Today, during the opening keynote of Unreal Fest Orlando 2025, CD Projekt RED showcased an impressive gameplay demo showing The Witcher 4 running in Unreal Engine.
During Epic Games’ livestream, before showing the tech demo itself, developers showcased an animated cutscene showing Ciri as she finds the remains of a caravan that has just been ambushed by a manticore.
The cutscene that ends with a glimpse of the game’s open world which certainly looks impressive.
Yet, if you find the glimpse at the end of the cutscene impressive, the real treat came afterward, as the developers moved into a full-fledged gameplay demo showing the open world in detail.
It’s worth mentioning that the demo was said to be running on a standard PS5 at 60 FPS with Ray Tracing.
We get to see the region named Kovir and Ciri’s own horse, Kelpie. Ciri and Kelpie are perfectly synchronized from all angles due to multi-character motion matching.
Kelpie’s muscles are animating naturally under the coat, creating fully seamless movements.
One of the big reveals of the demo is Nanite Foliage, which achieves gorgeous foliage density everywhere while remaining memory and resource-efficient.
We then get to see a local town and its characters, who interact both with Ciri and with each other. The developers made sure that the gap between Ciri and NPCs in terms of detail and behavior is as small as possible.
The scene displays over 300 characters while also leaving enough room in the game thread for developers to implement gameplay.
You can watch the full demo below.
Following the demo, we also saw a segment in which Epic Games explained what we saw, with plenty of interesting details on the technology.
The Witcher 4 is currently in development, but we know that it won’t be released before 2027
