The Witcher 4 will mark a major shift in CD Projekt Red's technological capabilities. As we saw in the Unreal Engine 5 demo for the game recently, it's clearly going to be a visually impressive game, but it'll also be packing a lot more detail in when it comes to settlements.
Speaking to GamesRadar, Jan Hermanowicz, engineering production manager on The Witcher 4's tech demo, said that the studio is going to make the most of the new hardware we've seen since the last Witcher game.
"That generational shift, we want to do it right," he said. "Our ambition is to take full advantage of it and really deliver the next-gen experience." In the demo, we saw the village of Valdrest in Kovir. While it might not seem impressive in terms of overall size, the density of the village was comparable with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt's Novigrad.
"We actually looked at what we did in the past, what was cool about that, and what we couldn't do at the time," Hermanowicz said. The team also "spent a lot of time watching recordings of Novigrad from Witcher 3."
The bar set by Novigrad informed CDPR on what they were capable of with fantasy settlements, and if the tech demo is anything to go by, we very well could see massive cities of an untold scale in The Witcher 4.