In the history of games, it is not uncommon to see examples of a free DEMO that has made a name for itself, such as "Fireworks" in the PS2 demonstration, and more recent examples such as Hideo Kojima's "P.T. " in Konami. Because of the timeliness of the game, these amazing demo demos have become works of illusion, existing in the archaeological bean knowledge of video games. Recently, another technology demo that can go down in history has entered our eyes, that is, "The Matrix: Awakening".
The Fireworks demo first expressed the expressiveness of a game console when dealing with a large number of 3D spatial relationships, and was later made into a standalone game
The game was launched at the just-concluded TGA awards ceremony, with Keanu Reeves "personally" standing, with content co-created by The Matrix copyright owners and Epic Games. Initially, everyone thought it was the synchronous promotion of the upcoming "Matrix 4" movie, but when the game was actually distributed to the player's console, it was discovered that this was a thorough show of muscle by the UE5 engine.
The game is currently launched on the next-generation console, that is, PS5/XSX, these two machines are still difficult to compare with the PC in terms of performance, but it will still be the most important position for future AAA games, and the standardized configuration is more convincing.
The entire DEMO is divided into three parts, the first part is the opening performance, Keanu Reeves introduces players to the history of the Matrix screen in a virtual white space, recalling the bridges in the original movie through the old-fashioned CRT display, which was also broadcast at the party. Subsequently, the camera montage was performed in the original Neo, which was different from the original film, and he saw the current Keanu Reeves on his monitor.
As the camera zooms in, Morpheus, Keanu, and the original Neo appear in the white space at the same time, and Keanu throws us the classic "Heavenly Question" of the Matrix movie - what is real? This will be both the theme of the new film and the form of future games, because so far, all the characters and scenes have been calculated through hardware real-time, without the original "Matrix 1" film, nor the participation of Keanu Levis.
This is fake Keanu Reeves
This is also fake Keanu Reeves
This is still fake Keanu Reeves
Through the digital generation of character models to fake the real release, which has been staged several times this year, earlier Nvidia's 30 series graphics card conference, the special effects version of the leather knife Huang in the middle of the video conference, decomposed the fireplace in the background, punctured the truth that he is a "special effects person"; in the Facebook renamed META conference, "Lizard Man" Zuckerberg is also shown by special effects, but his own in the past public links have appeared to be weird, and the special effects version shows its strange charm. Therefore, the special effects of "The Matrix" this time Keanu are not unusual, because the film produced through pre-rendering technology can indeed spend a lot of time and energy to make it indistinguishable from real-world images.
In the second part, the picture scroll belonging to the video game slowly unfolds, and the special effect Keanu travels into the classic scene of the movie to start a car chase. Players can control the character to shoot the pistol at the rear car, although it can not be aimed by the crosshair like an FPS game, but can choose to switch between multiple locked targets, the enemy jumps on the roof of the car, and when approaching the gunner, it will also trigger a QTE counterattack, the gameplay is similar to a simple orbital light gun game, but the picture is no different from a Hollywood special effects blockbuster.
The character's facial performance is vivid, but the body movements are often repetitive, which seems to be a bit of a dress. But aside from the characters, buildings, vehicles, and blasting effects are all difficult to distinguish between true and false. The battle lasted five minutes, and in the final big bang, the Unreal 5 logo faded into the picture. In the game, vehicles are exploded in different positions, and there will be visual effects that conform to the laws of physics, including affecting the trajectory of the car behind, in addition to the design of the hidden health bar of the vehicle, it is almost a special effects movie.
The third part, a pure show without a plot, comes to a small open-world environment where players are free to roam the small neighborhood and board the vehicle for destruction. The number of pedestrians and cars in the scene has reached a level that is difficult to match in other GTA games at present. The details of the architectural modeling are somewhat reduced compared to the second part, because the player has a lot of time to stop and look closely, and there will be a certain amount of wear, but other lighting effects and particle effects are still powerful.
The three sections show the three states of Unreal Engine 5, the first is as a CG tool, to the point where the film editing is completely fake, the second is to make an infinite scene similar to the special effects movie under the limited degree of freedom, and finally, under sufficient freedom, to make a breakthrough in the upper limit of the current video game. The total volume of CG+ play scenes is about 8 minutes, but it has occupied more than 30G capacity. Represents the highest standard of game vision at present, if you want to make a complete game, the final size will reach hundreds of gigabytes or even more than 1TB.
When it comes to RTX ray tracing, we often miss two words, which are instant, and in fact only these two words represent the core value of this technology. As early as the beginning of 2000, the film industry has gradually replaced the traditional film special effects art with computer CG special effects, these shots can be generated by pure numbers, and can also be digitally reprocessed on real film, but without exception, they need professional industrial graphics cards, coupled with long-term rendering, and repeated modifications. Combining the months of efforts of the film special effects staff and the dozens of hours of computation of graphics cards into a single moment is the epoch-making significance of ray tracing, and the technology is optimized through the engine of Unreal 5 and put into the production of the game industry.
But when we discuss which section of "The Matrix: Awakening" is true or false, in fact, the meaning of this demo has been fully achieved, allowing countless players to look forward to the future quality of the game, which is a topic that has not caused waves for a long time after the release of PS4, and it seems that the game screen has once fallen into a technical stagnation.
What the future AAA games will look like, and whether they will completely lose the background of the game, we do not know. In fact, the ability to distinguish between game screens is also improved with the growth of the game experience, in the PS3 era, the screen of some sports games is enough to make the elders who know little about the game fake it, perhaps in the future, players who grew up playing 4K ray tracing games can still distinguish the tricks of video games at a glance.