We recently sat down with both CD Projekt Red and Epic to find out a little bit more about that, well, epic Witcher 4 tech demo and what the new Unreal Engine 5.6 brings to game development. The main takeaway is that their collaboration won't just make Witcher 4 an incredible open-world experience. It looks like it will help other developers literally up their game when it comes to open-world titles.
"This is exactly what we wanted to do in Unreal and have been talking about since the middle of Unreal Engine 4. Improving open-world development in Unreal is a very long conversation and you can go back to each and every release and see something in it that is guiding us towards even more excellence in open world development," says Wyeth Johnson, Epic's senior director of product strategy.
He then motions upwards vigorously to illustrate how much better the latest Unreal 5.6 engine is for open world game development. "We ramped up dramatically for this release and I think it shows," Johnson says, referring to the Witcher 4 demo that's been blowing everyone's mind, particularly because it's running on mere Sony PS5 hardware, not even the PS5 Pro.
Johnson also re-emphasized just how important performance is for Unreal Engine 5.6. "Our focus for 5.6 is almost exclusively performance," he says.
"Developers should be able to achieve incredible quality, and they get to define what that quality is, maybe it's the perfect pixel, or maybe it's incredible scale, or animation features or AI, or whatever the case may be," he says.
"Performance is not just what a player interacts with, it's also what a developer interacts with. And when the water level goes up and the time to achieve quality goes down, then you can be more expressive, you can be more playful, you can try to dream a little bit more than just worrying about all these systems holding you back. I would expect every developer who is trying to do something really original and creative in the Triple-A space, they're all going to be excited about this release, " Johnson says.
In other words, Unreal 5.6's performance optimizations should mean much higher quality visuals and gameplay on existing hardware.
Unreal 5.6 is also about making things easier for developers in the first place. "We need to bring the overall level of the engine down and keep the overhead as low as possible so that developers themselves can implement interesting behaviours and they can trust that those behaviours can go right in and players can experience them. Every developer who uses Unreal will benefit from what we showed today. That's the most fundamental take away," Johnson says.
As for CD Projekt Red, it seems like the transition from their own Red Engine to Unreal has been an unambiguous success. "We had a blast with Unreal," says Witcher 4 senior technical animator Julius Girbig.
"It's not like we lost things because of the transition. We're bringing our experience that we already have from Red Engine, all the Triple-A, open world with streaming, all that experience we're now bringing over to experts who have been building engines for years," he says of the collaboration with Epic.
"I'm a pretty surface-level animation artist, so I'm not actually digging into code that much," Girbig goes on to explain, "but I'm still able to run these hundreds of characters, create behaviours for them within the editor with this supportive UI, it just unlocks me as an artist.
"Now with this engine it suddenly unlocks me to create much bigger things and to think bigger. It's really awesome to be able to use things like the Nanite foliage to create these vast forests and whatever comes to your mind."
The end result is certainly impressive. Indeed, it's almost hard to believe that it's running on the Sony PS5, it looks that good. But Johnson confirms that it's all running on completely standard PS5 hardware.
"There are intrinsic things that the Playstation is amazing at, and we kind of show every single one of them in that technical demo," he says. Given the most spec of the PS5 compared to the latest PC hardware, that bodes well. Even AMD's new entry-level RDNA 4 GPU, the Radeon RX 9060 XT, blows the PS5 away for raw specs and especially ray tracing performance.
Speaking of which, Johnson confirms that the demo was indeed using Unreal's Lumen ray tracing engine in hardware mode. If it runs well on the PS5, it should fly on any relatively recent PC graphics card.
Overall, the upside of CD Projekt Red and Epic working together is that both sides of the collab' benefit, and that means better games for all of us to play. "There's no possible way that we could push in every direction to the apex level that developers like CD Projekt Red are capable of pushing," Johnson says.
"We don't have any heartburn if somebody wants to make a modification to Unreal for their specific use and in fact that's a wonderful success for us, because it means we gave them a nice place to plug in the thing that they needed that we didn't provide."
The only frustration in all this is that Witcher 4 only started development late last year and isn't due out for a few more years at the very earliest, and likewise other games that benefit from all of CD Projekt Red and Epic's latest learnings aren't exactly around the corner.
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