Revision 1

Background

Cyberpunk 2077 launched in December 2020 with severe technical issues, particularly on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The game was temporarily removed from the PlayStation Store. CD Projekt Red has been transparent about applying lessons learned from that experience to The Witcher IV.

The Approach

For The Witcher IV, CDPR adopted what VP of Technology Charles Tremblay described as "console-first development." The philosophy is simple: build and test on consoles from the very beginning, then scale up for PC hardware. Tremblay explained: "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."

Engineering director Colin Walder elaborated: "Take consoles, for example; we need to make sure they're functioning from the get-go. For our next project, Polaris, we're already running our demos and internal reviews on the console from the very beginning. This is a step we only took later in Cyberpunk's development."

Performance Targets

The State of Unreal 2025 tech demo ran on a base PlayStation 5 at 60 frames per second with ray tracing enabled. This is the established baseline. CDPR VP Jakub Knapik noted that it is "easier to scale up than down," which is why the studio starts with the most constrained hardware and adds visual enhancements for higher-end systems.

Achieving 60 FPS on Xbox Series S was described as "extremely challenging" due to the hardware gap between the Series S and Series X. No specific compromises for the Series S have been detailed.

Implications

The console-first approach has several practical effects on development. Assets and rendering features are designed with fixed console memory and GPU budgets in mind. Level-of-detail systems and streaming are tuned for console storage speeds first. Internal playtesting and milestone reviews use console hardware as the primary reference platform.

For PC players, this approach means that the PC version should scale upward with higher-resolution textures, further draw distances, and features like real-time path tracing and RTX Mega Geometry that take advantage of high-end GPU capabilities.