Digital Foundry interviewed CD Projekt Red and Epic about the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo for The Witcher 4 and it’s an interesting look at the state of the art when it comes to how many polygons you need to make a pine tree look all nice (answer: a lot). One of the first topics that came up was the fact this tech demo was shown running on a PlayStation 5 rather than a PC.
“We always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down,” said Charles Tremblay, VP of technology at CD Projekt Red. “But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to see, OK, this time around we really want to be more console-first development, right? And then we worked with Unreal, with our partner, and then we saw the challenge—to realize the ambition that to make what we want at 60 fps on PS5 would be, you know, there would be work.”
While your mind might race back to Cyberpunk 2077’s PlayStation launch, which was so bad Sony pulled it from sale, it’s not like The Witcher 3 didn’t undergo a lot of heavy-duty patching shortly after its release either. Much as you or I might like CDPR to say that our platform of choice is their baby darling and the one they think of first when they wake up in the morning, obviously something has to change if The Witcher 4’s launch isn’t going to be another five-alarm fire. (Hola!)
“We wanted to solve certain foundations for us,” said Jakub Knapik, VP of art and global art director at CDPR. “It’s pretty logical in thinking about it—it’s easier to scale up than down. Because we know that both Lumen and all those technologies are providing us pretty consistent representation across the scale-up, we knew that once we’ll set up certain foundations both visually and technically, there’s room to scale up. Now what that means is another question. Because we’re CDPR, we always like to push PCs to the limit. It’s just a creative process how to really use it. We know we have a really great foundation right now on the console that we still need to push, but we’ll still figure out what it means—for sure we’re going to expand all the raytracing features forwards.”
So basically, don’t set fire to your pitchforks yet. Just because The Witcher 4 is going to be designed to hit 60 fps on a PlayStation 5 doesn’t mean you won’t be able to crank it up to ultra and see every pore on the face of some grubby peasant who is giving you a quest.
“The company started as a PC company and we definitely will want to have the best experience for the PC gamer for sure,” Tremblay said. “But it’s too early to say what will it mean for The Witcher 4.”