What is real, or unreal? Gaming shifts up a gear...

 


By now, a substantial chunk of you will have either seen footage of, or directly experienced the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo wrapped around a Matrix promotional shot. After an agonising (for me) week of waiting for that countdown to lapse, many of us spent the weekend oohing and ahhing at the demo itself - then realising, with some delight, that you could actually PLAY bits of it. 

Open world games have become such a mainstay in modern gaming that we barely blink an eye when a developer knocks up a virtual world for us to race around, shoot things or perform exquisite acts of parkour in. With the Unreal 5 Matrix demo, we got a brief glimpse of some QT gunplay and a rather epic car / copter chase between Neo, Trinity and "New Gal" before the demo settled into giving you a living breathing and beautifully rendered city to go sightseeing in. 

Though a few folk have moaned about the frame drops (which are noticeable but given the levels of detail here, entirely understandable) it really does show just how far tech has come in a couple of decades. As a showcase for the new engine tech, it got me thinking about how much we now take for granted with open-world games, and how much we now expect in terms of striking a balance between the 'real' world, and a virtual world that comes with all of the simulated elements that give that sense of immersion, of being able to do almost anything and go almost anywhere within the confines of the game itself. If you start to pick at the Unreal 5 demo, and keep picking you'll begin to feel that there's still a huge amount of work to do in order to faithfully recreate a city - from wind-blown garbage to a genuine level of chaos in the way certain scenic elements are placed, elements that almost evolve rather than being placed in the scene like props in a movie set, ironically. 


If you cast your mind back to 2002 and think back to that hoary old PS2 classic "The Getaway", those of us who played the game were suitably impressed at the attempt to cram dirty old London into the guts of the machine, listening to the poor CD drive hammering its own arse off trying to pass the assets required to draw up a decent frame rate but maintain a balance of playability. 

Looking at the game again without the rose coloured spectacles on, the whole thing is still a pretty reasonable looking game for the time, though I remember how utterly terrible the character animation was - with characters running around looking like they'd had one too many Ruby Murrays and hadn't made it to the loo in time. 

Playing "Watch Dogs: Legion" for the first time over the weekend heavily reminded me of "The Getaway" and the technological gap (and three consoles) between one and the other.

Though the game didn't seem to win critics over, I was pretty impressed with the levels of detail - and that aforementioned nod to slightly chaotic scenic enhancement that a good open-world game has. 

The game itself can get a bit repetitive (and again, for my money, the characters let the game down slightly whereas everything else looks pretty top notch) but for a piece of virtual tourism, letting my daughter play it (after her recent visit to the London Aquarium and the Fashion Museum) was revelatory as she was instantly able to find both, navigating her way round a slightly minimised yet seemingly accurate model of our beloved capital city. 

With each leap in tech, our minds seem to readily adjust to what we're seeing and again as I said above, we begin to take all this stuff for granted - sometimes casting an unfairly critical eye over games that now require the budget - and the staff - that a major movie would require (and then some). With any demo you feel like you're seeing the concept car before the eventual 'production model' rolls off the rails but consider the showreels for Unreal Engine 4 (running on Playstation 4 'standard' hardware) and what the latter PS4 games themselves actually look like. Also consider that games not kow-towing to reproducing realism (for example the truly excellent "Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart" are already doing a mind-blowing job of ramping up prettiness and effects, perhaps not reinventing the wheel in terms of gameplay but definitely giving us more eye candy to gaze in wonder at. 

I look forward to seeing what development teams do with UE5, and if nothing else that Matrix demo should've lit a fire under the likes of Rockstar and others if they're planning their own new open world experiences. The next couple of years are going to be very interesting as devs start to work more closely with the guts of the PS5 and Xbox Series X - so let's hope we see more than just reboots, reissues and re-polished old games. 


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