The Witcher 4 tech demo ran on a base PS5 to ‘show how much we can optimize’

“Everybody has the concept of how briskly a PS5 is and what sorts of video games it will probably run,” he tells The Verge. “That’s why we particularly needed to go that route of: let’s begin with the consoles, let’s present how a lot we are able to optimize this engine along with Epic and make it work on present gen, as an alternative of operating it on some high-end {hardware}.”

Now, to be clear, the UE5 demo is just not really a slice of the ultimate sport. Girbig describes it as “an illustration of the instruments that we’re presently constructing that may finally energy The Witcher 4,” and one thing that “does present the model and course that we’re going for, and the constancy that we’re aiming at with the ultimate sport.”

In response to Girbig, who didn’t work at CDPR till after the shift to Unreal, the choice was made as a result of UE5 “throughout the board, provides us what we’re searching for.” That features an elevated sense of scale needed for open-world video games, with the power to render tons of of non-playable characters with extra elaborate AI guiding their actions, and in addition a greater manufacturing pipeline for managing a number of tasks. (An upcoming remake of the first Witcher game is also being made in UE5.)

However from a creative perspective, Girbig says, the transfer to Epic’s engine has a distinct sort of influence: getting out of the best way to permit for extra bold concepts. “It permits an artist to specific themselves far more simply when the engine isn’t a limitation anymore,” he says. “That’s what we’re aiming for right here. As an artist, for me, this unlocked myself to assume larger, and on larger scales.”