CD Projekt Red stays coy on whether The Witcher 4 can run on current-gen consoles, including Xbox Series S

Since The Witcher 4's impressive, ultra-high-fidelity debut trailer at The Game Awards last week, there's been a fair bit of consternation from fans as to whether it'll actually be playable on current-gen hardware. That's something only compounded by the mention, in the trailer's small print and a brief official blog, that the trailer was pre-rendered on a mysterious, "unannounced Nvidia GeForce RTX" graphics card, "using assets and models from the game itself" - suggesting at least some minor level of similarity to what the game will look like on arrival.

Developer CD Projekt Red also has some history with older console struggles of course, with the last-gen consoles of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One proving hugely problematic for Cyberpunk 2077's launch. The studio ultimately dropped them for the Phantom Liberty expansion that arrived in 2023.

Speaking with CDPR in a new interview this week, Eurogamer asked whether the studio could reassure console owners that they could actually run it - and whether it could run on, say, an Xbox Series S, which as things stand is still required for any game releasing on the Xbox Series X. The developers were a little coy in response.

"You know, first of all, this is good to say: this is not a kind of 'beginning of marketing' campaign," said The Witcher 4's game director, Sebastian Kalemba, referring to the trailer. "We firstly wanted to showcase and share with the entire world that: Ciri is the main protagonist; it's The Witcher 4; and she's mutated; and she's on The Path, definitely, right?"

Rather than specifically referencing concerns about certain consoles, Kalemba elaborated a little more, but only went as far as to mention it would be coming to the key platforms more broadly.

"The second thing is that, yes, we are working on a new engine right now, together with Epic's engineers, and there is a great synergy and a great collaboration between us. And currently we're working on Unreal Engine 5 and our custom build. And obviously we want to support all the platforms - meaning PC, Xbox and Sony, right? - but I cannot, right now, tell you more specifics regarding that."

He also stressed for a second time that this trailer was just a technical showpiece and "good benchmark" for now.

"For sure, it's definitely worth remembering [that for this] first time, we created the cinematic, pre-rendered, without post production piece, that we want to [show that we're] simply aspiring to achieve such quality in cinematics as much as possible. That's my opinion: it's a good benchmark."

The emphasis on this just being an early showcase, rather than a true 'beginning of marketing' campaign, brings to mind some comments from CDPR joint CEO Michał Nowakowski to Eurogamer recently, detailed more fully in our recent report on what we can expect from The Witcher 4.

Speaking to Eurogamer earlier this summer, Nowakowski explained that while Phantom Liberty had a more truncated, six-month marketing campaign before its launch, "for a new game, we would still expect a slightly longer - but not two-year - lasting campaign." (The two years it took for Cyberpunk 2077 was down to its delays, he explained, with the studio originally planning something closer to 12 to 18 months from its big Keanu Reeves moment at E3 to launch.)

Nowakowski also referred to as a marketing "mass attack" being the main kick-off point for that less-than-two-year run up to launch. "Having said that, I want to stress: it doesn't mean we would not tease or drop some cool assets before [a full reveal]. Because the marketing campaign, slightly earlier before the launch of the game, that's different than the actual, say, 'mass attack'. Mass attack is when you announce the date, you start collecting the pre-orders and it really is that race from that point, that moment, to the moment you launch the game."

For example, he continued at the time, "If I ask you, what do you know about The Witcher 4? The answer is not much, probably - yes, there's theories and so on. But there's nothing really specific. So we want to drop the crumbs here and there so that people - and the media as well - can, you know, pick up on it and try to figure out what it is we're trying to say this time. So that [is something] we can start doing a little bit earlier." That would involve aspects such as "having some video assets, or something to whet the appetite of the fans - not even to create the hype so much," he said, as to simply get the early conversations flowing.

More simply: it might be reasonable to infer that this first trailer would count as one of those "cool assets" releasing as an earlier tease - establishing we're playing as Ciri, and some basic foundations of lore such as her having become a fully fledged witcher - but still coming a little way before that roughly 18-month countdown.

Coming back to the consoles, there's also some interesting context in the form of CDPR vice president of technology Charles Tremblay's comments to Eurogamer earlier this year. There, Tremblay noted that the studio's next game likely wouldn't launch on just PC. "I don't think this is a strategy we want to adopt right now. That being said, will it mean that we will have - let's say there were 20 platforms available - we'll have 20 at launch? Maybe not. But at least PC only, and then scattered, it's not necessarily the approach we want to go forward, for sure."

He also noted that the studio now develops all of its games on the "lowest" spec hardware, such as consoles, at the same time as it does on PC, rather than its old method of working to PCs first and going backwards from there - one of the many causes for Cyberpunk's launch woes.

Console versions "working super late" are now "unacceptable," he explained. "It's part of our process; we do the reviews on console so we know exactly where we are on all the platforms, [including] the lowest [spec] platform we have, rather than saying, 'PC's fine, we can go forward'."

With the process applied across all of the studio's upcoming games, it makes for an interesting situation with The Witcher 4. If the studio's hesitant to commit to its viability on current-gen platforms (albeit not ruling that out of course), and it also now develops games on the lowest-spec platforms alongside high end PCs, what might those platforms be here? Going from what CD Projekt Red's said so far, we might be waiting a fair bit longer to find out.

In the meantime, our full interview with CD Projekt Red about The Witcher 4 has more crumbs of detail, while our report on the studio's technical ambition, optimism, and development timeframes and our full long read on what went wrong with Cyberpunk 2077 and how the studio responded offer plenty more context on how CDPR works today.