The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red’s next major game, will hopefully not suffer the performance problems of the studio’s former major release, Cyberpunk 2077. The developer, keenly aware of the latter’s disastrous launch, has adopted a new approach to game optimisation for the former.
Put simply: CDPR currently has the game running on all its target platforms to avoid any surprises later into development. “You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now,” studio co-CEO Michal Nowakowski told Game Developer. “You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it’s going to run.”
Leaving performance optimisation until the end of development is a common practice, but that approach was particularly brutal for Cyberpunk 2077, which released across two console generations – and PC – simultaneously.
Cyberpunk 2077 was famously nearly unplayable on PS4 and Xbox One due to numerous technical issues. Though the game fared better on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, those versions suffered problems of their own. The issues were so pervasive that Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from the PlayStation Store. The game returned six months later after receiving several patches.
“The way the studio was thinking was that we are reaching for the best possible visuals,” Nowakowski explained. “We want to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot, and PC was just the best suited rig for that.”
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Nowakowski added the team had this “false belief” that it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to “tone down” the experience to fit the target console in question. That was what the studio did with The Witcher 3, so it carried those lessons into Cyberpunk 2077. Even then, Nowakowski admitted the studio “got a bit lucky here and there” with performance optimisation on consoles.
“Since then, we don’t take chances,” he went on. “We want to be sure that it actually works.”
That refined approach also extends to how the studio tracks development milestones internally, and how it addresses platform-specific problems. “For example, technically, we should hit, let’s say, 10 checkmarks,” Nowakowski explained.
“Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, ‘we’re gonna catch up with that later on.’ Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn’t, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it’s not that easy.”
The Witcher 4 is currently targeting a 2028 release, though that could slip. Still, that should hopefully be enough time for CDPR to deliver a stable, relatively bug-free release on day one across all platforms. The Witcher 4 is in development for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
