“Welcome to the Matrix,” Trinity remarks. “I thought we had total creative control.” Why a car chase? Obviously because the “marketing people” decided the demo needed one, Trinity explains. I don’t give a damn about “boomer” sci-fi icons like Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia Neo and Trinity are the silver screen heroes that pull at my tender, cholesterol-encrusted heart strings.Īfter a short, theoretical diatribe the retreads familiar ground like the digital era’s impact on entertainment, the nature of reality and self-perception-you know, the hits-Neo and Trinity whisk us away to a high-speed chase through the streets of a familiar unnamed, faceless, endless city. Morphing between their current versions and their younger selves, asking about the nature of our reality, they strike me as the perfect ambassadors for next-gen, and for stating its case to aging millennials like myself. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, acting as our tour guides, start blurring those lines right off the bat, as both their real images and digital selves, as themselves and as their iconic characters, Neo and Trinity. After spending about 90 minutes or so with the demo, I can safely say I’m a next-gen believer.Īs far as settings for a tech demo that shows off a new game engine which further blurs the lines between the real and the digital, The Matrix is probably as on the nose as you can get. During the show, not only did Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II show off what the new engine can do, but Epic also dropped The Matrix Awakens, a demo that anyone with a Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 can download and play. The 2021 Game Awards was a big night for Unreal Engine 5, and for next-gen gaming in general. Yeah, a weirdo like me can find playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 4K at 60 frames per second to be a religious experience, but the general gaming public would probably prefer having new games that fully take advantage of the hardware they spent their hard-earned hundreds on. The best reason to get a new console (if you can even find one) is to play better versions of older games or better versions of games that are also coming out on the hardware you already own. As much as I enjoyed most of those games, I can’t say my hair was blown back, especially considering one was a remake of a game from 2009 and another was a console port of a PC game I’d already been playing for a year or so.īecause of this lack of next-gen exclusives-due to the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic, as well ongoing pressures to reduce crunch culture in video game development, have assumedly had on release schedules-the messaging around the new consoles has been somewhat muddy and confusing. Everything else was either cross-gen or “enhanced” versions of previously released last-gen titles. As far as new, next-gen exclusive releases are concerned, we’ve only received a handful of notable titles: The Medium, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Destruction AllStars, Deathloop, Hell Let Loose, and the Demon’s Souls remake are the only ones that immediately pop into mind. We recently passed the one year anniversaries of both the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5, and I think it’s safe to say that this has been one of the weirdest first years of any console generation.
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