The Witcher 4 recently had its tech demo and it’s needless to say that CDPR has definitely cooked with this title.
However, based on what they’ve revealed in an interview with Digital Foundry, CDPR is pushing for a console-first development over PCs because apparently scaling down caused a lot of problems for the studio in the past.
The biggest problem that the studio faced in the recent past was Cyberpunk 2077’s buggy launch. Although that boat has long sailed, and the game is playable right now, it was a mess when it first came out.
The Witcher 3 also had its fair share of problems, so it’s evident that their formula of pushing for a PC-first development hasn’t been working well. However, this console-first development might also have its problems.
First and foremost, the tech demo showcased The Witcher 4 at 60FPS running on a PlayStation 5. While it runs easily on the PlayStation 5, it’s bound to struggle quite a bit on the Xbox Series S, and on your PC too, especially if you don’t have a beefed-up rig.
“We always do PC and we push and then we try to scale down. But then we had so many problems in the past that we tried to see, OK, this time around we really want to be more console-first development, right? And then we worked with Unreal, with our partner, and then we saw the challenge—to realize the ambition that to make what we want at 60 fps on PS5 would be, you know, there would be work.”
Charles Tremblay, VP of technology at CD Projekt Red
However, CDPR still wants to assure everyone that they’re a PC company so you can expect them to be somewhat lenient on all our systems at launch. There’s still a long way to go for them to launch the game, so it’s always possible that the developers might switch their priorities in future.
And just because it’s being limited to 60FPS on the PlayStation 5 doesn’t mean you’ll have graphical limitations on your rig. If you have the power, you can crank up the visuals to as high as they can go to view the tiniest detail on the monsters in the wild.
But hey, if that burns your PC down, try not to blame the developers for it!
