The Witcher 4 is a console-first game, and Cyberpunk 2077 is to blame

The Witcher 4 is being developed with consoles first in mind, as developer CD Projekt Red aims to avoid a similar fiasco to the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. A recent Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 tech demo gave us our first big preview of how the new RPG is shaping up, and it certainly looks stunning. But the showcase was running on a standard Playstation 5, rather than the typical PC demos we're often used to seeing for such presentations, and the studio says this decision was a result of the "many problems" it encountered during its previous release.

In a new interview, Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia asks why the Witcher 4 demonstration was shown on a Playstation 5, and why CDPR is targeting 60 fps first for its upcoming RPG. "We have super-high ambition for this project, and we always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down," VP of technology Charles Tremblay responds. "But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to see, okay, this time around we really want to be more console-first [in] development."

Those issues most notably came to a head with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, which was removed from sale on PS4 due to performance woes, and saw Xbox expanding its refund options to account for returns. While PC players had a slightly better time, CD Projekt still offered full Cyberpunk refunds to any dissatisfied players that wanted one.

"We worked with Unreal and then we saw the challenge to realize the ambition that to make what we want at 60 fps on PS5, there would be work," Tremblay continues. "This is why we started to talk to figure out what needs to be done with the technology and we also decided that we need to have all these things that need to be developed. Where we go from there, it's hard to say, but right now we really wanted to focus on 'What does it mean to make this ambition [a reality] on a console?'"

Among those ambitions were including a "dense, large, and dynamic forest" that is fully scalable, featuring "smooth, hitch-free traversal," a "believable, interactive, full-of-life village," and with room to grow gameplay features. The result is certainly impressive, even though CDPR was quick to clarify that the tech demo is "a first look at the cutting-edge technology powering The Witcher 4, but not The Witcher 4 itself."

Tremblay notes that CDPR has "all our other projects at 60 fps and we really wanted to aim for 60 fps once again and not go back to 30 fps or something like that." Cinematic director Kajetan Kapuściński adds, "It was a mutually shared ambition together with Epic. When we started talking about it [the tech demo], I think that was literally the first pillar we established together, that this was going to be a console, 60 fps demo."

Tremblay notes that he's particularly proud of the demo's forest. "It was quite stressful to figure out how to make this forest, and the Epic guys worked extremely hard to figure out these problems. The first time I saw it in full bloom, I was like, 'Oh, we've got it.' The forest is super important for this game; you want the player to want to explore the forest as you're hunting monsters. My stress level reduced when I saw it."

"We're perfectly aware that we still have a lot of work ahead of us," Tremblay says of the remaining Witcher 4 development. "This is a tech demo, the whole gameplay loop is not implemented, there's no combat, there's a lot of things that don't work. But the ambition is set; this is where we want to aim, and we'll be damned if we don't try to get this game in performance. It's too early to say if we'll manage to nail it, but we'll work as hard as we can to make it."

We'll keep you up to speed on the latest news, including The Witcher 4 release date, as it comes. We've also rounded up the biggest upcoming PC games you'll want to keep an eye on as 2025 rolls forward.

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