We got our first look at The Witcher IV’s world

It goes without saying that because we’re such a small group here at Phenixx Gaming, we don’t cover every single bit of news or conference that happens. Given it is faux-E3, that’s something to keep in mind more than ever, but I will cover something from a showcase we’re not discussing too much this weekend. Mostly because you don’t see the name PC Gamer or Digital Foundry above this article, so neither of us (you or I) cares too much about the details of how Unreal Engine 5.6 works. However, during the State of Unreal 2025, we did get a look at The Witcher IV.

How much of the final product is in this footage is yet to be revealed. However, it is interesting to see so early on after the official announcement. The showcase of The Witcher IV starts about 30 minutes into the showcase of Unreal’s forthcoming power, none of which is decent uncompressed audio, but that’s neither here nor there. A large portion of the stage show section is very much what we all bemoaned the PC Gaming Show 2015 for: it is slow. It thinks what you care about is pixel density and teraflops, when most really want to see interesting gameplay.

I won’t bemoan them too much for that, it is a showcase of a game engine for devs rather than a showcase of games themselves, but what we saw “gameplay-wise” was the tech demo from CD Project Red. Not run on the latest PC hardware either, but rather “running on a standard PlayStation 5, at 60 frames per second with ray-tracing.” This itself is impressive enough if you’re into that type of thing, but it is one of those scripted “we’re playing this on-stage” demos/cutting to pre-rendered scenes. The type of hands-off demo you see at conventions.

“Gameplay” wise, we’re only talking about 15-ish minutes if you include the camera panning to non-cutscene or gameplay sections. It isn’t that big or important, but it is something interesting to see, especially at this point. What I will say about it, however, is that it looks quite impressive in the details, particularly the hair and the cloth physics. The shading may be a little off on the hair, especially around the forehead of Ciri, but as someone with long hair, that braid looks a bit more fluid than GTA VI‘s showcase in its latest trailer.

Though that wasn’t the big impressive Unreal talking points. After the “gameplay” section, we got the details guy to come out and show the geometry of trees and how Unreal 5.6 is going to handle trees to offer better real-time lighting effects without being too costly to the platform’s performance. Changing from the LOD magic trickery for shadows being cast by trees before, this is being replaced by a “Nanite approach” that uses voxels for each part of the tree. Again, the type of thing PC Gamer and Digital Foundry fauns over.

The world as showcased looks beautiful and has lots of detail, but what we need to keep in mind is that we don’t have a release date, we don’t have specs to gauge performance, and we don’t know how much of this demo was actually built. As stated in the showcase itself, this was a tech demo. Much like the castle as you walk down Main Street of Disney, or the trees/hills in Toontown, there is probably some trickery with the distance or perspective that made rendering a lot of the crowds and scripted “here’s a random event” moments as smooth as possible.

I’m not trying to bemoan or belittle the work of those at CD Projekt Red nor those who work on Unreal Engine, it is all impressive work for what it is. However, I’m not talking directly to the developers, unlike those on stage at the State of Unreal 2025, that’s not what I’m doing here. For a further ten minutes, there was talk directly for those in development and the type of thing to make those people rub the inside of their pockets.

Though for those of us just excited to see something from The Witcher IV ahead of its launch, or practically anything, CD Projekt Red did release some images too, as seen throughout this article. Again, no massive news on the release date or release window, but good to see something at least. Linked below is the showcase, timestamped to the start of The Witcher IV section.