“Hello, I’m Keanu Reeves, and twenty years ago I was in the Matrix trilogy of films” being delivered by a temporal-spatial-facial rendering/animating/morphing/jargoning Neo-through-the-ages was genuinely stirring and did a surprisingly good job of selling me on Unreal Engine 5, despite the whole premise of this demo not being a million miles away from those Windows 95 CD-ROMs that Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry did way back when. As someone who was Right Age, Right Time for the original movie, I guess something like this is precision-engineered to get me emotional despite it being the Epic Games equivalent of Quake II RTX. I made a point of only watching the first trailer for Resurrections, but if this is a hint of what the movie is gonna be like… I’m excited!
The highway chase being an essential spiritual sequel to Path of Neo (“enough talking, we have to give the gamers some action”) was a delight, though I could hear my Series S sobbing quietly beneath the hood while trying to rustle up some of the particle and destruction effects. Very funny to think I’ve bought an only-one-year-old next-gen console that is already writhing in agony at a specialist tech demo made by the very architects of the engine that underpins most video games!!
The city sandbox at the end is a genuinely fascinating little petri dish of games tech, and did a far better job of explaining some of the new-age rendering technology than any diehard no-lifer “vegetation doesn’t respond in real-time to player movement???” tweet ever has. Complaints about car-handling and physics feel wholly redundant when you can literally pop a menu to fuck with…. idk…. the position of the sun in the sky or the diffusion of light across surfaces. Crazy. Now we just need someone to actually make a game that meaningfully integrates this stuff.
The highway chase being an essential spiritual sequel to Path of Neo (“enough talking, we have to give the gamers some action”) was a delight, though I could hear my Series S sobbing quietly beneath the hood while trying to rustle up some of the particle and destruction effects. Very funny to think I’ve bought an only-one-year-old next-gen console that is already writhing in agony at a specialist tech demo made by the very architects of the engine that underpins most video games!!
The city sandbox at the end is a genuinely fascinating little petri dish of games tech, and did a far better job of explaining some of the new-age rendering technology than any diehard no-lifer “vegetation doesn’t respond in real-time to player movement???” tweet ever has. Complaints about car-handling and physics feel wholly redundant when you can literally pop a menu to fuck with…. idk…. the position of the sun in the sky or the diffusion of light across surfaces. Crazy. Now we just need someone to actually make a game that meaningfully integrates this stuff.