The Witcher 4 | Gameplay Tech Demo

While this is definitely real-time and in-engine, it's so heavily scripted and such a small vertical slice of the game that it can't be used as a representation of the final game at all. CDPR have learned nothing from Cyberpunk and Witcher 3 launches, it seems.

ETA: CDPR have clarified that this isn't The Witcher 4 but the way they speak about the features demonstrated makes me think that wasn't their original intention when showing this on stage and that they're already trying to walk some of it back.

They've come out and said specifically this is a tech demo in the world of the Witcher 4 but its not actually witcher 4 the game. As in, they're showing off the new tech, like foliage nanite.
Calling it a „tech Demo“ already made their initial intention pretty clear: this is not the game, this is some tech we‘ll be using.
- But here's the thing. People will interpret it that way, lose their shit and empty their wallets the moment they can based on media like this.

I believe it. I've had access to a ps5 devkit and UE5 in the past.
What I don't believe is that they can actually run a full-fledged game on the same hardware at the same level of fidelity
- Interesting thing is, they never claimed they can 😀
  I am not even sure how far along they are with the game, so maybe they aren't in a position to talk about performance and visual fidelity, but this is going to make people think this is how Witcher 4 will look and run.

Well damn I know it's just footage of a tech demo so there is a lot that can happen still and Ciri was definitely not controlled live (as they tried to make us believe if you watched the full event. Like seriously, who's going to believe you when you slice up a horse and voxelize trees? Holding the controller on stage was just corny, sorry guys) BUT it looks amazing! I especially loved how they showcased some of the technical details. I really didn't think it would impress me this much because they showed way more about a game that's probably years away from release than I ever anticipated. And again, a lot can still happen and go wrong but I would lie if I said I wasn't hyped already. Mission accomplished I guess.

That's not unbelievable. If the trees voxelization thing is just a visualisation mode in the engine, it's stupidly easy to "ship" it into a dev build and activate it with a shortcut. Hell the nanite visualisation thing they showed on foliage before that one is exactly that, and iirc enabled by default in dev, you just need to toggle a cvar to see it.
Source : have worked on UE5 games
- The presentation looks too fluid. I don‘t see any room or reason to use a controller live on stage there other than to pretend. The entire thing looks scripted through and through so why would you even make Ciri controlled live there? Feel free to send me time codes where the camera itself actually looks like it‘s controlled by the guy behind the pult, though. I can‘t see anything. It looks like a normal tech demo with preselected inputs to me and I see no reason why they would give the guy control over anything.
parts of the demo could be player controlled

Ugh, I can already tell this is my deadline for my getting a GPU upgrade.

Hopefully the switch to a third-party engine means I won't have to wait a year after release like I did with CP2077. I imagine this game has to be super important to Epic.

Only relevant thing from this is to see Skellige, prettiest part from TW3

This is in Kovir.
- Good to know. Another cool nordic region.

Surely digital foundry will find improvements but to me this doesn't look that different than witcher 3. Better animations and hair looks better I think? Never noticed lod transitions myself. The promise of increaaed interactivity means nothing in a trailer neither. I only hope it has better multi core performance especially with ray tracing

I'm sorry, but you are blind, if you feel this way.
Have you gone and looked at what W3 looks like recently? It's not a bad looking game by any stretch but this still looks significantly better imo. The vegetation density definitely looks way better, as well as the lighting.
- I've been replaying W3 and I agree. This looks quite a bit better in terms of foliage density and character detail. W3 still looks great though.
- I've been playing it the last week

What does it matter what it was running on? This looks pre rendered and anything pre rendered will look good even on a potato. Case in point Blizzard’s old pre renders in warcraft and diablo.

Don’t get me wrong, i’m excited for new witcher, just be realistic on the requirements. I’d rather not have another cyberpunk ps4 fiasco.

Well it is so you know you're going to get something similar if you own a ps5
It's running in real time.