It looked good, but it didn't look even close to the UE5 reveal, so that seems odd. Shorter, less content, far less environment detail. Not sure I see the point.
...a lot of that work was building out the engine and the associated technology wasn't it? They expressly said part of their goals with UE5 was ease of content creation because they know how hard it is to create high quality assets at scale.
It was the scary thing about this demo, when you listened to the whole talk, that they did it the
hard way, and it took them a lot longer and came out with a lot less demo material, and it still didn't fully impress compared to work done the
easy way.
At first, I saw the teasers of the two demos and thought, Ok, so they took some Quixel Megascan rocks and made a temple with a shiny alien diamond, then they used MetaHumans and made a beardyface guy, then ran that on Xbox to see its stats, and so that's it, pretty easy, just a little test...
But no, that's not what they did. It was a proper demo. They
made their own rocks (90% original), and they
crafted their own face (using the MetaHuman frame and parts but sculpted in their own tools) and they built and optimized some tech specifically for Xbox research (to share with MS and Epic,) and they really did take 9 months to make that whole 30-second thing. Which is scary how hard they had to work for so little! Epic Games' two UE5 demos would already be too short if they were actual game levels, but the Coalition one was barely a room or a whole cutscene. Meanwhile, home tinkerers are kitbashing some UE Marketplace parts and stretching out a preset MetaHuman face, and bam, they have a whole UE5 demo in a few hours. And Coalition's work is not crushing them in quality like you'd expect. (Ok, it does crush if you are informed and look closely, but to the normal viewer, the homemade stuff looks fine so far, and better even because it's not just rocks.)
So, what's that mean for future games? Like, why was this so hard to make when the engine was already in good shape? And if it took a high-caliber studio like The Coalition that look to make only that much, are all these developers going to be killing themselves making their own games at this new standard (unless they use preset assets)? There's some reasons inside the full GDC talk, but there's still questions in my head why this was so hard for so little for a team this good...