[360] Alan Wake - Still awake

I wasn't thrilled by the VO either, but it is Remedy, it's hard to judge the tone of the game from a short video, if you just saw a capture of MP's comic cutscenes we'd probably dislike it, too.

 

Light beams are caused entirely by atmospherics. Light travels in a ray, visible only if the light is travelling from object to eye. So light being beamed out from a torch into a scene will not be visible; only the reflected light. Any beams we see are caused by the light bouncing of particles in the air.

The bit that struck me as weird wasn't the torch light effect, which I thought pretty convincing, although it is rather laser-beam, but that it doesn't wobble. The torch traces from the hand that jiggles about to a perfect centre-spot in the screen. It ought to be wobbling about, amplifying hand motion, but that may be too realistic for a game and make players feel queezy? Where the light hits is also the reticule for the gun, so is needed for aiming. It ought to have that shakey, chaotic "Blair Witch Project" feel I think, but you'd need to be a good player to hit targets!

Besides that, it does look impressive. Should be convincing playing in a dark room.

 

The story telling looks like its going to be awesome(new vid):

http://www.eurogamer.fr/videos/presentation-alan-wake-exclusive

 

Atmosphere & feel is brilliant & top notch !
The large landscapes looked beautiful.

Lets just hope the gameplay too matches it & isnt just a Dead Space like shooter with light dismemberment part thrown in. [Yes it involves fair bit of driving but how much ?]

 

Damn, the cutscenes appear to be prerendered just like in Uncharted 2. Farewell extra constumes and easter eggs/interactivity Reminds me of the PS1 era..

Otherwise, i agree that the VA is a little off, but at least they put some work into fairly decent motion capture and the fact that there is definitelly focus on the story made me somewhat interested in the game.

 

Excited for the game, but I hope they can stabilize the framerate and fix the screen-tearing.

 

I love the atmosphere.. It has a distinct x-files feel in it... I hope they can pull it off

 

Wonderful presentation and story telling ! They should do more games like this. How many years is it in development ?

 

Their last game was Max Payne 2... So I suppose you could say 6.5 years from MP2's release to AW's. They're a pretty small team from what I understand though.

edit: It was announced in 2005 though.

 

What makes you think the cutscenes are prerendered?

 

It looks like the cutscenes they showed (before they switched to gameplay) were the old ones from 2006/7 videos.

 

Where do you get that Uncharted 2s cutscenes are prerendered? Have you played it?

In Uncharted 1, most cutscenes were prerendered, but not all of them. The recent "upgrades" shown at NeoGaf et al. lead me to believe they are actually real time.

 

All the story cutscenes in Uncharted 1 are prerendered.
In Uncharted 2 (and Alan Wake), the lack of loading in and out of cinematics and the extra overall polish leads me to believe they are prerendered as well.

Not that it is that much of a big deal, it's just that i, personally, have always admired the devs that really push the optimisation and make as much of the game they can completely realtime (konami, capcom) and then there's the supreme payoff for me which are the xtra costumes and generally the interaction in the story scenes.

 

It was already 5years under development when they showed gameplay at E3.
If you add up the one extra year until the release date, you ll have 6 years total dev.time

 

Rendered on their PS3 engine and then recorded. it's still their PS3 engine. I know you know this, but just pointing that out

 

New videos:

http://www.gametrailers.com/game/alan-wake/1608

 

I watched the first seconds ( I'M going to watch all vids later) but there is a shit toon a tearing, damned!

 

Yeah, the tearing is pretty bad. Must be an older build though as that leaked video was much smoother. Other than the tearing it looks great; the lighting, fog, and foliage especially look good.

 

Framerate was terrible (sub 20?) and constant tearing with basically nothing much going on, the lighting was spectacular though, it doesn't look like the game is open-world anymore, probably a good thing in terms of narrative, tighter pacing ftw.

 

Looks great. Except for the tearing as noted.

Could it be a video issue? Could they fix it by just turning vsync on? Uncharted 1 had terrible tearing, but 2 they turned on vsync and now zero tearing.