The Witcher 4 tech demo shows off new features in Unreal Engine 5.6

ORLANDO, Fla. – The Witcher 4 is still years away from release, but we now have a much better idea of what the open-world RPG will look like.

CD Projekt Red showed off a gorgeous tech demo of The Witcher 4 during Epic Games’ State of Unreal keynote this morning at Unreal Fest 2025. What we saw wasn’t actual gameplay footage — the developer worked with Epic to make this playable build specifically for the conference — but it does show off some of the new Unreal Engine 5.6 features that will power the game.

The tech demo opened with a vicious beast attacking an unsuspecting group of men traveling on a road, picking them off one by one. We then see The Witcher 4 protagonist Ciri, who’s now a veteran monster-slaying witcher following the events of the last game. She’s in the region of Kovir, a new massive area never before seen in the series.

Ciri is trying to track down the missing people in the snow-covered mountains along with her horse, Kelpi. Thanks to new improvements in UE5.6, The Witcher 4 will have rich environmental details and smoother character animation. During the demo, Epic showed an X-ray view of Kelpi’s body, which revealed a realistic simulation of the horse’s musculature.

CDPR said on stage that the game can also load in content much faster in the open world with UE’s Fast Geometry Streaming Plugin. Ciri walked around the marketplace of Valdrest, showing off how reactive the world is to the player when she bumps into a villager, causing him to spill the food he was carrying. The representatives said such actions can even cause a chain reaction as those NPCs interact with other characters.

Ciri later speaks to the merchant who hired her to track down his men, and that’s when she tells him the bad news. At one point the camera pans to the town square, and Epic Games said there were over 300 skeletal mesh agents in that scene and that it doesn’t affect the performance of the game at all. The demo ended with Ciri and her horse heading back home.

Most impressively, the demo was running on a standard PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second with ray tracing, showing the efficiency of UE5.6 when building open-world games.