Death, taxes, and CD Projekt finding ways to make its massive RPGs come with graphical options that’ll have your computer kicking out enough heat to turn the arctic circle into the Arizona desert. The Witcher 4 sounds set to continue that trend, even if its devs have opted to go “more-console first” when putting it together.
Folks from the studio and Epic revealed this in a chat with the beloved boffins over at Digital Foundry. As you’d expect, it’s a long discussion that delves into all things hardware-related when it comes to TW4’s recent tech demo. You know, the one that included familiar voices and exposed horse muscles.
“We always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down,” Charles Tremblay, CD Projekt’s VP of technology said when asked why the tech demo was on PS5. “But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to see, ok, this time around we really want to be [doing] more console-first development, right? We worked with Unreal, with our partner, and then we saw the challenge. To realise the ambition, to make what we want at 60 fps on PS5 would be, you know, there would be work.”
So, the studio’s made The Witcher 4’s console performance a big focus – something that’s not surprising given Cyberpunk 2077‘s launch issues generally proved much more dire on those platforms than on PC. That’s not to say we were spared totally, I remember some pretty wacky glitches from the start of my first playthrough, but nothing so game-breaking it made me consider trying to get a refund.
However, don’t fret, CD Projekt still plan on letting you take full advantage of the bells and whistles the best PCs can pull off, even if it sounds like they’re currently figuring out exactly what that’ll entail.
“It’s easier to scale up than down, because we know that both Lumen (UE5’s global illumination and reflections system) and all those technologies are providing us pretty consistent representation across the scale up, we know that once we set up certain foundations both visually and technically, there’s room to scale up,” CD Projekt VP and global art director Jakub Knapik said in a bit of the chat about the game’s graphical potential beyond what the PS5 can handle.
He added that CD Projekt aim to “expand all the raytracing features forwards” on PC, and in general ensure that people who spend the big bucks on their desktops are appropriately rewarded with the likes of uber-swankily rendered huts and suitably stunning vistas.
“In the past, something that’s [been] super important for the group is that if people pay good money for the hardware, we want them to have what the game can provide for that [top hardware], not like a simplified experience,” Tremblay added, “So this is something we’ll definitely explore.”
