Highlight

• The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5.6 tech demo showcases jaw-dropping visuals and cutting-edge gameplay, running at 60fps with ray tracing on PlayStation 5.


• Ciri takes center stage as a Witcher, exploring Kovier and Vest with unprecedented realism, featuring seamless horseback riding and dynamic world interactions.


• Unreal Engine 5.6 introduces massive improvements in foliage, character animation, and rendering speed, making it one of the most ambitious RPG projects to date.

With heavy responsibilities resting on its shoulders, CD Projekt Red must ensure The Witcher 4 lives up to the hype, and judging from the release of the Unreal Engine 5.6 Tech Demo, the developers definitely have worthy intent. This initial peek was truly mesmerizing and displayed the most cutting-edge animation systems, world-building advances, and character fidelity at a locked open forty-five-degree angle at 60fps with ray tracing on a regular-design PS5.

Ciri Enters the Forefront

After years of speculations, Ciri will finally be able to walk the world as a full-fledged Witcher, roaming its expansive and rich world. The demo highlights Kovier, a dense, wild landscape bursting with lush forests-and Vest, a bustling port town that thrives on its trade, fishing, and mining industries.

Along with her is Kelpy, the new and shiny horse, and sorry, Roach, but this next-generation level of horses just cannot be ignored. Through multi-character motion matching, Ciri can mount from any angle and at any form of speed, with absolutely synchronized animations. Kelpy itself retains impressively good muscle animation, courtesy of Chaos Flesh Solver, which performs machine learning-based muscle stretching and deformation in real-time, all while keeping performance crisp.

Most impressive, however, is how the world reacts to player actions. Whether it’s disturbing the environment or triggering unexpected chain reactions, Kovier and Vest feel alive in a way the franchise has never seen before. The effort to eliminate the gap between protagonist and NPCs is a major priority for the developers, ensuring that every character, big or small, feels authentic and lifelike.

Unreal Engine 5.6 is a Game-Changer

The world’s reaction to a player’s action is the most impressive feature. Be it disturbing the environment or setting off unexpected chain reactions, Kovier and Vest feel alive in a way the franchise has never witnessed. CD Projekt Red is trying to eliminate the barrier between the protagonist and NPCs, making sure there is not a single character without a convincing, believable existence.

CD Projekt Red is embracing the full power of Unreal Engine 5.6 to build one of the most ambitious open-world RPGs ever seen. These are far more than mere show upgrades, as they affect the very designs capable due to the latest generation features. Nanite Foliage guarantees that vegetation grows beautifully, using an adaptive voxel representation that renders individual leaves and pine needles in breathtaking detail. If you can remember, gone are the days of flat textures; every tree right now is made with Nanite assemblies, which also support skeletal animations for dynamic movement.

Starting from character animation, you’re just getting bigger. Chaos Flesh Solver procedural muscle activations will give it realistic muscle movements, and interact with Chaos Cloth near conditioning perfect barrier interactions. With ground-breaking evaluation offload from the main game thread, we can barely impair the performance, given over 300 animated skeletal characters packed in a densely populated area.

The Witcher 4’s Bold Future

This isn’t just another sequel—The Witcher 4 is shaping up to be a massive evolution of everything we know about the franchise. CD Projekt Red, alongside Epic Games, is leveraging Unreal Engine 5.6’s full potential, creating a world that’s not only visually stunning but alive, reactive, and deeply immersive. If this tech demo is any indication, we might be looking at again like the Witcher 3, another one of the most ambitious, groundbreaking RPGs of the generation.