The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience

If you are an ardent gamer, no doubt, you would have been keenly awaiting The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience. Now, the wait is over for you. The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience already hit PS5 pretty recently. However, you would still be curious about this. You would still be having certain doubts about this. But we can convince you that we can tell you everything that you need to know through this article.

What is The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience?

The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a new tech demo that shows what is possible when Unreal Engine 5 and PlayStation 5 are combined together. And as the name itself suggests, the basis of this creation is the movie series The Matrix.

About The Matrix Franchise

The Wachowskis, along with producer Joel Silver, developed the American media franchise The Matrix. The Matrix (1999) is the first film in the series, which is followed by three sequels: The Matrix Reloaded (2003), The Matrix Revolutions (2003), and The Matrix Resurrections (2021). The Wachowskis wrote and directed the films, while Joel Silver produced them. Warner Bros. owns the franchise and distributes the movie together Village Roadshow Pictures.

The series tells a cyberpunk scenario about humankind’s technological decline. In this story, artificial intelligence has given rise to a race of self-aware robots that imprisoned humans in a virtual reality system called the Matrix, which was farmed as a power source. Occasionally, some of the inmates manage to escape the system and, as a threat, are sought by the artificial intelligence both inside and outside the system.

The films follow Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) as they attempt to rescue mankind from the system while being chased by the system’s guardians, including Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). And the story has references to a variety of philosophical, theological, and spiritual issues, including the choice vs. control conundrum, the brain in a vat thought experiment, and the notions of interdependency and love, among others.

Video Games related to The Matrix Franchise

The game Enter the Matrix was launched in North America on May 15, 2003, alongside The Matrix Reloaded. It portrayed a plot that ran concurrently to The Matrix Reloaded and used sequences recorded during the production of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. It was the first video game based on the movie. In 2005, two additional The Matrix video games were launched. The Matrix Online was an MMORPG that continued the plot after The Matrix Revolutions, and The Matrix: Path of Neo gave players control of Neo in sequences from the film trilogy. In 2009, The Matrix Online was shut down. Several original Adobe Flash-based browser games were also available on the Matrix official website.

What we told you was about the video games in relation to The Matrix franchise from the beginning. But now, there is an incredibly exciting topic to talk about. That is about The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience.

Is this a game?

We promised you that we would tell you all about The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience. Now, this would be an important question that you might have within you. Is this a game? Let us answer that question. The Matrix Awakens is not a video game. Not in the usual sense, at least. Rather, it is a demonstration of the next-gen consoles’ ability to generate near-photorealistic visuals.

While The Matrix Awakens is not a full-fledged video game. Besides, the tech demo’s visuals are stunning. According to an official trailer released on December 6, 2021, the demo showcases what a future Matrix video game may look like.

When you first start The Matrix Awakens, you will see a breathtakingly realistic cutscene. A brief playable automobile chase sequence will follow it. After that, you will be able to freely explore an open-world environment. If you are stuck for something to do in The Matrix Awakens during this open-world section, you have a few options: You may tamper with the world’s settings in the pause menu to see what effects they have on your surroundings; you can learn about The Matrix Awakens by following green arrows on the map; and you can just roam about, soar across the globe, or take a joyride in a car. There are no missions, but there should be plenty to keep you in touch. You will surely have nothing to complain about your entertainment in The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience.

How to download it?

The Matrix Awakens is now available to download for free from the Xbox Store or PlayStation Store if you want to give it a try. But keep in mind that it will only be playable on next-gen consoles. If you were expecting to play The Matrix Awakens on an older console or PC, you are out of luck. The Matrix Awakens will not be available to play on PC, PS4, or Xbox One. However, for those who are fortunate enough to possess a PS5, Xbox Series X, or Xbox Series S, this is surely a blast.

More about The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience

As we told you, The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is to demonstrate the potential of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, a 3D development tool that will power the next generation of gaming and virtual production.

The proof-of-concept demo consists mostly of an open-world metropolis in which you have the ability to walk, drive, and fly about while modifying different features such as the sun’s position, the ‘Matrix filter,’ and crowd and vehicle levels. However, it is a little similar to taking the world of PlayStation’s “Marvel’s Spider-Man,” which already looks fantastic, and enhancing it with even more realistic lighting, architecture, aesthetics, and zero load times with no pop-in.

There is also a segment that is more cinematic, with film mixed in with next-level QuickTime event-style components. Lana Wachowski wrote and directed the demo, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity, respectively. The actors and characters are all computer re-creations, with the exception of a brief video clip of Reeves in the white space (plus a few seconds of excerpts from the original “The Matrix”). That includes the scene of Neo sleeping on his keyboard at the opening, which was painstakingly reproduced. The dialogue was given by the performers, who also contributed high-fidelity 3D scans and 4D captures of their performances in a Serbian studio.

The MetaHuman Creator, the Chaos physics system, the Lumen dynamic global illumination system, which uses real-time ray tracing, a World Partition system for developing large environments, and Temporal Super Resolution, which allows for rich, high-resolution images at low processing cost, are all featured in the demo.

The demo city is 15.79 square kilometers in size, with 260 kilometers of roads, 512 kilometers of walkways, 1,248 crossroads, 17,000 simulated (and destructible) traffic vehicles, and 45,073 parked automobiles. There are also 35,000 simulated MetaHuman people, 7,000 structures, and 27,848 lampposts throughout the scene. No doubt, this is pretty interesting.

When you shoot a firearm at a car tire, everything around you explodes. The framerate is not flawless. It is aiming for 30 frames per second but frequently drops. But it is far ahead of anything else released on a platform previously. It cuts in and out of cutscenes, ending in a climactic shootout in which you use a heavy machine gun to knock down a helicopter. The camera zooms in and out, revealing the finer details of the character’s facial expressions as well as the city’s enormous size.

The city is exclusively lighted by the sun, the sky, and “emissive materials” on meshes during the day; there are no streetlights or headlights. During the night, millions of emissive building windows provide virtually all of the lights. Along with the final release of Unreal Engine 5, Epic promises to provide all of the creative materials used to create the virtual city, as well as its cars and pedestrians.

The Matrix Resurrections

Meanwhile, The Matrix Resurrections, the next installment in the franchise, received a new teaser, ahead of its December 22 release in cinemas and on HBO Max. The Matrix Awakens was created in collaboration with Epic Games and its partners, including filmmaker Lana Wachowski.

About Epic Games

Epic Games Incorporation is a Cary, North Carolina-based video game and software developer and publisher. Epic Games creates the Unreal Engine, a commercially accessible gaming engine that also powers its in-house games like Fortnite and the Unreal, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade series. Guinness World Records declared Unreal Engine the “most successful videogame engine” in 2014.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience. We hope that have a pretty good idea about it by now. We highly recommend you to check it out. It is really worth it!