Earlier this week, Epic Games’ State of Unreal 2025 event saw Polish developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR), present a tech demo of Unreal Engine 5.6 (UE 5.6) their upcoming AAA title, The Witcher 4, to a room of tech and game developers. Prior to the game’s original reveal trailer at The Game Awards last year, the tech demo marks the first time any in-game content had officially been shown.

Now, just to be clear, CDPR insisted that the portion of The Witcher 4 it was showing off was created to showcase the advancements and improvements that the Unreal Engine team had made, and wouldn’t necessarily be the same in the game upon release. On that note, CDPR said that the game’s launch was still a couple of years away, meaning the earliest we could expect the game is sometime in 2027.

As for which part of The Witcher 4 world was showcased, CDPR mentioned that it was in port city of the country of Kovir, a place we heard mentioned throughout the Witcher universe but never visited. Oh, and we get a glimpse of the city of Lan Exeter, Kovir’s capital.

Once again, this was a tech demo for UE 5.6, and CPDR had a fair bit to showcase on behalf of the game engine. The first claim it made was that the tech demo was running with ray tracing active and at 60 fps, and with the demo, the graphics preset could run on a standard Sony PlayStation 5 (PS5).

There is a lot of in-game technology being applied in The Witcher 4 and UE 5.6 too. There’s Multi-Character Motion Matching, Root Motion Movement, both of which CDPR says allow Ciri, the game’s protagonist, and Selphie, her horsie, to move in seamless synchronisation in-game. There’s also Chaos Flesh Solver, which uses machine learning to output realistic muscle movements.

One of the important, and perhaps arguably, the biggest features that was announced with The Witcher 4 tech demo was Foliage. A new addition to the UE Nanite geometry system, Foliage basically scales the polygon counts counts based on in-game distance and system reoslution. Why is this a big deal? Because it effectively allows CDPR to render every single leaf and pine needle on trees in-game, without burdening the system and consuming resources.

Another major feature that was introduced was MetaHuman. Fully embedded into UE 5.6, the feature allows the game enginer to render a “near infinite range of plausible body shapes”, allowing games like The Witcher 4 to theoretically create more than 300 NPCs in a single area. This was an unthinkable feat before but also clear that video game technology, and the hardware along with it, has come a long way.

(Source: State of Unreal

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