We got a fresh glimpse of The Witcher 4 during Epic's State of Unreal livestream today, showing a merchant having an incredibly unpleasant time at the hands of a manticore, and, oh, CDPR cinematic director Kajetan Kapuściński actually playing some Witcher 4.
It must be said, it looks bloody gorgeous. Ciri and her horse—Kelpie, not Roach—have found themselves in Kovir, roaming around taking monster contracts and doing general Witcher stuff, but in Unreal Engine 5 this time.
Our hardware team is cooking up an analysis of the tech on show, but my layman's opinion is that it looks swish as hell: Ciri's cloak deforms and rustles convincingly, the Koviri town Ciri rides into to conclude her contract is filled with life and people, and CDPR is giving us all what we want with realistic third-person shoving.
The demo feels a bit like a repeat of that Witcher 3 preview from way-back-when, the one where Geralt rides into Novigrad to claim the reward on a monster contract. After investigating the bloody aftermath of the manticore's attack on the merchant, she rides Kelpie back to the guy who hired her to give him the bad news.
The twist is, of course, that when this guy gave Ciri the contract he told her he wanted news on a delayed salt shipment, and it didn't take our witcheress long to figure out he was actually concerned about the smuggled goods hidden in the cart. A pretty classic Witcher turn in the tale: the kind of thing that would have Geralt heave a world-weary sigh as he decides whether to help the guy out or not.
We don't get a look at The Witcher 4's dialogue system, alas—the camera flies away from Ciri and the contract-giver's chat to show off some fish just when it looks like things might be reaching a decision point—but we do get quite a lot of Ciri's new voice actor, Ciara Berkeley, who's replacing Jo Wyatt from The Witcher 3.
In the parts we hear, Berkeley does a great job—channelling an appropriate level of witcher-like exasperation without sounding like she's doing a knock-off Geralt or Witcher 3 Ciri. She's older and more experienced, having been doing this monster-hunting lark for a while now, and that comes across in the bit of Berkeley we get.
If I wasn't excited before (I was), I am now (even moreso). It feels like CDPR is drilling down into the sumptuous open-world feast that was The Witcher 3, but expanding and enhancing it using its last 10 years of experience and technological development. "We are making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious open-world Witcher game ever," said CDPR's Sebastian Kalemba on stage. Traditional marketing hype, sure, but I'm inclined to believe him.
