Since CD Projekt RED showed off its new The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5.6 tech demo earlier this week, the company has had nothing but good things to say about the engine. In an interview with GamesRadar, the studio’s senior technical animator Julius Girbig also praised the engine, along with Unreal Engine’s senior director of product strategy Wyeth Johnson. The two spoke about how the newest version of Unreal Engine – 5.6 – helps developers and artists give life to their visions.
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.
