According to Johnson, “every developer who uses Unreal will benefit from what we showed today,” referring to the recent Unreal Engine event where the company showed off new features. With new tools that make animation easier, as well as the new MetaHuman Creator that allows for more realistic character craetion, Johnson said that the engine is now “good for everybody that uses it.”

“Performance is not just what a player interacts with – it’s also what a developer interacts with,” explained Johnson, talking about how the potential of Unreal Engine is typically realised by developers themselves. “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.”

Girbig spoke about how, since he primarily works on the art creation side of game development, he is “not actually digging into code that much.” However, he also mentioned that the new tools have allowed him to refine his own workflow and help him create and refine “hundreds of characters.”

“It just unlocks me as an artist,” said Girbirg. “Now, with this engine, it suddenly unlocks me to create much bigger things and think bigger. It’s really, really awesome to be able to use things like the nanite foliage to create these vast forests and whatever comes to your mind, and it will be available for everyone.”

The tech demo for The Witcher 4 shown off during Unreal Engine’s recent showcase gave us a look at quite a few impressive technical achievements, including the incredible detail of Valdrest, seamless transitions between gameplay and cutscene, and gorgeous environments created thanks to the new Nanite Foliage feature in Unreal Engine 5.6.

However, a spokesperson for CD Projekt RED did clarify that what we saw in the video was first and foremost a tech demo, and that fans of The Witcher shouldn’t look at the video as if it were a showcase of The Witcher 4 itself. “This is a tech demo and a first look at the cutting-edge technology powering The Witcher 4 – but not The Witcher 4 itself,” said the spokesperson.

Another spokesperson for the studio has recently revealed that the face for Ciri that we got to see in the video was a copy of Ciri’s face from her appearance in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The spokesperson did note that there were a few key changes made to the face in order to allow animators better control over her facial expressions.

Epic has described one of its key goals with the latest release of Unreal Engine as being able to maintain steady frame rates of 60 FPS in open world games that focus on high visual fidelity. According to the announcement, the engine is now capable of achieving this on all modern platforms, from PC to consoles, and even smartphones.

“With this release, one of our key goals was to empower you to build super-high-fidelity, large-scale open worlds that run smoothly at 60 FPS across current-generation hardware,” wrote Epic Games on its official website. “We’ve also made major strides toward a truly engine-first animation and rigging workflow, reducing the need for DCC round-tripping. Plus, MetaHumans can now be fully authored directly within the engine, unlocking a more streamlined and efficient creative process.”

Among the features revealed for Unreal Engine 5.6 is Hardware Ray Tracing, which allows for better performance when games make use of Lumen Global Illumination. The latest version of the engine is able to eliminate bottlenecks that might arise from the CPU when it comes to rendering large-scale open worlds.

Unreal Engine 5.6 can also make use of the Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin to allow developers to get better performance out of a game when static content is streamed in and out when a game is started up. For players, this largely means that there will be less bottlenecks for a game to deal with when streaming in static objects that can’t be interacted with, but add to the scenery.

Animators can also enjoy some of the newer features of the engine, including a revamp to Tween Tools that allows animators to have greater control over selected key frames and nodes. Part of these enhancements is also the new Curve Editor toolbar that further helps animators with manipulating key frames, along with the addition of the Lattice tool and Smart Key snapping.

With Unreal Engine 5.6, the MetaHuman Creator will also now be fully integrated into the engine’s toolkits. MetaHuman allows developers to create realistic looking human characters that can then be used in the rest of Unreal Engine during the development of the game. Developers can also capture actors’ performances in real time with most webcams and smartphones to then animate in the engine in real-time.

For developers, both professional and aspiring, that might be wondering, Unreal Engine 5.6 is available right now. For more details about some of the new features of Unreal Engine 5.6, including demonstrations of things like the new Hardware Ray Tracing, check out the showcase video below. Also check out how The Witcher 4 will make use of some of these features.