Many of gaming’s most compelling stories come from those who’ve helped to create our favorite Xbox One games. In our Inside Xbox One X Enhanced series, these creators will share the behind-the-scenes accounts of the work involved in enhancing these epic games for Xbox One X, how they’ve helped chart the course of the world’s most powerful console, and what that means for the future of gaming. Today, we’ll be chatting with CD Projekt RED’s Jakub Kutrzuba, Development Lead on the epic RPG The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

What specifically is your development team doing to enhance The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt for Xbox One X?

With the additional power of the Xbox One X, we are able to deliver The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 4K, while providing numerous visual tweaks such as higher-quality shadows, ambient occlusion & texture filtering, as well as higher resolution textures, and an all-around performance boost.

How do these enhancements impact the gaming experience, and why did your development team choose to focus on these enhancement areas?

Beautiful visuals are one of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s standout features, breathing life into the game’s open-world full of places to see, secrets to uncover, and adventures to embark on. When enhancing the game for Xbox One X, we wanted to use the additional power of the console to deliver an even more visually stunning experience. When playing the game on Xbox One X, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s visuals are sharper and the overall presentation more vivid than ever before on Xbox.

How do you expect fans of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will respond to seeing/playing it on Xbox One X with these enhancements?

We think Xbox users who haven’t played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or who are looking to relive Geralt’s final adventure on the new console will be happy to see what we’ve achieved with the game’s visuals on Xbox One X.

How has the process been to get the game up and running on Xbox One X?

With Xbox One X being part of the Xbox One family of consoles, we didn’t have to worry about compatibility and were free to focus on what we could do to enhance the game. The implementation process for the new visual features was also rather hassle free and something Microsoft assisted us with all the way.

What enhancement were you most excited about to explore leveraging for The Witcher 3 on Xbox One X?

Thanks to 4K, we can show everything our artists created with more detail, while HDR support further immerses players within rich, vivid environments. And it’s not just owners of a 4K TV who will benefit from the higher resolution. Thanks to supersampling, the leap in quality will be visible even on a 1080p screen.

What does 4K and HDR mean for your game, games in the future and development at your studio?

With the technology becoming more widespread, 4K is looking like the next step for the gaming industry to achieve more in terms of visuals.

Thanks to Jakub for taking the time to chat with us about Xbox One X Enhanced. We’ll be bringing you more interviews with more developers in the future, so stay tuned to Xbox Wire!