Asmongold TV - Witcher 4 looks huge.. | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Witcher 4 looks huge.. Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. --------------- -------- Keywords: gaming drama, gaming reactions, reaction videos, gaming takes, game criticism, video game analysis, gaming content creator, gaming podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the tech demo for The Witcher 4. This just came out today. It already has almost 2 million views. This is huge. Damn. This is a technological showcase set in the world of the Witcher 4. Wow. What you just saw and are going to see now is running on

standard PlayStation 5 at 60 FPS with rate tracing. So in the game, you'll be playing a Siri, a professional monster slayer, a Witcher. She explores the world and hunts down's monster for coin. The region we are in is called Poverier. And you'll get to explore it in a game. Right now. Isn't that crazy? The Witcher 3 came out over 10 years ago?

She is investigating the monster and after gathering new clues, she is heading back to a nearby village. I don't know what it's going to show at all. It's a tech demo. Yeah, that's fine. Let weeds be weeds, Kelpie. So, let me see how she looks. I feel like she's... Yeah, I mean, I think she's hot.

Yep, definitely. Absolutely. Perfect. Yep, she's hot. So just like Gerard Roach, Siri has her own loyal companion. We return to town. These two characters need to feel like one. Since you're going to explore the world on horseback,

riding this to feel seamless, natural, and just fun. Yeah, and to support that, we're introducing multi-character motion matching in Unreal. What is this? So Siri and Kelpie, they're perfectly synchronized when mounting from any angle and speed. Okay, that's good. And we also support root motion movement on Kelpy, so controlling her feels realistic and grounded. Yeah, this looks really good.

And there are also some really nice improvements to our Unreal Chaos Flesh solver, and these machine learned deformations. So you've got realistic muscles moving and stretching under Kelpie's skin without compromising the performance there. Yeah. I've always felt like this kind of. stuff. I mean, for video game developers, gamers don't really care about this. This is never going to sell a game.

Like, if you want to make your big AAA Magnum Opus game and you want to add this into it, that's fine. But like, this is really a waste of time and it's something that only 1% of people are going to care about or make a decision about. But it is cool. So let's leave Siri behind for a second and talk about the world itself.

Yeah, this looks really nice. So much of the Witcher world is natural, organic, especially cover with its dense forest and wild nature. And it's important to keep in mind here is that while this is on a PS5, this is clearly a tech demo. This is not an actual client of the game running. So I would not imagine this to be a one-to-one replica of what you would expect whenever the game comes out. Hopefully it's close, but just keep that in mind. Wild nature is hard. And with Nanite geometry, we freed artists from so many of their old constraints.

But we don't want to rest until everything we do in Unreal has that same spirit of freedom. There's always more work to do. And foliage is a huge piece of that puzzle. So we are excited to introduce nanite foliage. That's a lot. God damn. And in order to achieve gorgeous foliage density everywhere, while still being memory efficient, fast to render, we believe that a new idea was needed.

So instead of the same card approach we've been using for the past 20 years, artists should be free to take a Nanite approach to foliage, modeling every single leaf and pine needle. And the old LOD tricks of the past, they needed a complete rethink. And in their place, it's a new adaptive voxel representation in nanite. It's volumetric, it's fully 3D,

it is super fast to render. Yeah, this is something that they've added in, Like, I think that a lot of people, so Unreal engine gets a really bad reputation because Unreal Engine can make a potato look like Lord of the Rings. And you buy the game thinking that you're buying Lord of the Rings, but you're actually buying a potato. And yeah, sure, that's a problem. But at the same time, Unreal Engine, when it's used at its best, like, for example, Blackmoth, Wu Kong or Expedition 33, is phenomenal. And I think that too many people look at Unreal and say Unreal is the problem, but the real issue is just bad development,

and the barrier to entry with Unreal is so low that you have a lot of bad games that look good because of Unreal. Arc Raiders, yeah, exactly. Dense clusters of triangles turn into these cubes, which at a distance, they're no larger than a pixel, and they react to the changing light of our dynamic sun and our shadows, and they allow artists to render whatever amount of foliage is needed, to achieve their vision without compromise.

And no compromise means how ambitious we are when it comes to bringing our vision to life with incredible visuals. But more than that, together with Epic, we created fast a whale throughout the world. We can now bring in more content, more quickly, for the smoothest possible experience as we fly down to catch up with Siri.

Yeah, that looks really good. I'm really curious to see how much this is gonna look like the actual game. Because like the truth is like if I if I go back to my mind, this is the way I thought the Witcher 3 looked back whenever it came out. You know how like you know whenever you're a kid, you think that like acharina of time or like Majora's mask or something? It's like oh wow like this is like just like real life.

Welcome to Vagrest. So Vagrest is a port town, a hub for fishing, trade and mine. It's one of those places where you can meet shady character. or overhear gossip from other lands. It's also where Tzu took on her current contract. High Tech, let's leave Kelpie here and explore the marketplace and food. Okay. I'm so excited we can finally show you some of this stuff.

Let's see what Vagros has to offer. Ah, fuck it. Not her again. Ooh. What the fuck? I present him with a wish for the furry rabbit. Is there? This is impressive, yeah, this is really good. I mean, I would say in terms of like visual fidelity and quality, I mean this is pretty much the cutting edge.

Guys, notice how... That's really good. Holy shit. Damn. How responsive the world is. Jesus. Character actions directly affect what happens around you, sometimes even setting up chain reactions. everything is working together. Oh, look at this poor gentleman being told how to fly by an angry innkeeper.

Yeah, that's good. That's what happens when you cheat at Gwen. Yeah. Fuck him. Okay, so this is the guy who gave the series questions on. Like you probably suspect, he has a guy who gave the series questions on. suspect he has his own agenda in all of this. That looks pretty good.

A typical day's toil. Who win? Ah, witcheress. What news of my wagons? No eternity is taken to that damn salt to arrive. I found them. And, well, suffice to say, they'll not reach you. Oh.

For the soul? I found not one spec. I presume this comes as no surprise to you. It's crazy to see how much better the character facial animations are. Then, like, again, I just keep comparing it always to Assassin's Creed Shadows. It is not even remotely fucking close. This is so good. Kabir's smuggling trade is of no concern.

Are you sure this is real? I mean, this is a cinematic, right? Devoured your men? Quite the opposite. Mountie Corps. No, them winged hellspawn dwell in the arts end of Crayton. While Siri decides what to do about that merchant, let's take a look at the character technology that powers this marketplace.

Why don't we listen in on these fishmongers? They're selling their wares, chatting up customers. Hey! Come on, and catch this, she's, we'll find none fresher. Rugged me ladies after one of them. Got it for you. You got it for you. Jesus.

Got microcard or Brexit fighters. And there is tons of tech that play here. Even in the simple market stall, met as human tools, improved on real smart objects, chaos cloth, and more. Yeah, and all of this exists to make sure that the gaping quality

between Siri and NPCs is as small as possible. Yeah. That's a good way to look at it. I remember seeing videos of Red Dead Redemption 2 that had stuff that had like, you know, a comparable level of complexity to it, like some guy chopping wood. I was really impressed by that. Closing that gap, it's not just about fidelity, right?

But also authenticity. Remember about out? They should react to changes in the world around them. Yeah, this doesn't remind me of about it. The prisoner in pillar is an exciting enough for Vargas. Let's grab everyone's attention with the circus. E3 cyberpump flashbacks? Yeah, there's a lot of people that are worried

that this is just going to be attacked them out. But the great performance deserves a huge crowd though. Let's crank it up. That's a lot of people. So you are seeing tons of optimizations here to many of Unreal systems, including an entirely new Unreal animation framework, allowing us to fit easily in our 60 fBS budget, not just in rendering, but also with room to spare on the game thread.

Over 300 animated skeletal mesh agents all going about their business. Wow. And the whole point, it's to leave... to leave breathing room for developers like you, to introduce the gameplay and the systems that your players expect, empowering you to make your worlds come to life without Unreal standing in your way. You are right.

That's the open-world RPG that we're making. But before we wrap up, how about one final check-in with Siri? OK. Let's see it. We are making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious open world, which are game ever. 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 and I'm so proud of what we accomplished so far I think he's right about that you're seeing more and more open world

RPG games come out and I think they're becoming more popular and like the only issue that I think people have with open world games is like that one meme that I saw Like, where's the, where's the meme?

I don't know if I can find it or not, but it's something like this. Where is it? Oh, fuck. Maybe I don't have it here. Yeah, well, either way, it's the things just becoming farther and farther away. It's the same base game,

but it's just things farther and farther away. Yeah, the open world thing. Yeah, exactly. But I feel like open world games are great. It just depends on how they're designed and how they're made. Open world equals less story. I don't think that's necessarily true.

I don't agree with that. We are too. So we're almost done. I don't think that there's like what I respect games that allow you to, like as long as a game is being true to its vision, I think that's what matters the most, right? So if you want to have an on-rails game like Armored Core 6 or like Blackmuth Wukong, I think that's great.

If you want to have an open world game like Eldon Ring or, I don't know, Tainting Grail fall of Avalon, that's also great. It just depends or Red Dead Redemption too. yeah exactly kingdom come deliverance too yeah and so like it just depends on what the game is and if you're making a good game that's what we go here's a small gift for all witchie fans

a first look at lan exeter on with calving we what that looks really fucking good guys I'm gonna be real that was really fucking good thanks guys it seriously

it looks amazing and we've also barely scratch the surface of what's coming in on Real 5.6. So here's Julien to tell you even more. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Let's see it. All right, let's see what we got going on here.

Hey, everyone. Hi. Great to be here in Orlando. I spent a lot of time on this demo, so I'm happy to be the one to talk about what went into the 5.6 release. An open world like that was just the perfect content to focus on our main goal for the release. This is fucking insane. Like, especially that last scene. Let me see if I can go back to it.

This is nuts, man. Look at that. That's insane. It looks so good. Our main goal for the release, which was performance. We want the engine to scale to large and rich worlds. We want to preserve graphics quality. And of course, we want to deliver eye frame rates that you and your players expect. That's what matters a lot. So let's check it out. Like, I always want less detail and higher frame rate. Frame rate matters more to me, infinitely more to me, than detail in the game is. Obviously, best world is both of them, but if I had to choose, it's frame rate and playability.

Starting with rendering. If you all remember, when we released Nanite with UE5, it supported static geometry. Last year, we brought skinning to Nanite. And now we're working on nanite foliage. The only way to have a forest that looks as good as this one is to use 3D geometry for all parts of the trees, just like we do for everything else. However, this is a crazy amount of fine geometry.

So we have to rethink our trees are created and displayed. To create them, we develop nanite assembly. These 28 little parts that you see are all that we use to build all the spruces from the forest. See, this is the thing is that get ready to see a million fucking video games that have these trees everywhere. Like, as soon as you guys see the assets, it's hard not to see them, because a lot of people start using these. They are in tens of times and used like building blocks to assemble trees in different ways. Yeah, a little bit. And as you probably noticed with the wind effect,

not with Unreal 5, but other assets. They even support skeletal animation, which runs on the GPU. Yeah, it's insane. Thanks to assembly, we greatly reduce the storage. So they have the skeletons of the trees that are being rendered, but not the actual foliage. Memory and the rendering cost. Then, to display an entire forest,

the challenge was to preserve fidelity and performance from any distance. Let's check up close the level of detail we're talking about here. Jesus. Lots of details. You know what's crazy is that one day they're going to make Unreal Six? Isn't that nuts to think about? You imagine that? But this triangle representation is not the most efficient when far away,

due to the amount of overlapping. And that's why we made an adaptive Vauxhall representation. But in reality... This was a pretty big thing that I think Unreal did in general that a lot of people, like, probably might not realize, is that the dynamic culling that they have for the, like, the pixels and, like, how much each thing is detailed is very much based off of, like, where the camera focuses.

And I think that's one of the big ways that they save energy and save time. Like, or save a memory. You'll never see those voxels this close since when we move the camera back, they're barely a pixel. So, Nanite foliage is almost done. We are moving it to the main line as we speak, and it will be available for everyone in 5.7. Wow. Another thing I would like to share is that ray tracing and lumines now run more than twice as fast,

with no visual trade-off compared to when UE5 was released. I believe that when I see it. And because of that, we can now hit 60 FPS. I mean, I will say, like, the visuals for this again are phenomenal. This is amazing. I love the way this looks. On consoles. And finally, we rewrote the rendering pipeline to run asynchronously

so you can increase the richness of your scenes even more. Now let's talk about chaos physics. For chaos clot, we improve our clot-to-cloth constraint solution. This removes a lot of collision evaluation when garments are piling up. I need to give this to Blizzard so I can put this in wow. and interacting with each other. Even for complex setup like Series Cape, we hit a sub-millis-second budget on PS5.

With chaos flesh, we introduce procedural muscle activations to make deformation and motion more natural. Your artist will still have control over T-troidrol simulation and train ML models that went fast in real time. We now support the baking of fluid surface data, into lightweight assets to be played back at low cost. This is going to give you high-fidelity water without the performance cost of real-time fluid simulation.

Jesus. For animation, we work on both performance and fidelity. Here, you can see how Siri and Kelpie match up in their interaction. Well, that works no matter the angle of approach. That's our most character motion matching solution. Wow. We also added motion matching. Yeah, usually it's like it goes into, like there's one where it looks okay,

but all the rest of them looks like dog shit. Yeah, that's nuts. Yeah. Sequencer to build stitch tracks. With them, you can seamlessly transition from gameplay to cinematic. There's a lot of games that are doing that now. We now have a secondary layer of animation driven by physics in Control Rigg. We used it in Kelp's Rigg to drive the main, the Telfies.

and the saddlebacks. And now, I'm happy to announce that all these features are already integrated into our new Unreal Animation Framework, which we are releasing as experimental in 5.6. We built it with performance first in mind. Animation evaluation are not running in parallel off the game tread, which was our bottleneck. And for the other characters, SystemDabarch,

just as costly, like movement, avoidance, State tree behaviors, we also move them to worker trends. This is really going to help you create scenes that are crowded and lively. This is a setback that I think that something that was, I'm not sure, but this seems like something that was happening to the developers of Kingmaker. You know, like that was the game where it was like the guy that comes in from like the future and he's in like the, you know, like a medieval warfare and he's in a tank or whatever. Like, and he said in there, they said they can.

can't do it with Unreal 5 yet. And so that's why Kingmakers was being made with Unreal 4. So I think that changes like this are being done specifically to alleviate that concern. Streaming has always been a big deal regarding performance. And the three biggest improvements we made are physics state creation, which now runs async, improve runtime PCG for ground scatter on GPU, and a new fast geo plugin to stream static geometry. And just to take a different

example, in City sample, the streaming time was cut down by 90% while moving at high speed. We focus on a lot of areas for performance in 5.6. And mobile is no exception. We work on better defaults

and scalability settings for mobile and minimize the default package size. We also improve our workflows with a UI Refactor of the Viewport Tool bar and content browser, on-device iteration workflow, and a mobile preview solution. So there you go. Unreal Engine 5.6 is all about performance

and it's available today. Holy shit. Wow. Yeah, no, that was really, really good. Please go, enjoy the tech talks and session we are for you guys and come chat with us. And now, please welcome Chris from the meta human team. So they're probably talking about like other like character stuff. I might

look at more of the unreal stuff later on tomorrow. But like I'll look at the Witcher stuff now. This looks really, really, really good. Like I absolutely think this looks great. Like the character models I think look pretty decent as well. Like that looks good. I mean, absolutely. So yeah, check the cinematic trailer too. No, I will. I'll watch the cinematic trailer as well. But yeah, it's a trailer tech demo. I know it's a trailer tech demo. I know it's a trailer tech demo. but it does look good. I can't wait to see how the game plays. Yeah, I'm really hoping that it plays well.

I mean, again, there have been a number of games, like, I mean, Blackmouth Woo Kong was like a similar level of quality, I would say, and that was unreal. And so if you thought that played well, I could pretty much expect this to play well. Now, this could be a cyberpunk situation, right? I mean, you can't rule that out. There's a possibility that it could end up sucking and being bad,

but let's hope that doesn't happen. No forced ray tracing though Yeah, have you played Witcher 3? Only a little bit I never beat the game And let me see here Witcher, Witcher 4 trailer Okay, so let's see the actual trailer

But yeah, this looks really, really good to me Sleep is he? The plow and plonker Break me purlies on this blasted Pit ridden tract Oh We've feared off to Iroo Oh shit

Close the door, idiot. He lost all his money. Uh-oh. It's a griffin? It's not a griffin. Damn. Oh, that's the fucking thing from the... From the other cinematic.

Selt. Wow. That's a lot of loot. Almost had me fooled, fruant. Yep, she's definitely hotter. 100%. Absolutely. Totally.

totally looks like girls that would ignore me in high school. Absolutely. That's exactly what we were looking for. Fucking perfect. Yep. All right. And what she doing now? Yep, absolutely. And yeah, same brother. Yep, same brother. True, true, true. And anyway, promising protagonist, yeah, I mean, it looks great, obviously. And yeah, it looks like the original. Yeah, I would say so. And overall, I think it looks, it looks really promising. I mean, the demo looked, really good. Everything about it looked really good. Yeah, I'm not sure about the voice. I don't know. I'd have to hear more of it. And I think also, like a lot of times with the character's voice, there are times where it doesn't make sense the beginning of the game, but then after you kind of

just play the game for a while, you just acclimate to it and it becomes normal, right? And so, yeah, we'll see what happens, but the first trailer looks like not the final game anyway. Yeah, this looks great, man. And games about the hands-on review. of Crimson Desert recently? No, I'll play that when it comes out too, absolutely. And watch the full trailer, bro, from The Witcher Channel. No, I've seen that. I've already seen it. I saw it whenever it came out. But yeah, this looks really, really good. I mean, it goes without saying that I'm going to play this a lot on release, right? Like, I'm obviously going to play it a lot on release. And hopefully, hopefully it's a good game. I think it will be, right? I think this will be a good game because the last

game that they made, Cyberpunk, the, you know, like Liberty City or whatever, or Phantom Liberty. was good. Like, that's the way that I base every decision. If the last game was good, then the next game will be good. If the last game was bad, then the next game will be bad. So, yeah, it's that simple. On your 40th birthday, yeah, wow. And, yeah, release this in 2029.

No, it doesn't. Wait, what? No, it doesn't. I think it probably comes out next year, right? Like, I'm pretty sure this game comes out next year. That's what I would assume so. Yeah, is that right? Like, I think it's a, no.

2027. After 20... Really? Wow. Yeah, okay, well, I mean, shit. The thing is, if it takes longer, it takes longer, man. Like, I don't complain about that. I don't give a shit. I mean, if it takes that long, then

whenever they're ready, then I will play it. It is actually that fucking simple. Like, I don't need to be like, oh man, like, I've got to play this game. There are so many video games that I haven't played, and you want to know example of one that I haven't finished? I never finish the Witcher 3

So how am I going to complain about this game Not being oh it hasn't come out yet Yeah you haven't beat the next one Or the last one I mean Yeah you haven't finished Cyrupunk too Yeah I never finished CyroPunk There's a million other games for me to play When it's ready it's ready

But either way the game looks really good And yeah Visuals look amazing Like the cinematic like this to me is just like I don't really give a shit about this to be honest Like there are a lot of really good video games Cinematics. I think this one looks just fine. There's nothing really special or like unique about this.

It's just wow, it's another video game cinematic. But yeah, that's really it. How can you call yourself a gamer? Well, hey, I think that actually this is more relatable than anything. I think most gamers start games than they never finish them. That's the norm. So I would assume so, right? Play Red Dead Renemption off stream.

You'll love it. I'm already going with one game off stream. I don't know if I want to go with the. second one already. But yeah, that's pretty much it.