“Everyone has the idea of how fast a PS5 is and what kinds of games it can run,” he tells The Verge. “That’s why we specifically wanted to go that route of: let’s start with the consoles, let’s show how much we can optimize this engine together with Epic and make it work on current gen, instead of running it on some high-end hardware.”

Now, to be clear, the UE5 demo is not actually a slice of the final game. Girbig describes it as “a demonstration of the tools that we are currently building that will eventually power The Witcher 4,” and something that “does show the style and direction that we’re going for, and the fidelity that we’re aiming at with the final game.”

According to Girbig, who didn’t work at CDPR until after the shift to Unreal, the decision was made because UE5 “across the board, gives us what we’re looking for.” That includes an increased sense of scale necessary for open-world games, with the ability to render hundreds of non-playable characters with more elaborate AI guiding their actions, and also a better production pipeline for managing multiple projects. (An upcoming remake of the first Witcher game is also being made in UE5.)

But from an artistic perspective, Girbig says, the move to Epic’s engine has a different kind of impact: getting out of the way to allow for more ambitious ideas. “It allows an artist to express themselves much more easily when the engine isn’t a limitation anymore,” he says. “That’s what we’re aiming for here. As an artist, for me, this unlocked myself to think bigger, and on bigger scales.”