The Witcher 4 first look - State of Unreal 2025 Live Coverage

It sounds as though the show is just about wrapping up, as Sweeney leaves the stage. That's it for State of Unreal, but stick with GamesRadar+ for plenty more info about The Witcher 4.

"The world is changing ridiculously fast," Sweeney says as he takes a victory lap over his legal battle with Apple, but while also pushing the AI tech that's helping speed up that change.

Oh look, it's Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

AI NPC 'Mr Buttons' is having a tough time pronouncing his words here, which I don't think is something Epic will be thrilled about.

The context of the demo is that the AI NPC is supposed to get the player to press a glowing red button in the middle of the screen. It's quick, but it's pretty stilted given the stage-show format of the State of Unreal. It's clear that one side of this is extremely scripted, and the other is struggling to entirely keep up.

With that Vader tech comes the addition of Star Wars to UEFN. But perhaps more important is Epic's extra work with AI. That's why, later this year, creators will be able to build their own AI-powered NPCs in Fortnite. How exactly that will work isn't clear, but players will be able to drive NPC behavior and dialogue - Epic is showing off a live demo, driven by a large language model, but which it says will still allow players to have minute control over the language and personality of its characters.

"Disney and Epic are responsibly embracing emerging technologies to expand the boundaries of storytelling and reimagine what's possible in gameplay," apparently. 'Responsibly' is an interesting word, considering those skibidi toilet references I mentioned earlier.

There's a lot of jargon going on here - "linear content consumption" is a particularly chunky example. And here's the Vader drop.

Well, Fortnite, The Avengers, X-Men, Maleficent, Alien, Predator, Futurama, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, The incredibles, Encanto, and more just got shown off, with just a little hint of (samurai) Vader. and we're now focusing on the recent Galactic Battle.

Disney's here, which makes me think that Vader is on his way.

As for new partnerships, Squid Game is dropping to match up with the new season. Later, Avatar: The Last Airbender is coming next year, and both of the above will allow creators to make their own licensed games within Fortnite.

We're going back over Fortnite's cultural partnerships over the last few years, from the NFL to Ariana Grande to Godzilla. LEGO is here, of course, and it's now getting even better - essentially a brick-building simulator with individual bricks.

Ironically, they're also showing off a partnership with The Walking Dead, which feels like an unintentional throwback to the OG Fortnite: Save the World format.

Well I don't know if I love this - Epic is explaining how to use its Developer Assistant , which seems to be an AI-driven tool that does the coding for you.

Fortnite is on its way to be a full, open creator ecosystem, we learn, as we find out that multiple creators are starting to hit more than a million downloads. It might not be the same juggernaut it was in 2018, but Fortnite is an increasingly important platform, in the vein of something like Roblox (which is quietly massive).

Tom Jank, king of the UEFN jank game, is on stage talking about his experience becoming his own boss, by creating some - surprisingly - janky, simple builds, that have helped make his name as one of the ecosystem's biggest creators.

And now we move to the elephant in any Epic-shaped room: Fortnite. And it's only a few words before Unreal Editor for Fortnite gets mentioned. And that's an increasingly big deal, because for the first time, creator JoGo overtook Epic, with more concurrent players in their game than in Fortnite itself.

Speaking of the Epic Games Store, we're shouting out its very competitive revenue options, though little of this is new. The big change is that devs are now keeping all of the first $1 million they make, per title, per year. It's a big change, particularly for devs with substantial back catalogues.

Elsewhere, pre-loading, gifting, and new downloads and social systems are all being rolled out through this year, which Epic does acknowledge should probably have been a bigger deal some time ago.

It looks like we're getting a new game reveal. A follow-up to Monster Gaming, a 2013 Korean hit, Mongil Star Dive looks like a take on Genshin Impact and the like. You might not be familiar, but the original notched up 10 million downloads, which suggests that this monster collector has some weight behind it. An Epic Games Store exclusive on PC, it does look very cute, and that cat-girl probably won't hurt sales very much. A trailer definitely confirms those Genshin vibes, but you can wishlist it on Epic now.

Mobile is our next focus, and we're looking to Infold Games, and Infinity Nikki (which also launched on PC). Dubbed the team's "most ambitious project" so far, Nikki was significant step up over the games that the team had previously made. Mobile was a big part of the 20 million downloads Infinity Nikki received at launch, and getting its thousands of costumes and its large open-world all working smoothly across multiple platforms - a first for the studio - was a big goal for the team.

It was only six years between the first time that Sandfall's co-founder booted up Unreal for the first time, to Guillermin being shown off on this stage today. An incredible journey.

And next it's over to Sandfall - developer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Winner of an Epic Megagrant funding award, it's now on course for GOTY consideration, and CTO Tom Guillermin says that Epic and Unreal are a key part of that success - especially important for a team this small.

We're back to games, learning that Black Myth: Wukong has made over $1 billion.

The whole thing is made - from start to finish - in Unreal, which is testament to just how useful this tech can be.

"If this was a live-action movie, we'd be filming at Golden Hour every day for weeks," and relying on multiple massive vats of blood, we're told, before launching into an excellent clip from the upcoming Predator: Killer of Killers. I'd not seen much of this, but I'm very into the slightly stuttery, deliberately stop-motion effect behind the animation.

This tech gets used on loads of games, but it's also shown off across plenty of other projects. The team that's lent its talents to projects like House of the Dragon and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, is here to show how it's being used across the new animated Predator movie. It's a techie look, but the crux is that using this new tech helped save loads of rendering hours, and reduced CPU usage to "one fiftieth" - or about 2% - of what it was before.

We're diving deeper on what people have already been making, with the sizzliest of reels I;'e seen so far today. Was that Snoop Dog? It was certainly Fortnite and Split Fiction, MGS3, and Expedition 33.

With the MetaHumans section over, we're handing over to the Creator ecosystem. Epic is talking to creators from all over, but clearly one of its biggest focuses is Fortnite.

But we're kicking off with RealityScan 2.0 - which you've already seen working in The Witcher 4. It allows devs to take pictures and turn them into in-game items, which can be amazing for bringing complex rock and tree models to life. Access to RealityScan 2.0 will be rolling out this month, but Epic has already added loads of assets to its FAB store, to help out.

MetaHumans is a real focus of this one. Expression Editors for faces, Grooming Tools for hair, and more will be available for the entire community, being brought to a series of partner companies. Unreal Engine will feature MetaHumans as a given now, even within other engines, which means that any devs can use these creation tools if they so choose.

The most impressive bit there was the fact that "a consumer webcam" was driving that, in real-time, and it was capturing minute facial movements of a real person. "I can't believe that that level of facial quality is possible from a tiny consumer webcam," Workman says. It promises to really help out indie and solo devs.

"I think I cooked here," says filmmaker Matt Workman, as he brings a somewhat unprofessional alien friend to the stage (via telecast from 'space'). The real twist is that this is MetaHuman, working live - not pre-rendered or baked. It's pretty impressive, all down without a mocap suit, and adapting extremely fast to the real person on stage who's acting out this on-screen performance.

We're diving deeper into MetaHumans here, but the good news is that new storage options should allow devs to create and render faces within just a few minutes - down from the nearly 20 minutes as before. Additionally, the face work that MetaHumans previously brought will now be working across the rest of the body - and their clothing. It promises a much, much faster approach to overall character creation, which will be fascinating to see if it trickles down to players.

And here comes MetaHumans, and another sizzle reel. Ciri's back, but so is T'Chaka, and the protagonist of Black Myth Wukong, amid many others. Interestingly, however, there's plenty of uses that stem from outside gaming - so much so, that Epic has brought a filmmaker on to talk more about the power of MetaHumans, which is fully integrated into Unreal, thanks to 5.6.

If you happen to be a developer, then it's worth noting that Unreal Engine 5.6 - which contains many of those changes already discussed - is available now.

It's interesting to note that we've heard the words '60fps' a lot already in this stream. It certainly sounds as though The Witcher 4 will be targeting that benchmark, and Epic seems confident that it can offer that without hitting you too hard as the user.

Back to Kelpie, we're stripping Ciri's horse down to its muscles to show off the new Chaos Physics, which offers higher quality movement, without giving you a hit to performance. And that also allows Ciri and Kelpie to move together, with merged animations no longer what angle you look at. For Kelpie, that means that mane, tail, and body can all have uniquely moving parts.

Performance was the main focus of the demo, says a new developer as Kalemba leaves the stage. We're looking at that Nanite foliage again - "the only way to have a forest that looks as good as this one is to use 3D technology for all parts of the tree." But an entire forest can be made with just 28 puzzle pieces, reducing storage, rendering, and memory. It's a very lifelike setting, but it shouldn't hit your machine too hard.

A "first look at Lan Exeter" all-but confirms the Witcher 4 setting of Kovir, as Ciri looks out over Kovir's capital and sees that Manticore swooping above.

"We are making this game to be the most ambitious and immersive open-world Witcher game ever," says Kalemba. "And we are making this a reality thanks to our work on Unreal with the team at Epic. I think what we are doing together is going to bring in a new generation of open-world RPGs."

Kalemba's flexing here, bringing a massive crowd to the centre of the market, to watch some performance. Even then, with 300 "skeletal mesh agents" in one place at the same time, there's still room within the 60fps budget that The Witcher 4 seems to be targeting.

Now, we're back to NPC authenticity - "they should react to the world and changes around them," says Epic's representative, as we look closely at the market.

Ciri's referred to as a "Witcheress" by the NPC who issued her contract, which is an interesting change. She also confirms that that earlier enemy was a manticore - a monster that was cut from The Witcher 3.

Gwent mentioned!

We're introduced to Valdrest, a new town in the region of Kovir, which Kalemba says is a port, home to plenty of the undesirables you might expect. It's very colorful, and densely populated with NPCs, who directly interact with Ciri - when she bumps an NPCs, he drops some apples, which are then picked up by a nearby child.

Kalemba's now touching on a desire for no compromises, but says "we can bring in more content, more quickly," thanks to the Unreal partnership.

We're now looking at Kovir itself, and particularly its dense forests. A special focus on foliage - or specifically nanite foliage, which got a cheer from the crowd - means that we're seeing volumetric, fast-rendering, voxel foliage, which reacts to the movement of the sun.

We've also been introduced to Kelpie, Ciri's horse (and her equivalent of Geralt's Roach). As well as being very cute, Kelpie's a chance to show off some tech - muscle deformation, matched animations, and easy controls.

Kalemba says that the demo is set in Kovir, a region from the far north of The Continent that we've never visited in either the Witcher games or TV series.

Epic and CDPR have spent three years working on a tech demo, which is being played by another CDPR employee. He steps straight into that incredible vista. Kalemba says that the tech build is running on a PS5 at 60fps, which is putting what I was expecting to shame.

And as we take to the stage in Orlando, The Witcher 4 director Sebastian Kalemba says that CDPR is "stepping things up," and that it needed to work with Epic to make that happen.

And here's Ciri, investigating the scene of the attack, before stepping out over an astounding vista.

And there's our first (or second, if you count the reveal trailer) new monster. I'm really not sure what it is, but it looks like some kind of bat-thing?

The mysterious coins that CDPR have used in the past have shown back up in an early shot that seems to show some wealthy nobles travelling by carriage - followed by some immediate monster-evisceration. It's dark and confusing, but it does look great.

We're kicking things off with some fancy bubbles, and it sounds as though we're straight into The Witcher.

We're into the final minutes of that countdown, with Epic showing a sizzle reel of the stuff its tech has been used for. In the last moments, I spotted Dune Awakening, Marvel 1943, and Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, amid dozens of other titles, which shows you just how widely Unreal Engine is used.

Anyway, we're "starting soon," so hold onto your hats..

Either way, we're likely to find out pretty soon, as the State of Unreal 2025 kicks off very soon - in just about five minutes as I write this, in fact - complete with its early look at The Witcher 4. The stream's ticking down now, so you can check out the countdown for yourself.

Epic will also probably be bigging up its creation tools. Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) first showed up at 2023's State of Unreal, as did its revamped Creator Economy. Since then, Epic's made plenty of noise about just how much money it's been paying out to its creators, as well as the developers who host their titles on the Epic Games Shore.

From MetaHuman synergy with UEFN, to the unification of Rocket Racing, Fall Guys, and Lego with Fortnite Creators, last year was a big one for the creation ecosystem, and I'd be surprised if Epic wasn't looking to double-down on that in 2025. If nothing else, its creation clubhouse is a powerful set of cheerleaders for this tech, which can be a serious asset if used properly. Last year featured a full UEFN roadmap, with improvements through 2024, so perhaps we'll see a repeat of that later today.

As well as Fortnite, I imagine we'll see some more technical tools. A deeper dive on new Unreal features seems like a given, but it's anyone's guess as to what exactly those will look like. It's also pretty common for Epic to dive deep on MetaHuman - the name of the program it uses for its facial modelling and animation.

Metahuman showed up in both 2023 and 2024, so the odds are pretty good that it'll be appearing here - not least because the faces in The Witcher 4 are already looking pretty good, so I'd be surprised if CDPR wasn't making use of the tools to get that trailer working.

There's still a touch of the uncanny valley to MetaHuman's faces from what we've seen so far, but there's little denying that it's one of the best tools for the job out there at the moment, and certainly the only one capable of doing that job at this kind of scale.

We're now half an hour out from the start of the State of Unreal stream. So that seems like as good a time as any to note that it's not all about The Witcher 4. While CD Projekt seem to have a big presence at the show, Epic will likely also be using today's presentation to talk about developments to its engine and development tools, its storefront, and of course, its biggest platform: Fortnite.

Last month, it combined two of those things to bring an AI-powered version of Darth Vader to its battle royale. Fortnite's version of Vader could 'speak' to players using the sounds of actor James Earl Jones' real voice. While it was all auto-generated, it was relatively realistic - right up until Vader started dropping inappropriate language and referencing skibidi toilet. Something tells me that Epic might be interested in showing off more of that tech, but might skip over its teething troubles.

That's a sentiment shared by Geralt himself, but the way - Doug Cockle, who voiced The White Wolf in the main series, suggested that "you can't just have Geralt for every single game" in a recent video.

By the way, if you're wondering why we're focusing so much on Ciri, that's because Ciri, and not Geralt, is the protagonist of The Witcher 4. The White Wolf is widely considered to be retired after the events of The Witcher 3's Blood & Wine expansion, and CD Projekt Red has been planning to put Ciri at the forefront of their new Witcher saga since they finished up with The Witcher 3.

Of course, that was a trailer, and a pre-rendered one at that. But the fact that it was built in the same engine is promising - it's at least a sense that this is the exact technology that CDPR is using to make the game itself. The thing is, they're using some beefy tech to do it - you might be able to have a version of The Witcher 4 that looks nearly that good, but only if you're prepared to drop $2,000 on the RTX 5090 graphics card that CDPR used to render the trailer.

But that's all tech from five years ago, and we're here to look at brand-new tech instead. Notably, how CD Projekt plans to use Unreal Engine to bring The Witcher 4 to life. To help you remember that, take a look at The Witcher 4 reveal trailer that showed up at the end of last year.

The Witcher 4 World Premiere Trailer from The Game Awards 2024 - YouTube

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Think it looks good? Well that's good news, because the above trailer was pre-rendered in Unreal Engine 5 - the engine's most recent version - which means that it gives us a pretty good idea of what the final thing could look like.

Then we start to get into the really exciting stuff - in recent years the State of Unreal has played host to The Matrix Awakens, an astounding city-sized creation that really showed off what Unreal Engine 5 was capable of.

The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience - YouTube

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And before that was the next-gen demo from GDC 2020, which showed off what we could expect from the PS5 when that dropped later that year.

Unreal Engine 5 Revealed! | Next-Gen Real-Time Demo Running on PlayStation 5 - YouTube

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Before that, we had MetaHuman. Epic originally showed off its hyper-realistic character creation tech back several years ago, but State of Unreal 2023 leaned on Hellblade 2 to show off MetaHuman Animator, which took the NPC creation kit and added full facial animation to take things to the next level.

Hellblade actor demos MetaHuman Animator | State of Unreal | GDC 2023 - YouTube

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If you want a closer look at last year's reveal, you can check out the Rise of Hydra reveal below, straight from GDC. It's a chunky presentation, but it peaked around the showdown between Steve Rogers and T'Chaka - father of the Black Panther we see in the MCU, T'Challa. The takeaway there was just how good those characters' faces looked, but there's also plenty more technical info if you want to dig in.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra by Skydance New Media | State of Unreal | GDC 2024 - YouTube

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First things first - what is the State of Unreal? If you're not familiar, Unreal Engine is a game creation engine, made and published by Epic Games - who you might be familiar with as the developers of a little game called Fortnite. Unreal is one of the biggest and most popular game engines going, used by developers all over the world to help build their games.

Each year, Epic offers a peek at the new tech it's working on at the State of Unreal. This is a chance to show off the engine - and often the games it helps to make - at their very best. Last year, for instance, the standout was an early look at Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, the Captain America and Black Panther-led superhero caper from Uncharted's Amy Hennig.

Elsewhere, however, Epic offered a closer look at new animation technology, changes to Fortnite Creators, and a look at Dune: Awakening. While it can be a very technical showcase, State of Unreal has definitely had its fair share of big reveals, and with The Witcher 4 at the helm, that doesn't look likely to change.