Matrix Online Trailer

[Evil Elvis]

I'm not sure if this is a short clip cut from the trailer on the revolutions dvd or what, but there's a torrent file for it up here in wmv format.

Less than impressive, to say the least.

[Jon Carver]

Less than impressive, to say the least.

Unimpressive is an understatement.  The graphics and animation all look to be about five years old.  Either the Lithtec engine they are using is awful, the artists are dogs, or both.

[Alluvian]

So it will be an ugly CoH then?  With enterable buildings?  Have they said much about actual gameplay?

[TripleDES]

Graphics isn't the end all of a game. Also, the footage is supposedly almost a year old. If that's true or not, we'll see either on E3 or when the beta starts. The "new" video looks more or less the same as the footage from last years E3 (that Fragland video).

[Alluvian]

I just don't find the subject matter interesting in the LEAST for an mmog.  I don't see what is supposed to be the draw, ANY draw.

Considering this, I should just bow out of discussion as someone the game is not aimed at.

[TripleDES]

I'm just anticipating it, because it's a MMO in a scifi setting (since I dislike fantasy settings a lot). Whether the end result will be usable or not, is a different matter. On the same note, some time ago, everyone was trashing CoH too, but at present a lot of people are suddenly claiming it's fun. So I reserve my judgement, until the beta.

[Roac]

Harsh.  Graphics aren't outstanding in the vid, but it's poor quality.  Take a peek at the screenies on their site - better, although still not outstanding.  Main difference, imo, is that here you get to see how they move, and I do think that's fairly impressive.

With enterable buildings? Have they said much about actual gameplay?

I think they said that all buildings will be enterable.  Even if someone did find a quote, I wouldn't buy that line until I saw movies of them walking into several buildings - it's broad statements (features) like this that tend to get cut when deadlines approach.

On the rest of the gameplay, there isn't much info - depressingly little for a game that is supposedly to be released this year.  You can download skills like in the movie, but there is apparently a limit as to how many skills you can know at once.  Skills are supposed to be tradable (they're just uber-futuristic CDs, afterall).  Instead of "gold", the base commodity is "information", represented by your ability to hack matrix code and "resource nodes".  Combat is supposed to be one of the big draws of the game.

No idea how it will all come together though.  It's a title that could really do well, because the setting allows for radically different design than what we have out there now.  On the other hand, Matrix 2/3 did poorly, and it's equally possible Monolith could take a cop out approach - there's no gold, but information might be the same thing.  You farm it, you have no idea what it is (ie, you have 4831 units of information), etc.  Agents, or weaker counterparts, are the new mobs you kill to get access to resource nodes (gold piles).  You trade info for better skill chips.  The amount of skills you can hold (your skill points) go up over time/use/with xp.  Crafting has been replaced with hacking.  Buffing has been replaced with "anti-virus" skills, and debuffing with "virus" powers.  Guilds are replaced with "ships".  Etc, etc.

They could take the route of just renaming everything we already know, or they could spin it off and be original.  I hope it's the latter.  Experience tells me it'll likely be the former.  We'll see.  I am looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

[Arnold]

Less than impressive, to say the least.

Unimpressive is an understatement.  The graphics and animation all look to be about five years old.  Either the Lithtec engine they are using is awful, the artists are dogs, or both.

Lithtec?  Yuck.  I could only play Shogo for 30 minutes before I got ill.  No other FPS has made me sick.

[Alluvian]

A more modern look at the lithtech engine would be NOLF and NOLF2.

[HaemishM]

The Lithtech engine was decent, but not spectacular, more like a poor man's Quake. It can be decent, but it won't wow most people.

Nothing I've seen on the Matrix Online, including the 2nd movie, makes me think the game will be any good.

[TripleDES]

If someone's a fan of mental selfmutilation, you might want to look into the forums. They're REALLY down the crapper content-wise.

[Flashman]

This game is doomed IMHO. The last two movies were disapointments, financially and critically, not to mention incomprehensible to the vast majority of people.  There are no new movies coming out. The license is now stale.

The excitement that this game would have generated had it come out after the first movie or if 2/3 had been hits is now lost.

They've got a license they have to deal with, pay for and work within but what are the benefits of using the license? You get the name, but what is the name worth right now? Is there going to be that much of an interest in a license with one good film and two (at best) medicore sequels?

The game doesn't look/sound that great and the license is weak and won't carry this game.

[HaemishM]

Anyone have a link of this that doesn't require me to register at a site I know nothing about?

I finally saw Matrix: Revolutions this weekend, and ummm... it sucked monkey ass. It had no scene that I could look at and go "That saved the movie" (unlike the highway scene in 2 which did save that movie from total suck). The ending was just fucking stupid; incomprehensible, and it explained not one goddamn thing. Total fucking ripoff.

Which means the game will be saddled with the albatross license from hell.

[Margalis]

Strange coincidence, I also saw Matrix: Revolutions last weekend. (Never saw Reloaded)

Bad in so many ways...too many pointless characters, totally generic script cobbled together out of various cliches. But really, IMO the main problem was that The Matrix is inherently interesting and generic sci-fi robots battling generic sci-fi exoskeletons is not. The few snippets of the future in the Terminator films is a lot more compelling and believable than Zion garbage in the matrix films.

If you watch the first movie, there are a ton of different directions they could have gone in, and they chose one of the more boring ones. Some spaceships (look...they're spaceships!) fighting some robot drone things...yay.

"What is The Matrix?"

"Who cares! Look, a big robot is shooting a bigger robot! Rad!"

[daveNYC]

As a big fan of 'last stand' style battles (Battle of the Line, 300, Battle of the Five Armies, etc.) I enjoyed the dock battle scenes.  That just means that there were 15-20 minutes in the movie that didn't suck my life out of me.  A few more minutes of Monica Bellucci wouldn't have hurt either.

The second movie was pure filler crap.  They could have skipped it and started the third movie with a voice over saying that squids are coming after Zion, and Neo is trapped on a subway metaphor.  Bam, I just saved the studio $100M

[Alluvian]

Yup, I have always thought the failure of the second two movies is the abandonment of the basis on which the movie was founded... the actual matrix.  The third movie all but entirely gave up on it.  The second movie showed one scene of them actually having to call out of the matrix, and that was just to push the plot point that Agent Smith is now on the other side.

The original concept was interesting (even though it has been done before), but was also pretty thouroughly covered in the first movie.  There was nothing left to do but answer questions that are far more interesting when left rhetorical.

[eldaec]

generic sci-fi robots battling generic sci-fi exoskeletons is not [interesting].

Whoa there.

Generic sci-fi robots battling generic sci-fi exoskeletons are *always* interesting.

The problems, as mentioned by various other people, were....

1) When I bought a matrix film ticket I was hoping to see something else.
2) The rest of the film was crap.

But don't go putting down the concept of generic sci-fi robots blowing shit up.

If Matrix 2 and 3 really had to be made, they had enough room for 15 minutes of generic sci-fi ass kicking front and centre. The problem was the whole additional hour of pointless Zion scenes where everyone went around explaining crude philosophical concepts in words of one syllable for no good reason.

If, in the centre of a decidedly average film you ever get a choice to watch either 15 minutes of robots laying the smack down, *or* 15 minutes of reject footage from Nivana's 'Smells like teen spirit' video, you are always going to pick the former.

That is why, for instance, Matrix 3 > Matrix 2.

[HaemishM]

There should have been no "Matrix 3." There wasn't enough actual story to make two movies. The 3rd movie revealed nothing significant, took like 30 minutes with that usless train man sequence just so they could show the goddamn Merovingian again (and Monica Bellucci's ample bosom). I'd have rather they either fill that 30 minutes with more Bellucci bosom or just not have it. The fight with Seraph in 2, just about any goddamn thing with the Oracle or the Merovingian could have been fucking cut completely. Almost all of the Zion shit out of 2 was a waste of time, and the whole Locke-Morpheus rivalry could have been dipped in honey and staked on an ant bed as well.

Is it just me, or did the ending basically amount to the humans being used as pawns by the programs with conflicting agendas?

[pants]

Is it just me, or did the ending basically amount to the humans being used as pawns by the programs with conflicting agendas?

Yes.  The final scenes of Matrix 3 reminded me of the end of 'Trading Places' - I was expecting the Architect to hand over a $1 bill to the Oracle.

[Der Helm]

Is it just me, or did the ending basically amount to the humans being used as pawns by the programs with conflicting agendas?

Yes.  The final scenes of Matrix 3 reminded me of the end of 'Trading Places' - I was expecting the Architect to hand over a $1 bill to the Oracle.

Oh no, you guys want to tell me that the humans don't win ?


<--- Has not seen the movie, yet.

[stray]

Is it just me, or did the ending basically amount to the humans being used as pawns by the programs with conflicting agendas?

Well, I don't think that scene was trying to say that. The Oracle's agenda is "choice", for humans and machines alike. Because of that, she's naturally on the humans' side. They were discussing the significance of what Neo just did, not just for humans, but for the machines as well. Not that they were making pawns out of humans (in some sense, yeah, there's some "chess playing" going on, but that's because they were the two god's of the Matrix. Neo was the third -- or is it the "One"?).

One thing to make it easier to understand is that Neo realized that the "machines", per se (including the Architect and the Source), were never the real enemies at all -- Agent Smith and the Merovengian were.

Anyways, I agree. Very crappy movie, bad ending. I liked the ending "in theory" (at least I think I understand it, but my explanation would probably take a page or two, so I won't go there), but it was poorly done. Sloppy. What they tried to do with the ending was cool, but it turned out to be very confusing (there's just too much subtext in the Trilogy to make sense out all of it. That, or you have to be familiar with Gnosticism or Hinduism to grasp it). The rest of the film is just stupid. Too much Zion, not enough Matrix, and not enough Bellucci.

But...What I really would have hated even more is if all Neo did was kick Smith's ass --The End. Duality is played out IMO, especially in action films.

[HaemishM]

One thing to make it easier to understand is that Neo realized that the "machines", per se (including the Architect and the Source), were never the real enemies at all -- Agent Smith and the Merovengian were.

Well, except for that whole "turning humans into Energizer batteries" thing. They completely sidestepped the issue that if humans were allowed to unplug, would there be enough plugged in to power all the machines?

The Merovingian was a complete fucking waste of time character, put in to make them seem "philosophical."

[stray]

The Merovingian was a complete fucking waste of time character, put in to make them seem "philosophical."

You're probably right. He was a waste of time, for the most part at least, but he shouldn't have been. He was not only hostile to humans, but also to the Source. He was a defiant, once very powerful program, that now imposed his own barriers between the machine and the human world. He had a deep disliking for what the Oracle did to the "newer" Matrix, and his new position in it, so he went about making life hell for machine and human alike...unless you made a deal with him. He wanted the old Matrix with the "vampires and werewolves".

I'd think that if a Lucifer-type is included in a story, he'd get more screen time, more significance to the plot, but that didn't really happen.