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The world is gearing up for the release of the next Matrix movie. It is an eagerly anticipated event, the first new mainline Matrix film since the Matrix Revolutions, which came out eight long years ago. Meanwhile, Keanu Reeves has been popping up all over the place as he makes his new movie better known to the world. His face also popped up in a new "game," one which has drawn some admiring coverage.
Many who downloaded the Matrix Awakens tech demo have been wowed by it. The demo is a collaboration between members of the Matrix movie team - such as Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta - and those on Epic's teams. The tech demo, which features cinematics, and a fully open-world city that players can walk around and drive in, is also a showcase for Epic's Unreal Engine 5.
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, which is free to download on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, is so realistic that players have been testing out various features of the demo. The fictional city of the demo is big, with 16 square kilometres of open world. There are also 7,000 buildings, 1,248 intersections, 43,073 parked cars (of which 38,146 are drivable), and over 260km of roads. It's an impressive tech demo by most measures, while the cars and traffic is something Redditors have paid closer attention to.
In a subreddit users have been discussing a screenshot of a huge traffic jam in Matrix Awakens. It's notable since many other open world games would not feature as many cars onscreen, and behaving so realistically..."lol cyberpunk 2077 just spawns a different set of cars entirely every time you turn around," commented one.
"This tech demo really showing what Cyberpunk could have been," says another. Unreal's Matrix tech demo is certainly impressive, but it is important to note that this is new technology that is running on next-gen consoles, while Cyberpunk 2077 was developed with older technology.
Nevertheless, the scale and detail shown in the Matrix demo is impressive, with things such as the global illumunation system being instant wow factors, while players are now drawing attention to slightly more subtle details such as the AI system governing traffic. The draw distance in this Unreal Engine 5 demo is another admirable facet as videos show traffic being backed up.
All of this offers a tantalising prospect for the next batch of next-gen games made using the tech and tools that Epic has created, which is suitably shown off in their Matrix Awakens demo.