CD Projekt Red stays coy on whether The Witcher 4 can run on current-gen consoles, including Xbox Series S

WITH Impressive, ultra-high-quality debut trailer for The Witcher 4 at The Game Awards Last week, fans expressed considerable concern about whether the game would be playable on current-gen hardware. This is only made worse by the mention in the trailer’s fine print and short description official blogthat 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 upon arrival.

Developer CD Projekt Red of course also has some experience with older consoles: the latest generation consoles PlayStation 4 and Xbox One have proven extremely problematic for Cyberpunk 2077launch. The studio ultimately dropped them due to Phantom Freedom expansion, which will come in 2023.

Talking to CDPR in a new interview this weekEurogamer asked if the studio could assure console owners that they would indeed be able to run it, and whether it could run on, say, the Xbox Series S, which in its current state is still required for any game to be released on the Xbox Series X. Developers were a little shy in response.

“You know, first of all, it’s nice to say: this is not some kind of ‘start of a marketing’ campaign,” said The Witcher 4game director Sebastian Kalemba, referring to the trailer. “At first we wanted to demonstrate and share with the whole world that: Ciri is the main character; This is The Witcher 4; and she mutated; and she is definitely on the Path, right?”

Rather than specifically citing concerns about certain consoles, Kalemba elaborated a bit more but only mentioned that this would apply to key platforms more broadly.

“Secondly, yes, we are currently working on a new engine with Epic engineers, and there is great synergy and great collaboration between us. And we are currently working on Unreal Engine 5 and our custom build. And obviously we want to support all platforms – so PC, Xbox and Sony, right – but I can’t tell you more about that right now.”

He also stressed for the second time that this trailer is just a technical exhibit and a “good reference” for now.

“Of course, it’s definitely worth remembering [that for this] for the first time, we created the pre-rendered cinematic piece without post-processing that we want [show that we’re] simply striving to achieve such quality in cinematography as much as possible. That’s my opinion: it’s a good benchmark.”

The emphasis on this being just an early demo rather than a true “start of a marketing” campaign is reminiscent of some of CDPR CEO Michal Nowakowski’s comments recently in an interview with Eurogamer, covered in more detail in our recent report on what can we expect from The Witcher 4.

Speaking to Eurogamer earlier this summer, Nowakowski explained that while Phantom Liberty had a more stripped-down six-month marketing campaign before launch, “we’re still expecting a slightly longer – but not two-year – campaign for the new game.” (The two years it took Cyberpunk 2077 was due to its delays, he explained, as the studio had originally planned for something around 12-18 months from the launch of its big Keanu Reeves moment at E3.)

Nowakowski also cited a marketing “massive attack” as the main starting point of this less than two-year pre-launch period. “Having said that, I want to stress that this doesn’t mean we won’t be teasing or releasing some cool assets sooner [a full reveal]. Because a marketing campaign carried out a little before the launch of the game is different from a real, say, “mass attack”. A massive attack is when you announce the date, you start collecting pre-orders, and it’s really a race from now, from now until the game launches.”

For example, he then continued: “If I ask you, what do you know about The Witcher 4? The answer is probably not very big – yes, there are theories and so on. But there is nothing concrete. So we want to sprinkle crumbs here and there so that people – and the media as well – can pick up on it and try to understand what exactly we’re trying to say this time. [is something] We can start doing this a little earlier.” This will include aspects such as “having some footage or something that whets the fans’ appetite – not even to create that kind of hype,” he said, but just to just get the early conversations flowing.

To put it simply: it would be reasonable to conclude that this first trailer would be considered one of those “cool assets” released as an earlier teaser, establishing that we are playing as Ciri, and some basic story basics, such as that she has become a full-fledged novice witcher, but that roughly 18-month countdown is still a long way off.

Returning to consoles, there’s also some interesting context in the form of CDPR VP of Technology Charles Tremblay’s comments to Eurogamer earlier this year. There Tremblay noted that the studio’s next game will most likely be released not only on PC. “I don’t think that’s a strategy we want to take right now. That being said, would that mean that we’ll have – let’s say there were 20 platforms available – we’ll have 20 at launch? Maybe not. But launching at least on PC only and then in silos, that’s not necessarily the approach we want to take, that’s for sure.”

He also noted that the studio now develops all of its games on the “lowest” spec hardware, such as consoles, at the same time as it does on PC, rather than its old method of working on PC first and then working backwards. – one of the many reasons for problems with the launch of Cyberpunk.

Console versions “running very late” are now “not acceptable”, he explained. “It’s part of our process; We’re doing console reviews to make sure we know exactly where we stand on all platforms. [including] lowest [spec] platform that we have, instead of saying, “PC is fine, we can move forward.”

Since this process applies to all of the studio’s upcoming games, it creates an interesting situation with The Witcher 4. If the studio is hesitant to guarantee its viability on current-gen platforms (though not ruling it out, of course), and is now developing games for the lowest-spec platforms Along with high-end PCs, what could these platforms be? Based on what CD Projekt Red said, we may have to wait a little longer to find out.

Meanwhile, our Full interview with CD Projekt Red about The Witcher 4 contains more details, while our report on studio’s technical ambitions, optimism and development timelines and our full long read on what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077 and how the studio responded offer much more context about how CDPR works today.