Since The Witcher 4’s impressive, ultra-high-fidelity debut trailer at The Game Awards last week, there’s been a fair bit of consternation from fans as to whether it’ll actually be playable on current-gen hardware. That’s something only compounded by the mention, in the trailer’s small print and a brief official blog, that the trailer was pre-rendered on a mysterious, “unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX” graphics card, “using assets and models from the game itself” – suggesting at least some minor level of similarity to what the game will look like on arrival.
Developer CD Projekt Red also has some history with older console struggles of course, with the last-gen consoles of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One proving hugely problematic for Cyberpunk 2077’s launch. The studio ultimately dropped them for the Phantom Liberty expansion that arrived in 2023.
Speaking with CDPR in a new interview this week, Eurogamer asked whether the studio could reassure console owners that they could actually run it – and whether it could run on, say, an Xbox Series S, which as things stand is still required for any game releasing on the Xbox Series X. The developers were a little coy in response.
“You know, first of all, this is good to say: this is not a kind of ‘beginning of marketing’ campaign,” said The Witcher 4’s game director, Sebastian Kalemba, referring to the trailer. “We firstly wanted to showcase and share with the entire world that: Ciri is the main protagonist; it’s The Witcher 4; and she’s mutated; and she’s on The Path, definitely, right?”
Rather than specifically referencing concerns about certain consoles, Kalemba elaborated a little more, but only went as far as to mention it would be coming to the key platforms more broadly.
“The second thing is that, yes, we are working on a new engine right now, together with Epic’s engineers, and there is a great synergy and a great collaboration between us. And currently we’re working on Unreal Engine 5 and our custom build. And obviously we want to support all the platforms – meaning PC, Xbox and Sony, right? – but I cannot, right now, tell you more specifics regarding that.”
He also stressed for a second time that this trailer was just a technical showpiece and “good benchmark” for now.
“For sure, it’s definitely worth remembering [that for this] first time, we created the cinematic, pre-rendered, without post production piece, that we want to [show that we’re] simply aspiring to achieve such quality in cinematics as much as possible. That’s my opinion: it’s a good benchmark.”