As part of State of Unreal 2025, CD Projekt RED released a new cinematic trailer and technical demonstration of The Witcher IV. The tech demo shows the game running on a base PlayStation 5 with ray-tracing at 60fps. The demo takes place in the region of Kovir, which is new to the game series. It follows protagonist Ciri along with her horse Kelpie as she makes her way “through the rugged mountains and dense forests of Kovir to the bustling port town of Valdrest.” The Witcher IV will launch for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC. A release date has yet to be announced.
The full details:
As Unreal Fest 2025 kicked off, CD Projekt RED joined Epic Games on stage to present a tech demo of The Witcher IV in Unreal Engine 5. Presented in typical CD Projekt RED style, the tech demo follows the main protagonist Ciri in the midst of a monster contract and shows off some of the innovative Unreal Engine 5 technology and features that will power the game’s open world.
The tech demo takes place in the region of Kovir—which will make its very first appearance in the video game series in The Witcher IV. The presentation followed main protagonist Ciri—along with her horse Kelpie—as she made her way through the rugged mountains and dense forests of Kovir to the bustling port town of Valdrest. Along the way, CD PROJEKT RED and Epic Games dove deep into how each feature is helping drive performance, visual fidelity, and shape The Witcher IV‘s immersive open world.
Watch the full presentation from Unreal Fest 2025 now at LINK.
Since the strategic partnership was announced in 2022, CDPR has been working with Epic Games to develop new tools and enhance existing features in Unreal Engine 5 to expand the engine’s open-world development capabilities and establish robust tools geared toward CD PROJEKT RED’s open-world design philosophies. The demo, which runs on a PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second, shows off in-engine capabilities set in the world of The Witcher IV, including the new Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage rendering, MetaHuman technology with Mass AI crowd scaling, and more. The tools showcased are being developed, tested, and eventually released to all UE developers, starting with today’s Unreal Engine 5.6 release. This will help other studios create believable and immersive open-world environments that deliver performance at 60 FPS without compromising on quality—even at vast scales. While the presentation was running on a PlayStation console, the features and technology will be supported across all platforms the game will launch on.
The Unreal Animation Framework powers realistic character movements in busy scenes. FastGeo Streaming, developed in collaboration with Epic Games, allows environments to load quickly and smoothly. Nanite Foliage fills forests and fields with dense detail without sacrificing performance. The Mass system handles large, dynamic crowds with ease, while ML Deformer adds subtle, realistic touches to character animation—right down to muscle movement.
Stay tuned at Gaming Instincts via Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for more gaming news.
