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Comment by pxc | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else kinda feel like videogames look good enough at this point? This demo looks fantastic, but I don't think many visual improvements beyond it seem super exciting to me. I'll take them when they come, of course, and I'm sure that realistic 3D worlds in videogames will continue to look better and better as time goes on.

But I dunno. I hope advances in videogame engines do more than just help the biggest AAA titles improve their photorealism.

What do we get as the technology improves beyond the point shown in this demo? Just better graphics, or a democratization of the production of photorealistic games? Does this somehow open the door for smaller teams to create games that involve photorealism, or for more budget and staffing resources in the development of photorealistic games to be directed toward other aspects of the game?

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> Does anyone else kinda feel like videogames look good enough at this point?

Yes, definitely. I kinda wish more resources would be diverted to improved physics, better procedural generation, and especially more realistic AI. When do we get to play a game against AI that is learning from the player and constantly changing its behavior in a truly dynamic way? Or how about a game where you can move and interact with every physical object you see instead of everything being a bolted down prop except for that jarringly different item that you're obviously intended to interact with? That would be orders of magnitude more exciting to me than hyper realistic hair on the player models.

You got your wish - a big part of the Matrix demo is the "Mass" AI system (some sort of new ECS system designed to optimize dcache hits), and the city is procedurally generated in Houdini which is a sort of visual node/graph based programming language.

That was actually my first reaction when I saw this video. The graphics are incredible, sure. The people don't entirely escape uncanny valley, but they partially do, and everything else looks awesome. No question.

Then we get to the game portion of the demo, and... it's a half-step above a quicktime event. Now, look, yes, I get it, this isn't actually a game, and the game is an afterthought and not the main point. (By that, I mean the game itself, not the cars, not the agents jumping around, but just the underlying mechanics.) Still, consider where we've come from. Think Atari 2600 graphics and the sheer staggering number of orders of magnitude improvement in the graphics since then. Even if they did have tons of people working on this, all those people were working at levels of efficiency undreamed of in the 2600 era, by almost any objective measure you can imagine. (Even though we'd never be able to agree on one.)

Yet the game itself used in this demo is basically something you could fit on the 2600. I mean, the game itself, the mechanics. Obviously not the graphics, or even a facsimile thereof, but just the game's mechanics. It's still "point at the thing you want to blow up". No generalized conversation engine. No generalized music engine. If you'd like to be generous, call it an order of magnitude better than the 2600 could handle.

The gulf between the graphics and the games we have with them keep getting larger and larger, and it doesn't help that in a lot of ways the AAA games have been boxed into what the engines do. It's not just that "open world sandboxy combat" is the only game they want to make... it's that these huge amazing engines almost require that sort of game, because that's what the engines do. The sameyness of AAA games is forced by this graphics focus because trying to do provide anything but the simplest game mechanics with this level of graphics is impossible.

Which is why I've basically abandoned AAA and go indie now. The lower graphics capability turns out to be a positive advantage, because it means they can make games that aren't The AAA Engine Game.

> Then we get to the game portion of the demo, and... it's a half-step above a quicktime event. [...] The sameyness of AAA games is forced by this graphics focus because trying to do provide anything but the simplest game mechanics with this level of graphics is impossible.

Yeah, was my impression of the gameplay we saw, and my worry about whether it will encourage that kind of design.

Yes, you got it exactly. This is the democratization of AAA graphics. This whole city was made with just a team of 70. (Red Dead Redemption 2 had a team of 1,600.) They relied heavily on Epic’s giant library of game assets that anyone can use. They used procedural generation to mix those assets in to create the map and random procedural generation of the pedestrians. The lighting and physics system are also Unreal Engine features. This whole Matrix project is getting released so devs can use it and base their games off it. The graphics are better, yes, but what this is really selling is the ability to make great looking AAA quality games in less time with fewer people.

To be honest, a team of 70 isn't going to be enough if you're going to make an actual game as big as RDR2 rather than just a tech demo. I'm not convinced until a game studio actually makes a standalone game in UE5 and reports its workflow has become better.

Workflow has improved a lot in ways that can't really be worse, e.g. projects are broken up into lots of small files now so it's a lot more compatible with version control.

> Does this somehow open the door for smaller teams to create games that involve photorealism

Yes, less dealing with LODs using nanite, less worry about drawcall count, less budgeting tri count. And Epic provides huge photogrammetry scan libraries that work well with it.

> Does anyone else kinda feel like videogames look good enough at this point?

People have been saying that for years, and then the following year comes along that blows away expectations yet again. IMO, I won't be satisfied until I literally can't tell an artificial rendering from a real photo/video.

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