Alan Wake 2 [XBSX|S, PC, PS5] 17th october 2023

[Grace Saunders]

I'm finding it kind of boring, unfortunately. I was fighting what's his name? The dude in the morgue who goes back into the woods, and he killed me, because your biggest enemy is the flipping camera. It's annoying too how you didn't get much time to think of what to do in the morgue when Hemingway suddenly woke up.

At least I think that was his name.

 

[hughJ]

The overall cadence and substance of gameplay actually reminds me a lot of Myst or similar classic point and click FMV games. The effort seems to be largely directed at story and environment crafting that's there to be passively observed as you walk from A->B, with the 'A' and 'B' being perfunctory puzzle solving or combat. Kind of a weird vibe to be playing something where the interactive moments are what disrupt or break the immersion, rather than what drives it.

Nice artistry, nice engineering, but I don't know if a real-time 3D engine video game is the best medium for this. I think I'd rather have watched the movie version of this than play it, and it would have been a fraction of the cost to produce, more consistently paced, and it wouldn't be contending with a mixed quality of experience dependent on demanding hardware specs. If the game isn't completely butchered by video compression maybe Geforce Now would be the best way to play it for those without $2k video cards.

 

[davis.anthony]

10hrs in and it's starting to get super repetitive now, combat and game-play mechanics aren't deep enough for 10hrs+ of single player in my opinion.

I got to the end of the cinema and was like, suppose I'll go through the same thing a few times before it finally lets me complete, it's super predictable now.

Story seems to drag on for no reason other than dragging it on too.

If it didn't look at pretty as it does I likely would have stopped playing it by now, but I'm a graphics whore so I gotta whore myself over to its graphics.

 

[trinibwoy]

10hrs in and it's starting to get super repetitive now, combat and game-play mechanics aren't deep enough for 10hrs+ of single player in my opinion.

I got to the end of the cinema and was like, suppose I'll go through the same thing a few times before it finally lets me complete, it's super predictable now.

Story seems to drag on for no reason other than dragging it on too.

If it didn't look at pretty as it does I likely would have stopped playing it by now, but I'm a graphics whore so I gotta whore myself over to its graphics.

Did you play the first one? It was exactly the same. There isn’t a lot of variety in the combat or enemies. There are a few different environments but it’s all very samey which is understandable given the story. It really is an interactive novel with combat to check the gaming/challenge box. I enjoyed it but skipped American Nightmare after reading about the insane difficulty spike. Alan Wake + frustrating combat is not fun.

 

[davis.anthony]

Did you play the first one? It was exactly the same. There isn’t a lot of variety in the combat or enemies. There are a few different environments but it’s all very samey which is understandable given the story. It really is an interactive novel with combat to check the gaming/challenge box. I enjoyed it but skipped American Nightmare after reading about the insane difficulty spike. Alan Wake + frustrating combat is not fun.

Yes I did but I don't remember the first game being as long and the story seemed to develop more quickly so it kept my attention easier.

 

[Grace Saunders]

I'll maybe go back to this later. But meh. I cannot say I care much for it.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Alan Wake 2 update 1.1.1 notes — Alan Wake

Latest update notes for Alan Wake 2.

www.alanwake.com

Some PS5 performance improvements and some visual and lighting fixes across all platforms. Bunch of other stuff.

 

[Grace Saunders]

Despite how hard and boring it is, I think I ought to get back to it later on. After all, what other survival horror games are there to play? Konami hasn't even gave us any news on the Silent Hill 2 remake and the other games, for ages now.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake is definitely not canceled, Bloober Team confirms

Silent Hill 2 Remake, which revives the horror game classic alongside Townfall, Ascension, and Silent Hill F, is not canceled, Bloober says.

www.pcgamesn.com

 

[Scott_Arm]

Couple things about this game. I've come to turning the lens distortion off so I can use more aggressive DLSS and still have it look sharp. I find the lens distortion is mostly just a warping of the image that softens it a lot, but I haven't noticed any other visual "character" that you lose by turning it off.

Input lag is not great. The game must support Reflex for frame generation, but there's no option in the menus. I don't know if it auto turns on with any form of DLSS, but if it does then the game has bad input lag. Doesn't make a huge difference in this game, but it's way more laggy than I'm used to.

Surprisingly I can actually run path tracing in some of the Alan Wake areas and get framerates that are close to what I get in the forest areas playing as Saga with ray tracing off.

 

[davis.anthony]

I've been playing around with the settings and can honestly say it has server image quality issues.

Even downsampling from 2x native res with DLAA still doesn't address a lot of the ghosting issues, which I thought were caused by using DLSS, FG and path tracing.

But it's not caused by DLSS, FG and path tracing, the game just has shit image quality.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Alan Wake 2 update 1.1.1 notes — Alan Wake

Latest update notes for Alan Wake 2.

www.alanwake.com

Performance

• Improved overall quality of the occlusion culling algorithm, improving GPU performance especially on locations with a lot of geometry.
• The performance upgrade is most visible in the PlayStation 5 Quality mode, where (incredibly) there are up to 1.8ms improvements. Cauldron Lake should be coughing less.
• Optimized HUD UI content setup so rendering the HUD takes less time. This brings between ~0.5-0.7ms improvements to performance.
• A few selected tweaks and optimizations for path tracing and rendering.
• Improved streaming by removing occasional 10 – 100ms stalls that mostly affected Xbox Series platforms.
• Reduced memory usage by 16 MB on all platforms.
• [PC] Slightly improved performance on by removing some error diagnostics instrumentation.

Visuals

• Somewhat reduced specular aliasing (“shimmering”) on shiny surfaces with a new algorithm.
• Improved Trailer Park cinematic lighting.
• Improved shadow quality inside the Valhalla Nursing Home to respect the elderly even more.
• Flashlight shadows are now prioritized to avoid a blocky look in locations featuring heavy dynamic lights usage.
• Fixed (or ruined, depending on your view) the “chameleon chair” visible in front of the sauna. It’s not changing color anymore
• Fixed LODs on the hotdog stand.
• Fixed a variety of broken or ugly LODs.
• Fixed incorrect rendering culling mode on leaf and coffee pot materials to prevent path tracing issues.
• Fixed broken materials on the garage building in downtown Bright Falls raising property value.
• [PC] Improved quality for low ray-tracing preset, fixing flickering fireflies on character’s faces during cinematics.

There's actually a lot in this patch. This is just a slice. Some legit funny comments in the notes.

@Dictator More work for you when you get your RAM stable.

 

[Jupiter]

They should add a chapter selection and more available manual memory slots.

I played Alan Wake 2 twice and really liked it. Not a 10/10 like Cyberpunk 2077 but a 9/10. In many aspects it's very good. The game has clear weaknesses in the narrative and it's presentation of it. Later in the game there were too many annoying scenes in the thought room where monologues were held. You don't tell a story you show it. In the movie business they always sayf "show don't tell." In Alan Wake 2 there was far too much telling.

Alan Wake's sections were pretty good. I didn't see such an ability as rewriting the environment in realtime before in a game or movie. That was very innovative.

The game is not only entertaining but also artistically valuable.

EDIT
I also don't like it when a character comments on something that the player obviously sees. For example, when the water is high and character talks about high water or when the player can't open the door the character says: The door is locked.

Or the character once again explains circumstances that you have previously experienced yourself. This should all be avoided.

 

[davis.anthony]

1.8ms is a pretty insane gain on PS5 for a patch.

 

[Karamazov]

maybe the fact PS5 does not handle mesh shader natively, they had to fine tune a bit more.

 

[orangpelupa]

This game is a stutter galore for me... Much more stuttery than cyberpunk. Textures also sometimes doesn't load properly.

And there's no fps cap option...

 

[Scott_Arm]

This game is a stutter galore for me... Much more stuttery than cyberpunk. Textures also sometimes doesn't load properly.

And there's no fps cap option...

Interesting. Game is super smooth for me, but input lag doesn't feel great because it doesn't support reflex or an fps cap. It really should have an fps cap option at least.

 

[trinibwoy]

Why does an fps cap help with input lag?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Why does an fps cap help with input lag?

Because when the gpu hits 100% utilization and you don't have something like Nvidia Reflex to manage the render queue, the cpu will start queuing frames and the cpu sits and waits. Depending on how many frames the engine will queue, the input lag builds up. You basically want to keep your gpu at something like 95% utilization or lower.

Edit: In-game framerate limiters will typically not add any input lag, but external ones like the nvidia control panel option or rivatuner will add 1 frame as a buffer for frame pacing.

 

[orangpelupa]

Oh and I'm too chicken to play the game. I only managed to play for 1 checkpoint in a day.

If the game have manual save anywhere, I think I would be able to play for longer.

Oh and there's no "tone down the scary shits and jump scares, I'm chicken" accessibility option.

 

[trinibwoy]

Because when the gpu hits 100% utilization and you don't have something like Nvidia Reflex to manage the render queue, the cpu will start queuing frames and the cpu sits and waits. Depending on how many frames the engine will queue, the input lag builds up. You basically want to keep your gpu at something like 95% utilization or lower.

Edit: In-game framerate limiters will typically not add any input lag, but external ones like the nvidia control panel option or rivatuner will add 1 frame as a buffer for frame pacing.

Oh, isn’t that what the max pre-rendered frames (low latency mode) setting is meant to fix?