CD Projekt Red says it will focus on making The Witcher 4 work well on consoles first because Cyberpunk 2077 had problems on consoles when it was released.
In a new interview Digital Foundry’s Alex Battaglia asked why The Witcher 4 demo was shown on PlayStation 5 and why CD Projekt Red is focusing on 60 fps. Charles Tremblay the VP of technology said they have big goals for the game and usually start with PC first then scale it down. But because they had problems before this time they want to focus on consoles first.
The problems got really bad when Cyberpunk 2077 launched. It ran so poorly on PS4 that it was taken off the store. Xbox also made it easier for people to get refunds. Even though the game worked a bit better on PC the company still gave full refunds to anyone who wasn’t happy.
We used Unreal Engine but making our big ideas run at 60 fps on the PS5 was a challenge Tremblay says. So we started discussing what changes were needed in the technology. We also realized we had to build some new tools. For now we're mainly focused on what it takes to turn our vision into reality on a console.
They wanted to create a big detailed forest that you can move through smoothly without any glitches. They also built a lively realistic village that players can interact with and there's room to add more gameplay later. It looks great so far but CDPR made it clear that this is just a tech demo showing the new technology behind The Witcher 4 it's not the actual game yet.
Tremblay said that CDPR runs all their other projects at 60 fps and they wanted to do the same again instead of going back to 30 fps. Cinematic director Kajetan Kapuściński added that both CDPR and Epic agreed from the start that the tech demo would run at 60 fps on console.
Tremblay said he’s especially proud of the forest in the demo. It was really stressful to figure out how to make it but the team at Epic worked very hard to solve the problems he said. The first time I saw the full forest I thought Yes we did it. The forest is a big part of the game because you want players to enjoy exploring it while hunting monsters. I felt much more relaxed after seeing it come together.
We know there’s still a lot to do says Tremblay about Witcher 4’s development. This is just a tech demo. The full gameplay isn’t ready yet there’s no combat and many things don’t work. But we know what we want to achieve and we’re going to do our best to get the game running well. It’s too soon to say if we’ll succeed but we’ll work really hard to make it happen.
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