Alan Wake

    Finally got around to playing Alan Wake. Played the first episode (playing it on hard as you guys recommended) and I gotta say that I love what I've seen so far. I turned off all lights on my room, cranked up the volume and man... this game is so immersive! I love the music and the tv/radio shows and all the attention Remedy gives to little details. It's stuff like that that make their games so immersive imo.

    I know I haven't played much yet but it's far better than what I was expecting. Oh and Roy Orbison <3

    Finally got a chance to hop on my mate's 360 to check this out, I have to say I'm not all that impressed.

    Graphically it's a mixed bag, the impressive day/night cycles that were showcased awhile ago seem to have been completely dumped, it's either day or night (mostly the latter). Shadows are static which doesn't work well with moving foliage, speaking of which the ground usually nice and detailed but the trees branches are often really low-res. That goes for a lot of textures in the game, I came across several blurred surfaces next to much higher-res ones which stuck out like a sore thumb at times. There's also some ugly aliasing going on with texture blending on the ground at times, looks odd.

    You seem to fight the same enemies that crop up all over the place, with unlimited axes/knives (God that is friggin annoying). There's hardly no ammo for the shotgun or hunting rifle yet there's loads for the revolver.. seems a little unbalanced. The path through the game is very linear, if you explore you usually end up running into a fallen log or a vehicle or a high cliff.. or worse, you spawn more of those woodsman. The dialogue between Alan and his wife made me cringe.. "You get your sexy ass in the car"...

    It's not all negative though, Alan's narration is just as good as Payne's, Remedy still rival just about anyone for that kind of thing and the storyline keeps you guessing. Some areas can look really pretty, like Alan's cabin on the isle and the town is nicely made.

    For a game that took 5 years it's a "bit" of a letdown, it reminds me of Stalker's development, they got too ambitious and had to cut back on content stripping the sandbox gameplay and replacing it with a restricted environment (in Alan Wake's case, largely linear)

    I only played a little before half-way through though so I guess I'll have to finish it and cast further judgement at that time.

    Not sure how far through I am but I've just returned to my shack to save my friend from some birds. Been really enjoying it so far, although I've only been playing it in very small chunks since it came out. This is probably for the best as the gameplay does get a little repetitive, but the storytelling and other details more than make up for it. I totally love the atmosphere and presentation, and the TV-style endings to chapters are awesome — just encountered the one where it zooms out from the coffee shop girl and pans out over the forest and shit. So cool.

    It is bizarre that certain technical issues are present: the lip syncing is poor and the overall animation is occasionally stiff. Given the epic development time you'd think these things would have been spotted and resolved way back.

    Fortunately the technical problems don't extend to the graphics. I think this is one of the most atmospheric and immersive games I've played this generation on that front, with the really open environments and superb art direction depicting creepy forests like I've never before encountered in a game — especially when the smoke/fog goes crazy. It's obvious the engine was designed to handle much more ambitious environments than you actually see though (was meant to be open world), with flawlessly huge draw distances and stuff used for little more than adding a bit of wow factor. Very impressive though like when you're up in the cliffs and can see things miles away that you need to get to.

    May I ask which part of the Lipsync is off? Like the ingame stuff or the cutscenes? Just curious because our studio was responsible for that (before I joined it) and the same technique is used for other titles now as well... :X

    It was in cutscenes, it just looked very outdated. Almost looked sorta like they were all ventriloquist dummies just moving their mouths open and closed.

    No offense!

    Yes, there's alot of stuff that gets lost in the transition from skin to bones as necessary for games (because it's an optical skin based capture and you have to recalculate the skin-weighting on the bones). The skinning of most game characters isn't the best either... But we have these discussions here as well but not too many people spot it in the games...

    http://www.captivemotion.com/ <- That's the tech company behind it

    http://www.metricminds.com/ <- That's the animation studio I work with.

    Only bought the game a couple of weeks ago and wow... fun ride! I'm glad I bought it after all.

    We need more narrative action games and less mindless FPS'es...

    I liked how sometimes the story got cliché like and then suddenly got you confused and stirred things up. In the end though, I'm kinda dissapointed what the *real* story is, but the ride was interesting enough!

    I'm playing it again in Nightmare! Fuck yeah, now it's challenging!

    I'm enjoying it a lot, maybe even more than the first time around, for some odd reason. And I'm spotting things I didn't on the first playthrough. It's like when you listen to a music the second time, it starts to grow into you and you enjoy it a lot more! Awesome, this doesn't happen a lot with games for me...

    I'm also going to give the two DLC's a try when I finish the game again. Apparently the second DLC wraps up the story.

    Has anyone checked out the DLC yet? Interested in knowing how that is.

    Is Nightmare a harder difficulty than the standard hardest setting when you first play through?

    i got both dlc packages but they didn't advance the story at all and answered nothing whilst the setting ( graphics) and gameplay is pretty much same old same old that we already knew from the core game ! really pretty much all the environments in the dlc have been reuse from the campaign ... shameful !

    id urge you to buy them anyway just so that remedy doesn't go under ...

    i have been doing alot of charity game purchases lately D:

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    can't help but connecting it with Alan Wake... it's probably the text animations.

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