The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo, Epic Games Store Plans, and More

Unreal Engine 5.6 was released at the State of Unreal 2025 event, where CD Projekt Red and Epic Games showcased an impressive tech demo of The Witcher 4. Plans for the Epic Games Store were also refined further.

The State of Unreal event began with a technical demo from CD Projekt Red and Epic Games. It's not a demo of The Witcher 4 itself, but rather a showcase of some of the technology powering the new Witcher saga. "The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo" follows witcher Ciri as she explores the region of Kovir while carrying out a monster contract. The demo provides an early glimpse of several new open-world features of Unreal Engine 5.6 in action, running at 60 frames per second with raytracing on PlayStation 5. It showcases in-engine capabilities including the new Unreal Animation Framework, Nanite Foliage Rendering (due to be released in UE 5.7) and MetaHuman technology with Mass AI crowd scaling.

Since announcing their partnership in 2022, CD Projekt Red and Epic Games have been working together to develop new tools and enhance existing features in Unreal Engine 5. The aim is to expand the engine's open-world development capabilities and create robust tools that align with the open-world design philosophies of the creators of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077.

"The tools showcased are being developed, tested, and eventually released to all UE developers, starting with today's Unreal Engine 5.6 release. This will help other studios create believable and immersive open-world environments that deliver performance at 60 FPS without compromising on quality - even at vast scales. While the presentation was running on a PlayStation console, the features and technology will be supported across all platforms the game will launch on", CD Projekt Red states. "The Unreal Animation Framework powers realistic character movements in busy scenes. FastGeo Streaming, developed in collaboration with Epic Games, allows environments to load quickly and smoothly. Nanite Foliage fills forests and fields with dense detail without sacrificing performance. The Mass system handles large, dynamic crowds with ease, while ML Deformer adds subtle, realistic touches to character animation " right down to muscle movement."

Michał Nowakowski, Joint-CEO of CD Projekt Red: "We started our partnership with Epic Games to push open-world game technology forward. To show this early look at the work we've been doing using Unreal Engine running at 60 FPS on PlayStation 5, is a significant milestone - and a testament of the great cooperation between our teams. But we're far from finished. I look forward to seeing more advancements and inspiring technology from this partnership as development of The Witcher 4 on Unreal Engine 5 continues."

Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games said: "CD Projekt Red is one of the industry's best open-world game studios, and we’re grateful that they're working with us to push Unreal Engine forward with The Witcher 4. They are the perfect partner to help us develop new world-building features that we can share with all Unreal Engine developers."

Epic Games Store

Since its launch, the Epic Games Store has paid developer and publisher partners over $2.1 billion. The mobile store has 40 million installations to date, and is on track to reach 70 million by the end of 2025. "To give publishers an even better deal, we just changed our initial revenue share to 0% for the first $1 million then 12% thereafter," Epic Games said.

Pre-loading in the Epic Games Store launches in September, and gifting arrives in time for the holidays on PC and mobile. They are also opening self-publishing on the Epic Games Store to developers and publishers on Android and iOS in Q3 2025.

Epic Web Shops will be available in July, offering developers a way to set-up a shop for in-app purchases of PC and mobile games.

Last but not least, the revamped social features will connect PC and mobile players with game-independent voice and text chat and parties, as well as game invites for third-party games. These features will form the basis for several other social features on the Store.

Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN): For over two years, players have spent more than 11.2 billion hours on 260,000 live, creator-made islands. This has resulted in $722 million being paid out to third-party creators. Epic Games wants to continue expanding the tools and IP available to creators. Starting on 17 June, creators will be able to build Lego experiences using the Lego Brick Editor. New IPs are also coming to UEFN, with Squid Game scheduled for 27 June, followed by Avatar: The Last Airbender and Star Wars.

MetaHuman 5.6, the digital human framework leaves Early Access and is now fully embedded in Unreal Engine.
RealityScan 2.0 is launching in the coming weeks, which will unify the desktop and mobile versions under the 'RealityScan' name.

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