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The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Techdemo [video]

267 points by WithinReason 5y ago

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Al that work to be realistic, and then these ridiculous one-linere like "I thought you'd never ask" and "you boys'll get a kick out of this". You'd think with all the money they're spending on visuals they could afford a screenwriter or two.
- donohoe 5y ago
  Yeah. I thought the "you boys'll get a kick out of this" was a miss for any woman or trans gamer.
  - Mandelmus 5y ago
    It was directed at the all-male agents, no?
  - gavinray 5y ago
    I interpreted that line as directed towards the Agents, who are all men.
- gavinray 5y ago
  I'm not sure why they don't just hire voice actors and ask them to naturally respond to the situation while watching the video, with a set of target phrases. "Say something to the effect of this, when this thing happens on screen, but phrase it however you like." Visually stunning, but no matter how realistic it is, you're killing the chance of enjoying it because you go "Nobody would say that", and it also doesn't sound natural. This is why I enjoyed the Fallout games so much. Even the earlier ones like 3 and New Vegas that weren't realistic looking had fantastic, believable dialogue.
  - quitit 5y ago
    There is a lack of intonation which would suggest that it's recorded independently without live context = stilted sounding lines
- paxys 5y ago
  This is a tech demo. They aren't getting A-list writers or voice actors to spend their time on it.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Is this all rendered models? I honestly thought much of it was just filmed humans. I mean, once they get in the car, it's pretty obvious it's a game, but before that, there were a lot of shots that looked filmed.
- alexhjones 5y ago
  I think until it has the Xbox/PS5 logo at the bottom it looks filmed as an intro to the actual demo.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lm28469 5y ago
    Probably not, the body animations from 1:40 look very unnatural to me, the scene at 2:05 looks worse than in the original movie and more like a ps4 game
- udbhavs 5y ago
  Keanu switches to a CG model at 1:39, then the one in the mirror at 1:56 is real again.
- pacifika 5y ago
  > The demo has two parts. The first is a narrative sequence that doesn't respond to button taps, and it opens with a digital facsimile of actor Keanu Reeves—not playing a character, just Keanu being Keanu—remarking on The Matrix. He strolls through moments from the first film while pondering the original trilogy's questions about what is and isn't real. (Every time he passes a mirror, the bearded, long-haired Reeves who appears in it is video footage; otherwise, he's all digital. This article doesn't include any real-life Keanu.) Soon after, a digital facsimile of his Matrix co-star Carrie-Anne Moss appears—she only appears as a digital avatar, never as filmed footage—and their conversation eventually warps into a car chase. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is-2021s-must-play-flex-of-current-gen-console-power/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...
robbedpeter 5y ago
The Uncanny Valley effect is very apparent with Carrie-Ann Moss, but virtually nonexistent with Keanu Reeves. For some reason this is hilarious to me.
WithinReason 5y ago
At this point the main thing I see missing to achieve more realism are better physics, global illumination and better facial animations. Models/textures are already there.
- Tajnymag 5y ago
  Facial animations seemed fine for me. What got me off was surprisingly the body animations. When Keanu and Carrie-Anne were walking and doing hand gestures, it felt really strange. Too smooth.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    A little later in the video where another character is walking, the butt motion is really weird. It's like someone decided that "her butt will wiggle, regardless of realism".
    - dsign 5y ago
      Yes, hers is in fact the only one wiggling.
    - drcongo 5y ago
      That bit jumped out at me too.
  - dkdbejwi383 5y ago
    It's the small imperfections that give things away. Before, it was textures that were too perfectly smooth. These days we can make things look a bit more realistically imperfect. Now, it's animations that are too perfect, as you've pointed out. Even a perfectly trained athlete or ballet dancer still moves in slightly irregular and imperfect ways.
    - ddnb 5y ago
      People gliding over the ground is a huge giveaway as well, when you walk past someone else your feet don't slide to the right while you are still walking straight ahead, your movement changes.
tscherno 5y ago
3DMark 2001 Lobby Sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14Kt1ynvic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14Kt1ynvic
- zigzag312 5y ago
  It would be awesome, if 3DMark would remake the Lobby Sequence with the latest tech :D
- croes 5y ago
  Hall Of Mirrors | Equilibrium mod for Max Payne 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvkmfVPppY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvkmfVPppY
- dntrkv 5y ago
  Oh wow that brought back some memories. Overclocking my Pentium 4 Northwood paired with a 6800gt then running that benchmark, followed by Super PI, and then making sure it's stable with Prime 95. Spent so much time running those benchmarks.
imdsm 5y ago
Turns out we're now living in the future
new_guy 5y ago
This is incredible. It's actually better than some released games, I've been driving around the city for a while now and it's so real! What I would like not just for this but games in general is more interaction with the environment, you see a building, you can go into it. You see a bench you can sit down etc. The realism only lasts until you try to do something out of bounds then it's just a reminder that it's all pretty superficial. But yeah this will be a day one buy when the full game/experience is released!
headmelted 5y ago
Just played through this on PS5 on a decent OLED. It does not look like this video. It's impressive, but I'm skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere. It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it's PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall. Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video. EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It's clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it's not that far away from where it would need to be. And when it's not struggling with jaggies/framerate it's pretty jaw-dropping.
- lm28469 5y ago
  > It does not look like this video. It's always been like that for demos and promo videos. Sometime they straight up run the demo on a PC with crazy specs while pretending it's running a console. https://imgur.com/a/cagcr https://imgur.com/a/cagcr
- me_me_me 5y ago
  Its possible that it was recorded on dev ps5, those machines are more powerful. And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'. Marketing people are at it again
  - maybeOneDay 5y ago
    Source on dev machines being more powerful? I wasn't aware that was common practice. I assume this is for ease of playtesting a game before any optimisation phases have happened? I wonder whether it has a setting to convert down to actual PS5 power levels. > And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'. Of course. Sigh...
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      Dont have a direct source, but was told that few times by my gamedev friends who work on those. ... here i googled it for you https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstation-5-what-are-the-differences/ https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstat...
quincunx 5y ago
The tech is pretty, not sure it works as a demonstration of gameplay though. For some reason this strongly reminds me of The typing of the Dead. A "Typing of the Matrix" would fit the theme quite nicely!
- M4v3R 5y ago
  I don't think the gameplay was what they focused on here, this demo was meant to be a showcase of graphical/physics features that Unreal Engine 5 has.
bullen 5y ago
Realism is not the goal. Freedom is the goal. The hero movies hollywood keeps churning out make no sense in a meatspace world where you can build, own and be god; in your own virtual world. The goal is to build the real matrix (or oasis, the name hardly matters), and you cannot build it with high polycount or large textures. The future looks more like Minecraft or Roblox, like it or not.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>Realism is not the goal. Freedom is the goal. Says who? There is place out there for both Minecraft and for extremely high detail one-off experiences, we aren't destined to all move into the Oasis. >>The goal is to build the real matrix Again - says who? Who has that goal?
  - bullen 5y ago
    It's the natural evolution of the internet as a medium. Technology is always born without content and leeches off older technologies content. Theater -> Books Music -> Radio Books + Radio -> Movies Movies + Books -> TV Movies + TV -> Games So far we have used books and movies as content, but the internets native content is an open action 3D MMO, it just takes time for new mediums to develop their own content type. Why have a linear hardcoded storyline when the users can live out their own stories in the game? I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it. Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch. And while movies might be fun for them, the time spent in Movies vs. Minecraft + Roblox is an approximation error.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      >>Why have a linear hardcoded storyline when the users can live out their own stories in the game? Because a lot of people seem to enjoy exactly this - 10-30 hours of a very linear, hand crafted experience, not sandbox "you can do anything" kind of experience. >>I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it. I don't even understand what that sentence means, to be honest with you. I work for one of the largest video games companies in the world and we somehow still build both sandbox as well as single-player focused games. >>Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch. Kids have zero purchasing power, and it's the money which decides what to make. Your "average" gamer, by industry's own stats, is a 20-30 year old male, who owns a console, and buys exactly 3 games a year - latest Fifa, latest CoD, and one other game(and companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing to occupy that 3rd spot). Minecraft and Roblox are as big as they are not only because they are good games, but also because they are fantastic at extracting money from parents through children. Trying to figure out the future of gaming by looking at those two is like saying that future of movie making and holywood is animated cartoon short stories, since Peppa The Pig is unbelivably popular with kids.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
samsolomon 5y ago
There was a Half-Life mod called The Specialists that I played ages ago. It was a Matrix-inspired arena shooter. There was only one map, but it was well done and I got a tremendous amount of gameplay out of it. The bullet timing mechanic was wild. At the time I'd never seen something like that in a multiplayer game. https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-specialists https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-specialists I was kind of hoping this demo would include something similar, but this looks more like a cinematic than anything. Then again I'm too old to play games like that now. Civilization and Railway Empire are more my speed. EDIT: Here's a gameplay video if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8V4IQlb0zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8V4IQlb0zc
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Such great memories. I don't know if youth of today feel the same things when playing overwatch/minecraft/fortnite.
  - tobyjsullivan 5y ago
    They will most certainly feel the same nostalgia for those games, if that’s what you mean. I can only find reference articles about music but I’m sure it’s all the same. https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-psychology-and-neuroscience-for-song-preference-and-the-reminiscence-bump.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-p...
    - johnchristopher 5y ago
      They will feel nostalgia but I don't think playing the specialists, a niche mod for a pastime at that time, is the same as playing fortnite, an heavily marketed locked-up game with a world audience.
- DHPersonal 5y ago
  There eventually were many maps in the game. The lobby one might be the best for role playing The Matrix, but the game also had Castor Troy as a player model so the theme was a bit more broad. This was one of my favorite games for a while. I was part of a “clan” and played tournament games — even made my own website for the whole thing. It sucked up a lot of my time for a summer or two. https://youtu.be/adtMJly42hg https://youtu.be/adtMJly42hg
gigatexal 5y ago
A video I saw for this looked like it was using an Xbox controller. Perhaps the video I saw was on a PC with a 3090 or something insane like that.
PedroBatista 5y ago
Cool, but the problem is people ( marketing department included ) extrapolate this tech demo into something more, and we all know how that ends.. Maybe the most recent one is Cyberpunk 2077 and there were many reasons for that disaster other than the "tech", but it always ends with a couple million angry people robed and a few hundred burned-out employees with long lasting mental issues. Cool demo, but nothing more.
- jcun4128 5y ago
  I might have been lucky (decent system) but I got through Cyberpunk 2077 fine, was not bug free but I enjoyed it, put like 100hrs into it over Dec 2020.
marcodiego 5y ago
As is said in the demo, stay away from marketing people.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  Seriously. This is just a shoot 'em up with nice graphics.
- hn8788 5y ago
  I think that may be a reference to Cyberpunk 2077, which Keanu also starred in, being a disappointment based on the marketing.
po1nter 5y ago
Any reason the demo isn't available on PC?
- MikusR 5y ago
  Epic is a tiny indy company. They don't have the resources. Or parts of the demo are prerendered and on PC it's easier to discover that.
  - tempoponet 5y ago
    Epic is worth almost $30b. They make the largest 3d engine and own Fortnite, a franchise worth billions on its own. They have their own game marketplace. Their legal team is squaring against Apple. They've got more resources than a tiny indy shop these days.
    - po1nter 5y ago
      I think the comment you're replying to was being sarcastic.
- libertine 5y ago
  Probably for Marketing reasons.
  - brundolf 5y ago
    Probably also makes for a more predictable experience; you don’t want to show off your shiny new engine and have a subset of people getting a poor experience because of their varied hardware (which I guess is also a marketing reason)
wly_cdgr 5y ago
Very cool, but will it run Geometry Wars 4?
wly_cdgr 5y ago
There is something really weird and psychotic about, here's this technology that lets you render anything you can imagine in any way you can imagine, and what we keep trying to do is copy the way we already perceive the world as closely as possible. I wonder if this urge to copy reality is borne out of our biological urge to reproduce. Otherwise why would we find something as boring and unimaginative as photorealism so pleasing?
- marstall 5y ago
  even more psychotic: the real world but you get to kill anyone you want, and violence and death is basically the main focus of everything that happens in the world.
  - mattstudio 5y ago
    I totally agree. Any recommendations of games with great visuals that don’t focus on killing? I’d love to experience amazing virtual worlds without gameplay involving weapons. All I can think of are sports games like FIFA, or side quests in Red Dead Redemption. Any other suggestions?
    - wly_cdgr 5y ago
      The Forgotten City, My Summer Car, Quantic Dream's games, Supermassive's games, Cloudpunks, Mind Scanners, Sable, Obduction, Superliminal, Eastward, Beautiful Desolation, Dropsy, If On A Winter's Night Four Travelers, Desert Child, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, Legend of Hand, Draugen, Felix The Reaper, Firewatch, The Talos Principle, The Witness I am interepreting great visuals broadly to include great art direction, but there are some very nice looking realistic 3D games in that list Some other ones that I don't particularly care for but that many people love: Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn There are also many great games that feature combat as a core mechanic but are no more "about it" than The Odyssey or The Seven Samurai are. For example: Yakuza 0, Kenshi, INSOMNIA: The Ark, Vampyr, Valakas Story, Pathologic 2, Ghost of a Tale, A Plague Tale
      - 5y ago
shireboy 5y ago
I mean, it's amazing and all, but "uncanny valley" is still there with facial expressions.
- icoder 5y ago
  I agree it's still there, but to me this demo's nearing the end of the valley, way past the deepest point.
ilikerashers 5y ago
I love this trend of PS5/Unreal engine flexing for movies/music. The Radiohead art exhibit was amazing. They do an interactive art piece with "How to Disappear Completely", "Pyramid Song" and "You and whose Army". Serious amount of work goes into these, I'm sure and it's great to use the console for something other than FIFA.
smusamashah 5y ago
I think the first part with Long Haired Keanu is all filmed. He has all the details on his face and his face wobbles the way it does in real life. Same goes for the wrinkles on his shirt when he is touching the sofa. The neo that wakes up in front of computer didn't look real. Also when he transformed to his young self, that immediately looked bad and definitely CGI. The statement at start of video is not fair (a lie).
- reginold 5y ago
  Apparently Long Haired Keanu is indeed rendered!! This article (linked by a poster above) has everything you need to know: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is-2021s-must-play-flex-of-current-gen-console-power/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...
  - smusamashah 5y ago
    Even if it's a render, it's probably just 3d capture played back. You can see how unrealistic the young Keanu is versus the current one. The jaw specially moves in a weirdly inhuman way both in game play and in intro when he suddenly shape shifts. This article is also speculation and I don't believe them. If it was all a render, all faces should have maintained the same detail and realism. But only Keanu's face is real enough. You can even see his individual hair which are out of shape. That's way too real. Those hair can't possibly be 3d captured like that. As someone else pointed out, he does change to 3d render at 1:39 in a far view and you can easily see how unrealistic that one is.
greenail 5y ago
i think many will pick the blue pill and waste much time in the matrix.
souldragon 5y ago
While the technology is extremely impressive, I often find we over doing it to the point of un-canniness. For example, the dithering in the explosion/bullet effects appears to be confound with the over-sharping. As well, many of the effects are over done with the intensity of the particles and size of them. The gloss of the cars are extremely aggressive to show off the ray-tracing technology but it make the cars look goofy. I can see the de-noising failing with some surfaces because they are using ray-tracing as many places as possible. I feel we already close to reality, but are in-human desire to over-crank things to justify the huge performance hits or showing off some these features is hurting us. Games that I see that don't jump largely from medium to ultra are often because they softly layer the effects to the point where it's not noticeable at first glance, but as time goes on it builds up immersion. Detail is amazing, the technology is insane, and the attention to detail is jaw-dropping, I don't want to undermine the impressive work both from a technology as well as hard work implementing it.
aasasd 5y ago
Doesn't UE have a history of showing capabilities in tech demos that turn out to not be or not be used in games?
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Yes... but I'm not sure if it's due to misuse of tech demos, or the misunderstanding of what they are (maybe both?). Tech demos are kind of like concept cars. They're a glimpse of what's possible, but not necessarily practical.
mkoryak 5y ago
This is why I don't play video games, and it happens to be the same reason I have never tried cocaine. I don't know how kids these days can have access to games like these and still want to do anything else, like go outside, or do homework.
- coolspot 5y ago
  Cocaine actually makes you want to do something, so videogames/TikTok/Instagram are worse in this regard.
- RantyDave 5y ago
  Because it's a technically impressive "dragons lair". Ultimately, the game is selecting which circle you're shooting at and pressing the button. I'm not saying that this is the only game you can write with this engine, but as art costs go up, so the experience necessarily becomes more prescribed.
ggambetta 5y ago
I'm not sure I should watch it. I've been actively avoiding trailers and any kind of spoiler of the movie. Does this contain spoilers? Or is it more like the Animatrix was to the sequels (e.g. provide valuable context before watching the movie)?
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  There are no spoilers of any kind. It is essentially completely disconnected from any of the actual films other than featuring avatars for two of the lead characters and revealing agent behavior that was made clear before the middle of the first Matrix film.
- reginold 5y ago
  It's a video that shows the characters talking about the future of 3D reality and then a bunch of guns shooting out the tires of agents chasing them in cars.
kingcharles 5y ago
Just to show how far we've come, here is Spacewar (1963) running on a PDP-1: https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=780 https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=780
sloucher 5y ago
Graphics look great, but gameplay looks dull. Same tired old stuff, shooting at prettier targets (none of which can shoot straight other than when the plot calls for it).
- pindab0ter 5y ago
  It's a tech demo.
amai 5y ago
But game characters still walk as if they have a broken hip implant.

267 points by WithinReason 5y ago

Al that work to be realistic, and then these ridiculous one-linere like "I thought you'd never ask" and "you boys'll get a kick out of this". You'd think with all the money they're spending on visuals they could afford a screenwriter or two.

donohoe 5y ago
Yeah. I thought the "you boys'll get a kick out of this" was a miss for any woman or trans gamer.
- Mandelmus 5y ago
  It was directed at the all-male agents, no?
- gavinray 5y ago
  I interpreted that line as directed towards the Agents, who are all men.
gavinray 5y ago
I'm not sure why they don't just hire voice actors and ask them to naturally respond to the situation while watching the video, with a set of target phrases. "Say something to the effect of this, when this thing happens on screen, but phrase it however you like." Visually stunning, but no matter how realistic it is, you're killing the chance of enjoying it because you go "Nobody would say that", and it also doesn't sound natural. This is why I enjoyed the Fallout games so much. Even the earlier ones like 3 and New Vegas that weren't realistic looking had fantastic, believable dialogue.
- quitit 5y ago
  There is a lack of intonation which would suggest that it's recorded independently without live context = stilted sounding lines
paxys 5y ago
This is a tech demo. They aren't getting A-list writers or voice actors to spend their time on it.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Is this all rendered models? I honestly thought much of it was just filmed humans. I mean, once they get in the car, it's pretty obvious it's a game, but before that, there were a lot of shots that looked filmed.

alexhjones 5y ago
I think until it has the Xbox/PS5 logo at the bottom it looks filmed as an intro to the actual demo.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lm28469 5y ago
  Probably not, the body animations from 1:40 look very unnatural to me, the scene at 2:05 looks worse than in the original movie and more like a ps4 game
udbhavs 5y ago
Keanu switches to a CG model at 1:39, then the one in the mirror at 1:56 is real again.
pacifika 5y ago
> The demo has two parts. The first is a narrative sequence that doesn't respond to button taps, and it opens with a digital facsimile of actor Keanu Reeves—not playing a character, just Keanu being Keanu—remarking on The Matrix. He strolls through moments from the first film while pondering the original trilogy's questions about what is and isn't real. (Every time he passes a mirror, the bearded, long-haired Reeves who appears in it is video footage; otherwise, he's all digital. This article doesn't include any real-life Keanu.) Soon after, a digital facsimile of his Matrix co-star Carrie-Anne Moss appears—she only appears as a digital avatar, never as filmed footage—and their conversation eventually warps into a car chase. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is-2021s-must-play-flex-of-current-gen-console-power/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...

robbedpeter 5y ago

The Uncanny Valley effect is very apparent with Carrie-Ann Moss, but virtually nonexistent with Keanu Reeves. For some reason this is hilarious to me.

WithinReason 5y ago

At this point the main thing I see missing to achieve more realism are better physics, global illumination and better facial animations. Models/textures are already there.

Tajnymag 5y ago
Facial animations seemed fine for me. What got me off was surprisingly the body animations. When Keanu and Carrie-Anne were walking and doing hand gestures, it felt really strange. Too smooth.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  A little later in the video where another character is walking, the butt motion is really weird. It's like someone decided that "her butt will wiggle, regardless of realism".
  - dsign 5y ago
    Yes, hers is in fact the only one wiggling.
  - drcongo 5y ago
    That bit jumped out at me too.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  It's the small imperfections that give things away. Before, it was textures that were too perfectly smooth. These days we can make things look a bit more realistically imperfect. Now, it's animations that are too perfect, as you've pointed out. Even a perfectly trained athlete or ballet dancer still moves in slightly irregular and imperfect ways.
  - ddnb 5y ago
    People gliding over the ground is a huge giveaway as well, when you walk past someone else your feet don't slide to the right while you are still walking straight ahead, your movement changes.

tscherno 5y ago

3DMark 2001 Lobby Sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14Kt1ynvic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14Kt1ynvic

zigzag312 5y ago
It would be awesome, if 3DMark would remake the Lobby Sequence with the latest tech :D
croes 5y ago
Hall Of Mirrors | Equilibrium mod for Max Payne 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvkmfVPppY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvkmfVPppY
dntrkv 5y ago
Oh wow that brought back some memories. Overclocking my Pentium 4 Northwood paired with a 6800gt then running that benchmark, followed by Super PI, and then making sure it's stable with Prime 95. Spent so much time running those benchmarks.

imdsm 5y ago

Turns out we're now living in the future

new_guy 5y ago

This is incredible. It's actually better than some released games, I've been driving around the city for a while now and it's so real! What I would like not just for this but games in general is more interaction with the environment, you see a building, you can go into it. You see a bench you can sit down etc. The realism only lasts until you try to do something out of bounds then it's just a reminder that it's all pretty superficial. But yeah this will be a day one buy when the full game/experience is released!

headmelted 5y ago

Just played through this on PS5 on a decent OLED. It does not look like this video. It's impressive, but I'm skeptical this video is real-time on a PS5, certainly I doubt this is at 4K - the jaggies when I ran this were everywhere. It was worse in the city demo after the action sequence. Certainly a lot going on, but in terms of the trade-off, it was visually quite obvious where the costs are side-by-side with Miles Morales on it's PRT mode and for a real game the later would almost certainly be better overall. Hopeful people will get more out of it in future, but wanted to temper expectations here from the video. EDIT: Just found the signpost to enable real-time night mode with Lumen. Wow. It's clearly still struggling to run on a PS5 but it's not that far away from where it would need to be. And when it's not struggling with jaggies/framerate it's pretty jaw-dropping.

lm28469 5y ago
> It does not look like this video. It's always been like that for demos and promo videos. Sometime they straight up run the demo on a PC with crazy specs while pretending it's running a console. https://imgur.com/a/cagcr https://imgur.com/a/cagcr
me_me_me 5y ago
Its possible that it was recorded on dev ps5, those machines are more powerful. And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'. Marketing people are at it again
- maybeOneDay 5y ago
  Source on dev machines being more powerful? I wasn't aware that was common practice. I assume this is for ease of playtesting a game before any optimisation phases have happened? I wonder whether it has a setting to convert down to actual PS5 power levels. > And you can get away calling it 'runs on ps5'. Of course. Sigh...
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    Dont have a direct source, but was told that few times by my gamedev friends who work on those. ... here i googled it for you https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstation-5-what-are-the-differences/ https://www.fortressofsolitude.co.za/ps5-dev-kit-vs-playstat...

quincunx 5y ago

The tech is pretty, not sure it works as a demonstration of gameplay though. For some reason this strongly reminds me of The typing of the Dead. A "Typing of the Matrix" would fit the theme quite nicely!

M4v3R 5y ago
I don't think the gameplay was what they focused on here, this demo was meant to be a showcase of graphical/physics features that Unreal Engine 5 has.

bullen 5y ago

Realism is not the goal. Freedom is the goal. The hero movies hollywood keeps churning out make no sense in a meatspace world where you can build, own and be god; in your own virtual world. The goal is to build the real matrix (or oasis, the name hardly matters), and you cannot build it with high polycount or large textures. The future looks more like Minecraft or Roblox, like it or not.

gambiting 5y ago
>>Realism is not the goal. Freedom is the goal. Says who? There is place out there for both Minecraft and for extremely high detail one-off experiences, we aren't destined to all move into the Oasis. >>The goal is to build the real matrix Again - says who? Who has that goal?
- bullen 5y ago
  It's the natural evolution of the internet as a medium. Technology is always born without content and leeches off older technologies content. Theater -> Books Music -> Radio Books + Radio -> Movies Movies + Books -> TV Movies + TV -> Games So far we have used books and movies as content, but the internets native content is an open action 3D MMO, it just takes time for new mediums to develop their own content type. Why have a linear hardcoded storyline when the users can live out their own stories in the game? I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it. Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch. And while movies might be fun for them, the time spent in Movies vs. Minecraft + Roblox is an approximation error.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    >>Why have a linear hardcoded storyline when the users can live out their own stories in the game? Because a lot of people seem to enjoy exactly this - 10-30 hours of a very linear, hand crafted experience, not sandbox "you can do anything" kind of experience. >>I know it might be hard to see now, but we don't have the energy to not build it. I don't even understand what that sentence means, to be honest with you. I work for one of the largest video games companies in the world and we somehow still build both sandbox as well as single-player focused games. >>Also kids lead the way, and TV does not exist in their world, they call that YouTube and Twitch. Kids have zero purchasing power, and it's the money which decides what to make. Your "average" gamer, by industry's own stats, is a 20-30 year old male, who owns a console, and buys exactly 3 games a year - latest Fifa, latest CoD, and one other game(and companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing to occupy that 3rd spot). Minecraft and Roblox are as big as they are not only because they are good games, but also because they are fantastic at extracting money from parents through children. Trying to figure out the future of gaming by looking at those two is like saying that future of movie making and holywood is animated cartoon short stories, since Peppa The Pig is unbelivably popular with kids.

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samsolomon 5y ago

There was a Half-Life mod called The Specialists that I played ages ago. It was a Matrix-inspired arena shooter. There was only one map, but it was well done and I got a tremendous amount of gameplay out of it. The bullet timing mechanic was wild. At the time I'd never seen something like that in a multiplayer game. https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-specialists https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-specialists I was kind of hoping this demo would include something similar, but this looks more like a cinematic than anything. Then again I'm too old to play games like that now. Civilization and Railway Empire are more my speed. EDIT: Here's a gameplay video if you're interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8V4IQlb0zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8V4IQlb0zc

johnchristopher 5y ago
Such great memories. I don't know if youth of today feel the same things when playing overwatch/minecraft/fortnite.
- tobyjsullivan 5y ago
  They will most certainly feel the same nostalgia for those games, if that’s what you mean. I can only find reference articles about music but I’m sure it’s all the same. https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-psychology-and-neuroscience-for-song-preference-and-the-reminiscence-bump.html https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/musical-nostalgia-the-p...
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    They will feel nostalgia but I don't think playing the specialists, a niche mod for a pastime at that time, is the same as playing fortnite, an heavily marketed locked-up game with a world audience.
DHPersonal 5y ago
There eventually were many maps in the game. The lobby one might be the best for role playing The Matrix, but the game also had Castor Troy as a player model so the theme was a bit more broad. This was one of my favorite games for a while. I was part of a “clan” and played tournament games — even made my own website for the whole thing. It sucked up a lot of my time for a summer or two. https://youtu.be/adtMJly42hg https://youtu.be/adtMJly42hg

gigatexal 5y ago

A video I saw for this looked like it was using an Xbox controller. Perhaps the video I saw was on a PC with a 3090 or something insane like that.

PedroBatista 5y ago

Cool, but the problem is people ( marketing department included ) extrapolate this tech demo into something more, and we all know how that ends.. Maybe the most recent one is Cyberpunk 2077 and there were many reasons for that disaster other than the "tech", but it always ends with a couple million angry people robed and a few hundred burned-out employees with long lasting mental issues. Cool demo, but nothing more.

jcun4128 5y ago
I might have been lucky (decent system) but I got through Cyberpunk 2077 fine, was not bug free but I enjoyed it, put like 100hrs into it over Dec 2020.

marcodiego 5y ago

As is said in the demo, stay away from marketing people.

JohnWhigham 5y ago
Seriously. This is just a shoot 'em up with nice graphics.
hn8788 5y ago
I think that may be a reference to Cyberpunk 2077, which Keanu also starred in, being a disappointment based on the marketing.

po1nter 5y ago

Any reason the demo isn't available on PC?

MikusR 5y ago
Epic is a tiny indy company. They don't have the resources. Or parts of the demo are prerendered and on PC it's easier to discover that.
- tempoponet 5y ago
  Epic is worth almost $30b. They make the largest 3d engine and own Fortnite, a franchise worth billions on its own. They have their own game marketplace. Their legal team is squaring against Apple. They've got more resources than a tiny indy shop these days.
  - po1nter 5y ago
    I think the comment you're replying to was being sarcastic.
libertine 5y ago
Probably for Marketing reasons.
- brundolf 5y ago
  Probably also makes for a more predictable experience; you don’t want to show off your shiny new engine and have a subset of people getting a poor experience because of their varied hardware (which I guess is also a marketing reason)

wly_cdgr 5y ago

Very cool, but will it run Geometry Wars 4?

wly_cdgr 5y ago

There is something really weird and psychotic about, here's this technology that lets you render anything you can imagine in any way you can imagine, and what we keep trying to do is copy the way we already perceive the world as closely as possible. I wonder if this urge to copy reality is borne out of our biological urge to reproduce. Otherwise why would we find something as boring and unimaginative as photorealism so pleasing?

marstall 5y ago
even more psychotic: the real world but you get to kill anyone you want, and violence and death is basically the main focus of everything that happens in the world.
- mattstudio 5y ago
  I totally agree. Any recommendations of games with great visuals that don’t focus on killing? I’d love to experience amazing virtual worlds without gameplay involving weapons. All I can think of are sports games like FIFA, or side quests in Red Dead Redemption. Any other suggestions?
  - wly_cdgr 5y ago
    The Forgotten City, My Summer Car, Quantic Dream's games, Supermassive's games, Cloudpunks, Mind Scanners, Sable, Obduction, Superliminal, Eastward, Beautiful Desolation, Dropsy, If On A Winter's Night Four Travelers, Desert Child, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, Legend of Hand, Draugen, Felix The Reaper, Firewatch, The Talos Principle, The Witness I am interepreting great visuals broadly to include great art direction, but there are some very nice looking realistic 3D games in that list Some other ones that I don't particularly care for but that many people love: Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn There are also many great games that feature combat as a core mechanic but are no more "about it" than The Odyssey or The Seven Samurai are. For example: Yakuza 0, Kenshi, INSOMNIA: The Ark, Vampyr, Valakas Story, Pathologic 2, Ghost of a Tale, A Plague Tale
    - 5y ago

shireboy 5y ago

I mean, it's amazing and all, but "uncanny valley" is still there with facial expressions.

icoder 5y ago
I agree it's still there, but to me this demo's nearing the end of the valley, way past the deepest point.

ilikerashers 5y ago

I love this trend of PS5/Unreal engine flexing for movies/music. The Radiohead art exhibit was amazing. They do an interactive art piece with "How to Disappear Completely", "Pyramid Song" and "You and whose Army". Serious amount of work goes into these, I'm sure and it's great to use the console for something other than FIFA.

smusamashah 5y ago

I think the first part with Long Haired Keanu is all filmed. He has all the details on his face and his face wobbles the way it does in real life. Same goes for the wrinkles on his shirt when he is touching the sofa. The neo that wakes up in front of computer didn't look real. Also when he transformed to his young self, that immediately looked bad and definitely CGI. The statement at start of video is not fair (a lie).

reginold 5y ago
Apparently Long Haired Keanu is indeed rendered!! This article (linked by a poster above) has everything you need to know: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is-2021s-must-play-flex-of-current-gen-console-power/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/12/the-matrix-awakens-is...
- smusamashah 5y ago
  Even if it's a render, it's probably just 3d capture played back. You can see how unrealistic the young Keanu is versus the current one. The jaw specially moves in a weirdly inhuman way both in game play and in intro when he suddenly shape shifts. This article is also speculation and I don't believe them. If it was all a render, all faces should have maintained the same detail and realism. But only Keanu's face is real enough. You can even see his individual hair which are out of shape. That's way too real. Those hair can't possibly be 3d captured like that. As someone else pointed out, he does change to 3d render at 1:39 in a far view and you can easily see how unrealistic that one is.

greenail 5y ago

i think many will pick the blue pill and waste much time in the matrix.

souldragon 5y ago

While the technology is extremely impressive, I often find we over doing it to the point of un-canniness. For example, the dithering in the explosion/bullet effects appears to be confound with the over-sharping. As well, many of the effects are over done with the intensity of the particles and size of them. The gloss of the cars are extremely aggressive to show off the ray-tracing technology but it make the cars look goofy. I can see the de-noising failing with some surfaces because they are using ray-tracing as many places as possible. I feel we already close to reality, but are in-human desire to over-crank things to justify the huge performance hits or showing off some these features is hurting us. Games that I see that don't jump largely from medium to ultra are often because they softly layer the effects to the point where it's not noticeable at first glance, but as time goes on it builds up immersion. Detail is amazing, the technology is insane, and the attention to detail is jaw-dropping, I don't want to undermine the impressive work both from a technology as well as hard work implementing it.

aasasd 5y ago

Doesn't UE have a history of showing capabilities in tech demos that turn out to not be or not be used in games?

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Yes... but I'm not sure if it's due to misuse of tech demos, or the misunderstanding of what they are (maybe both?). Tech demos are kind of like concept cars. They're a glimpse of what's possible, but not necessarily practical.

mkoryak 5y ago

This is why I don't play video games, and it happens to be the same reason I have never tried cocaine. I don't know how kids these days can have access to games like these and still want to do anything else, like go outside, or do homework.

coolspot 5y ago
Cocaine actually makes you want to do something, so videogames/TikTok/Instagram are worse in this regard.
RantyDave 5y ago
Because it's a technically impressive "dragons lair". Ultimately, the game is selecting which circle you're shooting at and pressing the button. I'm not saying that this is the only game you can write with this engine, but as art costs go up, so the experience necessarily becomes more prescribed.

ggambetta 5y ago

I'm not sure I should watch it. I've been actively avoiding trailers and any kind of spoiler of the movie. Does this contain spoilers? Or is it more like the Animatrix was to the sequels (e.g. provide valuable context before watching the movie)?

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
There are no spoilers of any kind. It is essentially completely disconnected from any of the actual films other than featuring avatars for two of the lead characters and revealing agent behavior that was made clear before the middle of the first Matrix film.
reginold 5y ago
It's a video that shows the characters talking about the future of 3D reality and then a bunch of guns shooting out the tires of agents chasing them in cars.

kingcharles 5y ago

Just to show how far we've come, here is Spacewar (1963) running on a PDP-1: https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=780 https://youtu.be/1EWQYAfuMYw?t=780

sloucher 5y ago

Graphics look great, but gameplay looks dull. Same tired old stuff, shooting at prettier targets (none of which can shoot straight other than when the plot calls for it).

pindab0ter 5y ago
It's a tech demo.

amai 5y ago

But game characters still walk as if they have a broken hip implant.