horse’s appearance is very familiar to fans Red Dead Redemption 2.
Kovir — a large new zone built on Nanite technology
The demo on PS5 (basic!) consistently delivered 60 frames per second — it withstood huge and intense locations, crowds of more than 300 NPCs, and new combat physics. The developers claim that the entire forest in the game was created from only 28 objects — thanks to Nanite technology
This is a revolutionary virtualized geometry technology introduced in Unreal Engine 5. It allows you to create extremely detailed 3D objects without a significant performance load. The technology significantly reduces the memory footprint while maintaining volume, lighting, and detail. Epic and CDPR emphasize that this is the first time that such a detailed world can be created with such light resources».
«As Ciri explores the bustling market of Valdrest, we see how 5.6 handles busy scenes full of high-fidelity characters and visual effects like ML Deformer. The tech demo also showcases Nanite Foliage — which provides a fast and memory efficient way to achieve gorgeous foliage density and fidelity, slated for release in UE 5.7», — reads the official Epic announcement.
The game was launched on PlayStation 5 at a stable 60 frames per second to emphasize the new UE5 technologies:
- Unreal Animation Framework for realistic character animation in dynamic scenes;
- Nanite Foliage — rendering dense vegetation without losing performance;
- Mass AI — generating large crowds with MetaHuman support;
- ML Deformer — a system for transmitting body movements, such as muscle contractions;
- FastGeo Streaming — fast and smooth loading of game worlds.
CDPR and Epic Games also confirmed that all these tools are already available with the release of Unreal Engine 5.6. It is expected that they will be useful for other studios working on large open-world projects. The tools are supported on all platforms, including PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
Given that CDPR showed gameplay on a basic PS5 — probably, The Witcher 4 will not be a PS6 exclusive after all, as some have suggested. There was no mention of a release date or other plot details during the conference.
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