The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience

[Adam]

What do you guys think of this new tech demo? It really feels off sometimes (reminded me of watch dogs in some instances lol).

 

 

[NMErickson]

That was gnarly. Looks better than I expected. The little I’ve seen Unreal Engine 5 has been impressive. It seems beastly and full of potential.

[Dangisuckatgamin]

Couple things I’ve noticed so far:

- Driving at this high of quality has major fps drops and crashing the car (which looks rather cool) makes the game almost unplayable because it drops to 5-10fps. 

- The city looks great, shadows actually are real in this tech demo from what I could tell, however almost every building with a room has a graphical glitch where the rooms overlap (probably not the consoles fault but good to point this out lol). Really foresee shadows being turned way down in future unreal 5 games (which is fine because I used to turn shadows down anyway because they aren’t that important if you can gain more fps anyhow)

- It’s actually a rather decent tech demo. You can explore quite a bit and see different examples of what the engine can pull off. That is one thing I was impressed with. Didn’t play it long enough to see if there was any water though which is what I’m curious to see how they pull it off next gen.

 

Curious to see how this translates into future games. I hope developers realize that we don’t want this much fps drops though. Because they happen quite frequently.

Edited December 11, 2021 by Dangisuckatgamin

[Ghost]

I thought this was only a video showcasing how the Matrix would look on UE5. My jaw dropped during the driving sequence when you can use the pistol and AR. And then being able to walk around the city and driving. Amazing.

 

-

Epic included these stats with their press release, which apply to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X renditions of the demo.

• The city is 4,138 km wide and 4.968 km long, slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles
• The city surface is 15.79 km²
• The city perimeter is 14.519 km long
• There are 260 km of roads in the city
• There are 512 km of sidewalk in the city
• There are 1,248 intersections in the city
• There are 45,073 parked cars, of which 38,146 are drivable and destructible
• There are 17,000 simulated traffic vehicles on the road that are destructible
• 7,000 buildings
• 27,848 lamp posts on the street side only
• 12,422 sewer holes
• Almost 10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city
• The entire world is lit by only the sun, sky and emissive materials on meshes. No light sources were placed for the tens of thousands of street lights and headlights. In night mode, nearly all lighting comes from the millions of emissive building windows
• 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians
• Average polygon count? 7000k buildings made of 1000s of assets and each asset could be up to millions of polygons so we have several billions of polygons to make up just the buildings of the city

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-the-matrix-ue5-demo-is-incredible

 

Edited December 11, 2021 by Ghost

[G4Knight]

Pretty remarkable stuff. I was not expecting to continue on-foot. Now I want a real game out of this.

[Slava]

 

A 50 minute video from Digital Foundry where they talk about the demo and analyse each part.

[dakk55]

The worst part of this video is when you realize it isn't a new upcoming game, but merely a tech demo. Otherwise, it does look good. I'm starting to get a bit miffed that they didn't actually remake/remaster either Enter the Matrix or Path of Neo games. Maybe in the future, we did get a couple of tech demos that ended up being made into a game..eventually.

[Fr_0zt]

Pretty cool,  too bad we aren't getting a new game. :'/

[BlindMango]

When I saw this at The Game Awards I dismissed it as some sort of gimmicky movie tie in game or something, but I was not expecting this! It's a really cool tech demo, and a pretty genius marketing move from The Matrix (they even said it themselves in the dialogue lol), pretty great marketing for Unreal Engine too.

 

I love how they allow you to fly the camera around the city and play with certain world settings like sun rotation and seeing the polygons and so forth, really cool! The yellow icons on the map (not the orange ones) will also allow you to switch the map to night time and explore the city at night!

 

Also like the OP I got some Watch Dogs vibes too, well at least original 2012 unveil Watch Dogs, not what eventually happened to the series where it turned into sort of a goofy Ubisoft-y less serious appearance in some areas lol

 

Edited December 12, 2021 by BlindMango

[Super_Mep]

Yeah I just gave this a spin and drove around on the freeway dodging cars. Then flew around the rooftops and peered into buildings. Impressive stuff here for sure!

[SP71Q]

On 12/10/2021 at 6:45 AM, Adam said:

What do you guys think of this new tech demo? It really feels off sometimes (reminded me of watch dogs in some instances lol).

 

 

 

I think it looked fantastic. UE5 has potential to make some pretty games on the next-gen consoles. Really looking forward to what happens next.

[LukeTheGooner]

very very beautiful stuff, imagine playing a spiderman game with this engine, just incredible