The Witcher 4: Everything confirmed in the State of Unreal 2025 gameplay reveal

Living up to their word, CD Projekt RED has revealed new gameplay for The Witcher 4 at the latest State of Unreal 2025 event. This demonstration was an exciting graphics-centered breakdown of the upcoming Unreal Engine 5-powered action RPG set after the events of the universally acclaimed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

From new graphics tech that elevates visuals to new heights for the franchise, to a dynamic open-world that's bigger and better than before, The Witcher 4 is shaping up to be an impressive showcase. Here's everything detailed about it at the State of Unreal showcase.

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New Witcher 4 gameplay shows off ray-tracing and impressive open world at State of Unreal 2025

Before we begin, it should be noted that this is a build of the game created to showcase the engine highlights and features that will constitute the Witcher 4 experience, so it is not exactly indicative of the final product. That said, everything shown in this "demo" is confirmed to be making it into the full The Witcher 4 game.

For starters, the Witcher 4 demo was played on a base PlayStation 5 console at 60 FPS with ray-tracing, which is fairly impressive given the high fidelity graphics on display. The demo shows off the protagonist Ciri, the next Witcher, who is exploring the open world of Kovir.

With a new horse in tow named Kelpie, CDPR devs show off various features like muscle deformation for the ridable animal as well as multi-character motion matching to sync animation when Ciri is mounted on the horse. The land of Kovir is densely packed with foliage rendered using Unreal Engine 5's Nanite technology, which depicts realistic, densely packed trees at minimal performance hit.

This is also backed by an impressive asset streaming solution that minimizes pop-in even as the camera moves through the sandbox world with minimal hitching. Back to Ciri, the showcase takes players to the port-town of Valdrest. The ray-traced global illumination bounce lighting is also on full display on the top side of the screen as the heroine gallops through the entryway wooden bridge.

Here, the densely-packed crowd rendering is backed by a jaw-dropping NPC reaction system where characters smartly respond to actions, sometimes in a series of chains - like a young girl running over to pick up apples dropped by an old man after Ciri bumped into him. All of this is powered using Metahuman tools for realistic interactions even amongst NPCs themselves.

All in all, the team aims to deliver a visual powerhouse with a large open world while also boasting a high level of performance. It remains to be seen how well this scales to the final The Witcher 4 game, which is currently in development for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC platforms.