The Witcher 4 just declared war on Red Dead Redemption 2. Weirdly, the battlefield is horse animations.
During Epic’s “State of Unreal” showcase, the developers behind The Witcher 4 showed off an early demo of the game. What they presented was a technical feast: ray tracing on a standard PS5, absurdly realistic trees made from thousands of modeled pine needles, and a fully reactive port town. Also, yes, you can still get thrown out of a tavern for cheating at Gwent.
But the most oddly charming takeaway is the absolute, borderline obsessive attention to Ciri’s horse, Kelpie.
The Witcher 4 horses are gunning for RDR2’s stallions
“Alright everyone, meet Kelpie!” Witcher 4 director Sebastian Kalemba announced, like we were being introduced to a celebrity mare with her own entourage.
And she earned it. CD Projekt RED didn’t just model a horse, they sculpted a visual experience. From the shimmer of muscle beneath her coat to the way her mane reacts to the wind, Kelpie looks ripped straight out of a high-budget nature doc.
Now, if you’ve touched a controller in the last decade, you’ve probably heard how Rockstar’s horses are the most emotionally complex quadrupeds in gaming history. Entire YouTube essays have been devoted to them. The internet collectively lost its mind when it discovered that horse testicles shrink in cold weather. They sweat, they poop, they flinch at thunder. RDR2’s horses are more detailed than we asked for and yet somehow not detailed enough.
So naturally, CDPR’s like, “Hold our mead.”
Here’s what The Witcher 4 is bringing: seamless motion matching between Ciri and Kelpie, no matter what angle she approaches from. You can jump on mid-sprint, mid-angle, mid-chaos and it just works.
The devs also showed off something called “machine-learned deformations,” which basically means Kelpie has visible muscles that flex and stretch under her skin like a real horse. “Realistic muscles moving and stretching under Kelpie’s skin without compromising the performance,” they said.
They’re also using “root motion” so Kelpie doesn’t feel like she’s gliding or floating, she grips the ground. You feel her weight. They even added a second layer of physics-driven animation to things like her mane, saddlebag, and tail. All this for a horse. And we haven’t even seen her poop yet.
What CDPR is doing here is setting a new standard. Just like Rockstar did back in 2018. But unlike Rockstar’s wild west saga, The Witcher 4 is doing it in a fantasy world full of monsters, taverns, magical contracts, and very real consequences for getting too smug during a card game.
No release date yet, of course. CDPR’s not ready to pin that tail on the calendar. But when The Witcher 4 does finally gallop into our lives, odds are we’ll be too entranced by Kelpie’s beautifully rendered horsey haunches to care when we get tossed out of an inn for playing a rigged Gwent hand.
