The State of Unreal 2025 showcase has just offered us a first glimpse at what playing The Witcher 4 might look like, via an Unreal Engine 5 demo build that featured Ciri exploring the wilds and a village in Kovir. Kovir was also confirmed to be a location you’ll visit in the final game, so start packing your bags.
In this tech demo, which you can watch below, CD Projekt and Epic showed off some of the Unreal Engine 5 tech that’ll be aiming to make The Witcher 4 feel even more immersive than its already impressive predecessor when it drops.
Watch on YouTube
The demo kicked off with a merchant in a cart having his day entirely ruined by a monster, with Ciri then swooping in to quite literally pick up the pieces, as she embarks on a contract to hunt the monster that just killed the poor peddler. Things then properly transitioned into a Ciri-following build running on a PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second with all the raytracing bells and whistles at play.
We got a look at Ciri’s horse Kelpie, whom you’ll be riding about and if they’re anything like Roach, crashing into something every five minutes. The devs even peeled back Kelpie’s skin to show the engine simulating horse muscles as they run, which wasn’t at all freaky.
Ciri then wandered from the countryside of Kovir – a mountainous region that forms part of the Kingdom of Kovir and Poviss located in the northwest of The Continent – into one of the area’s villages, Valdrest. CD Projekt and Epic really played up all the immersive details that make up the likes of bustling marketplaces, with details like an innkeeper dynamically lobbing a Gwent cheat out of an inn’s front door being highlighted.
It seems that may well be what happens to you too if you try to con some cardplayers, so you’ve been warned. After showing off some varying crowd density at a circus, the demo concluded by showing Ciri looking out at the city of Lan Exeter in the distance. According to the lore, that’s Kovir’s winter capital and a Venice-style major port city filled with canals, so getting to explore it for the first time in a Witcher game will no doubt be prime screenshot material.
The Witcher 3 had the very Elven and French-feeling Beauclair and Novigrad could be just as breathtaking in a more grungy fashion, so it’ll be interesting to see how Lan Exeter stacks up. I’m really keen to explore Kovir full-stop, since it’s one of the fringe regions we’ve not heard too much about as The Witcher games have generally concentrated more centrally, aside from trips to Kaer Morhen. Regardless, it looks like we’ll be waiting until about 2027 to set foot there.