THE MATRIX AWAKENS: AN UNREAL ENGINE 5 EXPERIENCE PS5 | 4K Gameplay | PlayStation 5
0Epic Games is excited to announce that The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is now available to download for free on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
This boundary-pushing technical demo is an original concept set within the world of Warner Bros' The Matrix. Written and cinematically directed by Lana Wachowski, it features Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity and—in a reality-flipping twist—also playing themselves.
The project reunited many of the crew that worked on the seminal The Matrix trilogy, including James McTeigue, Kym Barrett, John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, Jerome Platteaux, George Borshukov, and Michael F Gay, in collaboration with teams across both Epic Games and partners, such as SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, The Coalition, WetaFX (formerly Weta Digital), and many others.
With Wachowski and many of the original crew onboard, the team set out to create something with Unreal Engine 5 that’s nothing short of spectacular: an experience that merges artforms in exciting new ways. The demo starts out with a cinematic that features exceptionally realistic digital humans, before morphing into a fast-paced interactive experience of car chases and third-person shooter action.
All of this takes place in a huge, bustling, and explorable open-world city that—like the simulated world of The Matrix—is incredibly rich and complex. Sixteen kilometers square, photoreal, and quickly traversable, it’s populated with realistic inhabitants and traffic. The experience is a tangible demonstration that UE5 offers all the components you need to build immersive, ultra-high-fidelity environments.
Despite the city’s complexity, a relatively small core team was able to create the experience thanks to a set of procedural tools including SideFX’s Houdini. Procedural rules define how the world is generated: from the size of the roads and the height of the buildings, all the way down to the amount of debris on the sidewalks.
Using this workflow, you can modify the input rules and the whole city will change, redefined by those new instructions. For small teams looking to build open worlds, that is incredibly powerful. It means you can regenerate the entire city, right up until the last day of delivery, and continue to adjust and improve it. This opens up so many creative possibilities—and proves that any team can make a triple-A-game-quality open world in UE5, irrespective of size.
As for the city in The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, it’s a living, breathing environment that never stops. Because the systems that drive its actors are part of a global simulation that is evaluated continuously, the activity that takes place in the city is far more consistent and believable. Block after block, it ticks with photorealistic AI-driven characters and vehicles—whether you’re looking at them or not.
This isn’t just a demonstration of the visually stunning environments it’s now possible to build, however—it also opens the door to a completely new way of storytelling. The high-fidelity simulation capabilities of UE5 are enabling an entirely new process: cinematic creation through simulation.
Many of the action scenes in the demo originated with crew members driving cars around the city to capture exciting shots. The team was able to use the simulated universe to author cinematic content, like live-action moviemakers scouting a city to find the best streets to tell their story—but without the physical constraints of the real world.
Where our sample project Valley of the Ancient gave a glimpse at some of the new technology available in UE5, The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience goes a step further: it’s an interactive experience running in real time that you can download on your Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 today.
The demo features the performance and likeness of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss as incredibly realistic digital humans. To achieve this, Epic’s 3Lateral team captured high-fidelity 3D scans of the actor’s faces and 4D captures of their performances in their Novi Sad studio.
The open-world city environment includes hero character IO, who was the launch character for MetaHuman Creator, as well as thousands of MetaHuman agents, demonstrating exciting new possibilities for high-fidelity in-game characters at scale.
AI systems drive the characters and vehicles, while procedural systems built using Houdini generate the city. Unreal Engine 5’s World Partition system makes the development of the vast environment more manageable.
The movement of vehicles, character clothing, and the destruction of buildings are all simulated in engine using Unreal Engine’s Chaos physics system. During the chase experience, because the car crashes are simulated in real time with Chaos, the same crash will never occur twice. It's unique at every run.
Other Videos By Game Over Man
Other Statistics
The Matrix Awakens Statistics For Game Over Man
At present, Game Over Man has 15 views spread across 1 video for The Matrix Awakens, and less than an hour worth of The Matrix Awakens videos were uploaded to his channel. This makes up less than 0.37% of the total overall content on Game Over Man's YouTube channel.