In case you have missed it, the State of Unreal 2025 event launched today, and started with a Keynote of CD Projekt Red and a technical demo for its next game The Witcher 4.
The Witcher 4 was not revealed that a few months ago, and it seems that he will not arrive before 2027 at the earliest, but fortunately, the new images of today gave us just enough to get out of it while we expect.
There are a lot of notable things to unpack from the shop window of almost 10 minutes, a new region, Fancy Unreal Engine 5 Tech and a new companion, but I managed to choose the first five things that have marked me the most.
1. Meet Kelpie
Just like Geralt de Rivia had a roach The Witcher 3: Wild HuntIt seems that in The Witcher 4, Ciri will have his own horse friend named Kelpie to keep his company throughout his trip.
Kelpie is from Witcher’s novels and belonged for the first time to a man named Hotspurn before the mare was at Ciri’s guard. The black mare was initially anonymous until Ciri the way and Hotspur crosses a river, after which Ciri named Kelpie.
According to the images, it seems that Ciri can call his horse whistling, as Geralt does in Roach. Interestingly, in books, Kelpie could be summoned by rubbing a magic bracelet, but it is not clear if this treat will be added to the game.
Since Ciri and Kelpie will explore the world together, CD Projekt Red explained that driving needed to “feel transparent, natural and just fun”. To support this, the studio introduced something called “multi-caractic motion correspondence” in Unreal Engine 5, which makes the pair “perfectly synchronized” during mounting from any angle and speed.
Hopefully Kelpie will not go away and cannot be stuck on a roof like Roach.
2. A location never seen before
When the Witcher 4 was initially revealed, CD Projekt Red confirmed that the game would introduce new regions of the continent, but that the card will remain “more or less the same” size as The Witcher 3 “.
In the last technological demo, we received our first overview of Kovir, a mountainous region filled with dense forests and snowy cliffs. The images also showed us our first overview of the port city in the Valdrest region, which is full of NPC.
In the tradition of Witcher, the northern region is famous for its glass industries and was once a county of Redania, but is now part of the kingdom of Kovir and Poviss.
3. Was he captured everything on the PS5?
According to CD Projekt Red, the latest technical demo works on a basic PlayStation 5 to 60 IPS, with the line of the activated rays. At first, I thought that the images came from a high -end PC or even a PS5 Pro, so it is difficult to believe that a game that looks so good could manage a current generation console.
Although it was not indicated during the event, CD Projekt Red has since specified (via VGC) that images were a technical demo. The Witcher 4 world, and was not The Witcher 4 Gameplay, suggesting that what we have seen will not be linked to the story.
“This is a technological demo, and a first overview of advanced technology The Witcher 4 – But not The Witcher 4 Himself, “said a spokesperson for VGC.
“It presents the powerful bases that we build in close collaboration with Epic Games to push the design in the world open more than ever and the basic systems and functionalities that we develop using a UNREAL 5 engine.
“We are really proud of this early step and delighted to give you an overview of certain cool technologies such as UAF, nanite foliage, intelligent objects, the ML distorter and the Fastgeo streaming that helps shape the future of the witch.”
4. Kill monsters
Before the technical demo begins, the opening speech started with a short cinema showing a group of Korviso men and their salt expeditions attacked in the middle of the night by a monster called a manticore.
While the scene goes to Ciri, we see that it was responsible for investigating the missing men and the expedition by a premises in Valdrest, and probably, hunting and killing the creature.
At the start, I thought that this quest could be fixed at the start of the game to give players an idea of their environment and to familiarize themselves with mechanics, similar to Geralt’s quest to hunt the griffin at the start of The Witcher 3.
However, consider that the images are not real WITCHER 4 gameplay, and in the place just a technological demonstration in the world of The Witcher 4We do not know if this quest and the Manticore will appear in the full game.
5. Let’s be technical
Since this demo was presented during the State of Unreal 2025 event, we were sure we will get a lot of juicy technical details on what exactly is The Witcher 4 look so well.
All the features mentioned are under development, tested and will eventually be published at all Unreal engines developers, starting with the Unreal Engine 5.6 version today.
This is in particular the new Unreal animation framework, the rendering of nanite foliage and metahuman technology with a scale of the IA crowd, which are used to help provide an immersive world at 60 IPS without compromising quality.
The Unreal animation framework fuels the movements of realistic characters in animated scenes, which we can see in action in the port city of Valdrest, while Fastgeo Streaming, developed in collaboration with Epic games, allows environments to load quickly and gently.
Nanite foliage is used as a way to make environments and feel more realistic, allowing developers to fill the forests and fields with dense details without sacrificing performance.
Then there is the mass system, which easily manages large dynamic crowds, and Ml Deformer, which adds subtle and realistic touches to the animations of characters, “just to the muscle movement”, as has been demonstrated with Kelpie.
