Forward-looking: Despite The Witcher 4 being many years away from release, developer CD Projekt Red is already warning that getting the game to run on the Xbox Series X at 60 frames per second is going to be "extremely challenging."
Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia met with Epic and Charles Tremblay, CD Projekt RED's VP of technology, in Poland following the tech demo showing off Unreal Engine 5.6 earlier this month.
CD Projekt has emphasised that the demo is a representation of what The Witcher 4 will look like on the standard PlayStation 5 with ray tracing enabled – it wasn't the actual game itself.
Tremblay said the development team switched to a console-first approach to achieve this target, rather than going the usual route of scaling down from the PC.
The exec says this traditional PC-first approach has caused many problems in the past. He's no doubt referring to Cyberpunk 2077, which had so many issues on consoles that it was removed from the PlayStation Store for months.
Tremblay explained that there is still a lot of work left to ensure The Witcher 4 runs at 60 fps on the PS5 and resembles the tech demo, but the team seems confident it can be done.
However, playing the next installment of the franchise at 60 fps on the Xbox Series S might be an impossibility. Tremblay said such a feat will be "extremely challenging."
"Let's just say that this is something that we need to figure out," he added.
The Xbox Series S has proven to be problematic for developers in the past. One of the most famous instances was Baldur's Gate 3. Larian didn't initially confirm the Xbox version due to technical challenges – particularly enabling split-screen on the Series S. The 150 GB install size was also an issue. It meant that the Xbox release of BG3 arrived about three months after the PS5 launch, and without the split-screen feature, which was added in a later update.
Microsoft mandates that games released on the Xbox Series X to also be available on the Series S. The requirement can result in some titles avoiding the Xbox altogether, such as the demanding Black Myth: Wukong.