We recently sat down with CD Projekt Red and Epic to learn a little more about it, well, demo tech epic Witcher 4 and what the novel Unreal Engine 5.6 leads to the development of games. The main amount is that their cooperation will not make Witcher 4 not an amazing experience in the open world. It seems that this will lend a hand other programmers literally raise their game when it comes to the titles of the open world.
“This is what we wanted to do in Unreal and this since the Middle Unreal Engine 4. The improvement of the development of the open world in Unreal is a very long conversation and you can go back to each release and see something that directs us even greater perfection in the development of an open world,” says Wyeth Johnson, senior director of the Epic product strategy.
Then he vigorously moves up to illustrate, if the latest Unreal 5.6 engine for the development of world open games is better. “We approached this edition dramatically and I think it shows it,” says Johnson, referring to the Demo of Witcher 4, which stunning everyone, especially because it works on the ordinary Sony PS5 equipment, even PS5 Pro.
Johnson again emphasized the importance of performance for Unreal Engine 5.6. “We focus on 5.6 is almost exclusively efficiency,” he says.
“Developers should be able to achieve amazing quality and can determine what this quality is, maybe it is the perfect pixel, or maybe it is an amazing scale, functions of animation or AI, or whatever it would be,” he says.
“Performance is not only what the player interacts with is also what the programmer interacts with. And when the water level increases and the time to reach quality decreases, you can be more expressive, you can be more funny, you can try to dream a little more than worry about all these systems stopping you from behind.
In other words, Unreal 5.6 performance optimization should mean much higher visualization quality and gameplay on existing equipment.
Unreal 5.6 also involves facilitating programmers. “We need to reduce the overall engine level and maintain the overall costs as low as possible so that the developers themselves can implement captivating behaviors and trust that these behaviors can enter and players can experience them. Every programmer who uses Unreal will benefit from what we showed today. This is the most fundamental output,” says Johnson.
As for the CD Projekt RED, it seems that the transition from their own red engine to Unreal was a clear success. “We had a great time with Unreal,” says Senior Technical Animator Witcher 4 Julius Girbig.
“It’s not like we lost things because of the passage. We are introducing our experience, which we already have from a red engine, the whole triple, an open world with a streaming transmission, all this experience that we now introduce to experts who have been building engines for years,” says cooperation with EPIC.
“I am quite an animation at the surface level, so I don’t really delve into the code,” says Girbig, “But I am still able to run these hundreds of characters, create behaviors for them as part of this supporting user interface, he simply unlocks me as an artist.
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“Now thanks to this engine, I am suddenly unlocking me to create much larger things and think about a larger one. It is really amazing that I can use things such as nanite leaves to create these extensive forests and whatever comes to your mind.”
The final result is certainly impressive. Indeed, it’s almost strenuous to believe that it works on Sony PS5, it looks so good. But Johnson confirms that everything works on a completely standard PS5 equipment.
“There are internal things in which PlayStation is amazing, and we show each of them in this technical demo,” he says. Given the most PS5 specification compared to the latest computer equipment that bodes well. Even the novel GPU RDNA 4 program, Radeon RX 9060 XT, blows up PS5 to get raw specifications, and especially ray tracking efficiency.
Speaking of this, Johnson confirms that the demo actually used the Ray Unreal tracking engine in hardware mode. If it works well on PS5, he should fly on any relatively latest graphics card on the computer.
In general, the advantage of CD Projekt RED and EPIC works together with the fact that both sides are the benefits of collabum, which means better games for all of us. “There is no possible way for us to push in every direction to the vertex level, which programmers such as CD Projekt Red are able to push,” says Johnson.
“We have no heartburn if someone wants to introduce a modification so that it is not a great success for their specific use, and this is a great success for us, because it means that we gave them a nice place to connect the thing they needed, which we did not provide.”
The only frustration in all of this is that Witcher 4 began developing only at the end of last year and is not at the earliest for several years, as well as other games that apply all the latest conclusions CD Projekt RED and Epic, are not exactly around the corner.
