CD Projekt RedThe Witcher 4 is still years away from release, but we’ve gotten a better idea of how it should look and perform in the past couple weeks. Following an impressive Unreal Engine tech demo showing off what CD Projekt Red is aiming for with the upcoming RPG’s visuals, developers from the studio have given a new interview touching on the biggest ways the next Witcher game will differ from its predecessors. One of the most important is its “console-first” approach, which could help it avoid the problems that have plagued other developers around the Xbox Series S.“We always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down,” Charles Tremblay, vice president of technology at CD Projekt Red, told Digital Foundry. “But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to say, this time around we really want to be more console-first development.”That shift in philosophy was on display at The Witcher 4’s Unreal Engine tech demo, which ran on a PlayStation 5 rather than a PC. According to global art director Jakud Knapik, developing the game to work first on consoles then scaling up the technology to take advantage of more powerful PCs is easier than building for the most advanced hardware first and later making it work around the limitations of consoles. If the team can get The Witcher 4 running at 60 frames per second on consoles, that then serves as a baseline for PC versions of the game to improve upon later.Given the studio’s history, it makes a lot of sense to start with getting console performance right. When CD Projekt Red launched Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020, it was, to put it lightly, a mess. While the PC version of the game had issues, it was a disaster on consoles, with bugs and performance issues that made it a considerable downgrade on current-gen consoles and nearly unplayable on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. At one point, Sony even removed the game from the PlayStation Store and issued refunds for anyone who’d already bought it.CD Projekt Red is aiming to make solid console performance a baseline to build on for The Witcher 4. | CD Projekt RedBy starting development on the PS5, CD Projekt Red can avoid any major surprises on the console side, although there are still plenty of challenges. During the interview, Tremblay notes that even current console hardware could pose some major problems despite the studio’s new development strategy.“I will say that 60 FPS will be extremely challenging on the Series S,” Tremblay said. “Let’s just say that it’s something we need to figure out.”With less power than the Xbox Series X, the Series S has proven to be an obstacle to developers before, and one that could even impede the launch of The Witcher 4 if it’s not handled with care ahead of time. In August 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 became a smash hit as soon as it launched on PC and had similar success a month later when it landed on PS5. But the Xbox Series X/S version of the game was delayed by several months, not getting a release until December, due to the lower power of the Series S. Microsoft mandates that Xbox games must have feature parity between the two consoles, and since developer Larian Studios couldn’t get split-screen working well enough on the Series S, both versions of the hardware were late to get the game. Given the ambitious targets CD Projekt Red is setting for The Witcher 4, reaching them on all three consoles could prove to be a challenge, as Tremblay said.Performance on Xbox Series S will present some unique challenges, CD Projekt Red says. | CD Projekt RedElsewhere in the interview, Tremblay also spoke about why the team moved to the Unreal Engine in the first place. As it turns out, it has nothing to do with the studio’s in-house redEngine’s ability to produce a good game and more about CD Projekt Red’s goals. After releasing Cyberpunk 2077, the studio began work on multiple new games at the same time, including at least one multiplayer game, both of which are new for the developer which typically only has one singleplayer game in active development at a time.Judging from what’s been shown off so far, the transition to Unreal Engine has been a positive development for CD Projekt Red. It may still be a long time before The Witcher 4 is released, but when it arrives, the changes at its developer should at least make it a smoother launch than its last game got.