The Witcher 4 Tech Demo: A Deep Dive
A tech demo for The Witcher 4 was released recently, quickly amassing millions of views. This demo showcases the technological advancements and potential visual fidelity of the upcoming game, set in the Witcher universe. Let's break down some of the key elements highlighted in the demo.
Ciri and Kelpie: A Seamless Partnership
In The Witcher 4, players will take on the role of Ciri, a witcher and professional monster slayer. Ciri has her own loyal companion, Kelpie the horse, much like Geralt and Roach. The goal is to make the bond between character and mount feel seamless and natural, enhancing the open-world exploration experience.
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Multi-Character Motion Matching: Unreal Engine is being utilized to synchronize Ciri and Kelpie's movements perfectly when mounting, regardless of the angle or speed.
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Root Motion Movement: Kelpie's movements feel realistic and grounded through the implementation of root motion.
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Unreal Chaos Flesh Solver: Realistic muscle movements and stretching are achieved under Kelpie's skin using machine-learned deformations, without sacrificing performance.
The World of The Witcher 4: Kovir and Valgrist
The Witcher world is vast and organic, with locations like Kovir featuring dense forests and untamed nature. The tech demo showcases the town of Valgrist, a port hub for fishing, trade, and mining, where players can encounter various characters and quests.
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Kovir: Dense forest and wild nature
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Valgrist: Port town, trading and mining hub
Nanite Foliage: Revolutionizing Environmental Detail
The demo introduces nanite foliage, aiming to provide artists with greater freedom and efficiency in creating dense and visually stunning environments.
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Nanite Geometry: Allows artists to bypass previous constraints, fostering freedom in design.
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Adaptive Voxel Representation: Replaces older LOD tricks, using a volumetric and fully 3D representation for fast rendering. This converts clusters of triangles into cubes that become pixel-sized at a distance, reacting to dynamic lighting and shadows.
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Foliage Density: Enables artists to render the necessary amount of foliage without compromising visual fidelity.
Unreal Engine 5.6 and Performance Enhancements
The tech demo highlights various improvements coming in Unreal Engine 5.6, focusing on performance optimizations. These enhancements aim to allow developers to create richer and more immersive open-world experiences.
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Ray Tracing and Lumen: Performance is significantly improved, running more than twice as fast without sacrificing visual quality.
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Asynchronous Rendering Pipeline: Allows for richer scenes.
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Chaos Physics: Improved cloth-to-cloth constraint solution and procedural muscle activations enhance realism.
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Unreal Animation Framework: Animation evaluations are now running in parallel off the game thread, reducing bottlenecks.
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Streaming Improvements: Physics state creation now runs asynchronously, and runtime PCG for ground scatter is improved, significantly reducing streaming times.
Character Technology and NPC Interactions
The demo showcases character technology improvements, particularly regarding the gap in quality between main characters and NPCs. The goal is to make NPC interactions feel more authentic and responsive to the player's actions.
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Meta-human tools, improved Unreal smart objects, and chaos cloth: Contribute to a more realistic and immersive experience.
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NPC Responsiveness: The world reacts dynamically to character actions, creating chain reactions.
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Facial Animations: The character facial animations are a massive leap from previous games.
Open World Design and Future Expectations
The developers aim to create the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game yet. The use of Unreal Engine, combined with the described enhancements, is intended to usher in a new generation of open-world RPGs. While the demo isn't a final representation of the game, it offers a glimpse into the potential visual and technological achievements. The game is expected to be released in 2027, according to the current projections.
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