Alan Wake: Microsoft preparing to leave PC gamers behind (again)

joker454 said:
Depends, the music industry has shifted to Spotify type all you can eat buffet model where most of the artists don't actually make any money, but they still make music because they enjoy it, so it's more akin to the indie gaming model. I don't think AAA publishers would be happy with that sort of model, nor is there any equivalent in the gaming space to the 99 cent music track. Additionally the gaming biz doesn't have the equivalent of the music concert to where they can afford to lose money on the music tracks themselves and make it back on concerts.
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iPhone 99 cent game model? /shudder. I'd hate to think of PC gaming devolving to that level. :D And yeah, limited opportunity for game devs to make back money on T-shirts, stickers, posters, etc. like most music artists.

Requiring online on pc hasn't worked either as that's been cracked as well. I don't really buy the "it can be more secure" argument either as that has been batted around for decades now with little effect. I think their best best it to entirely eliminate retail in the pc space. From what I've gathered from various friends that work at various "large publishers", the point of weakness on pc most of the time is at the dvd replicator. That is where the leaks usually occur, then it gets to the pirates and then it's being played long before the actual game hits the shelf. If they eliminate that entirely and ship only digitally the day before release, like on steam, then that would help a bit as some people that would normally have already finished the game before it was even release maybe would consider buying instead of waiting a week for it to be cracked. I still question if that is enough though. I hope you are right but I'm not particularly hopeful.
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Online authentication isn't the answer as that is easily bypassed. Hence it doesn't work nearly as well as I'd hoped.

Online authentication combined with online play fares a bit better, but even there it falls apart (BF3 evidently has a multiplayer crack to bypass Origin and battlelog or whatever EA call it) if crackers are determined enough.

So far the only method that works is MMO style of dedicated server hosting all gameplay with clients only operating as a graphical front end. It took over 2 years for an offline server to appear for Guild Wars, for example. And that was helped by the fact that apparently not "everything" gameplay related was hosted on the Arena.net servers.

D3 takes the concept of single player game on a MMO framework a step further. If cracking groups have to spend a year or more to release a working offline server (and modify it anytime server side changes appear) that'll greatly defeat most pirating efforts from affecting overall sales of a title. Of course, that comes at the expense of any ability to play offline. As well it only helps the well established pubs/devs. with the cash to afford the server side infrastructure.

Regards,
SB
 
I agree with Andrew that we are living the best years yet for electronic gaming. So many choices in games and platforms that host them. Little is missing and everything is reaching new levels of quality.

I think it comes down to there being more competition than ever before, thanks to the huge amount of money flowing in the industry because of the massively larger audience today than even 10 years ago. That and of course just the evolution of the technologies involved in every aspect.

Hey wait wasn't this thread about Alan Wake? ;)
 
joker454 said:
Consoles aren't 100% secure but they don't have to be, as the threat of being banned from their respective online services and/or bricking your console by tinkering with it are both excellent deterents.
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I'm less concerned with being banned from XBL or PSN than Steam. I have far more invested in the latter!

joker454 said:
Requiring online on pc hasn't worked either as that's been cracked as well.
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Online activation or "pings", sure. I'm talking about actually building online *services* into the application. Things like matchmaking being central to a game experience. Even stuff like BF3 hosting all of the servers and never providing that code in the client or otherwise makes it virtually impossible to pirate the multiplayer portion (and for that reason I'm severely doubtful of your claim that you can "bypass" it for MP... that would seem to require participation of one of the server partners and none of them would be stupid enough to do that). For single player games it's obviously more challenging, but that's true on all platforms really.

joker454 said:
I don't really buy the "it can be more secure" argument either as that has been batted around for decades now with little effect.
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There's just no motivation for anyone to do it. The people who make the hardware are serving the consumers, not the game companies (and it's probably best that way). No one wields enough power to force the entire chain of platform participants to cooperate on DRM. There's no technical issue though... I mean what do you think is magical about the consoles that allows them to be more "secure"? The exact same techniques - or even better ones - could be applied to PCs if everyone wanted to. I personally don't want that though... even the perceived threat of piracy has barely produced any console exclusive games that I care about. Alan Wake I'm so far beyond caring at this point that I don't give a damn if they port it to PC. Like I said, my 360 copy is still in the shrink wrap.

joker454 said:
I think their best best it to entirely eliminate retail in the pc space.
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I think that has mostly happened and is inevitable regardless of security considerations. It's just a pricey, and overall worse method of distributing things. Physical media in general needs to continue to die faster :)

Anyways Steam already has the right idea... they provide a way better experience than piracy, and services that are truly useful. Install/play anywhere, auto-updates, cloud saves, community and multiplayer platform features, etc. That's all stuff that's worth paying for. I can't imagine playing games without it... pirates are really missing out TBH :p

Sigfried1977 said:
Unless you pay someone to tinker with your 360 or risk bricking it by doing it yourself you are not going to play any sort of pirated software any time soon. If you still go ahead and do it you can at the very least say good bye to Xbox Live.
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If there was more motivation, it would be cracked in no time. There's actually very little motivation though as all you "unlock" is single player stuff and 95% of that is available on lots of other platforms as well. It's typically somewhat easier to crack the PC version, so might as well target the weakest link. Don't mistake that for any of the other links being particularly strong though ;)
 
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Svensk Viking said:
GPU benchmark
http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=auto%7Cen&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcgameshardware.de%2Faid%2C867466%2FAlan-Wake-PC-14-AMD-und-Nvidia-Grafikkarten-im-Benchmark-Test%2FAction-Spiel%2FTest%2F

*Shudders at having 4870 512MB*
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and one of the editors says 7970 @1200/7200MHz gets 51 FPS @2560x1600.. linear scaling with the core clock..

CPU benchies interesting negative scaling with >4T

and finally IGN PC footage... Game is looking amazing, reminds me witcher 2 :) they seem to have framerate issues though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-E8E4lImM0
 
pjbliverpool said:
It better look significantly better than the 360 version to achieve performance like that!
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Yeah that seems pretty irrational to me. My guess is they just went nuts and cranked everything (resolution, AA, shadow samples, etc. etc) to 11 and the visual quality benefit over much more reasonable settings is minimal. I call it "Metro 2033 syndrome" ;)
 
Gotta wait and see about tex res. Otherwise everything else is pretty much just crank up samples.
 
Yeah it doesn't look to me like they even increased the geometric complexity at all. Probably textures are higher but I doubt they did much more than crank the sliders.

Frankly even the input looks awkward assuming that is M+KB. The animation looks "off" with digital inputs.
 
They're running it with 8xMSAA and FXAA in that IGN footage so it's pretty much aping the cards pretty hard, Especially when you think about the sheer amount of transparent and alpha objects that need to be processed!

Game also seems to have a nice texture variety and not the same crap copy and pasted every 2 metres..
 
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Andrew Lauritzen said:
Probably textures are higher
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Gotta wonder how much of that is just simply mip selection considering the console iteration was so low in pixel resolution. Best way to tell would be to zoom in on everything I suppose.

But anyways, it's nice to see them actually putting in some effort. The daytime scenes were really hard on the eyes @544p. Night time was better, but then I started noticing the low res Z artefacts on the DOF/bloom. At least they seemed to have proper shading for the MSAA'd pixels.

Wonder how a proper DX10/11 path would be since they went with deferred MSAA and do a ton of post-fx.

I may pick this up for cheap one day - the game certainly had its moments of beauty that would look nice in 1080p+. :p

Frankly even the input looks awkward assuming that is M+KB. The animation looks "off" with digital inputs.
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Yeah, I'm not sure how they're implementing the "half-trigger pull" for the flashlight, which is pretty important to saving your batteries when fighting off enemies.

-------------

Oh... just remembered... there were quite a few cut-scenes (letter-boxed) that were pre-rendered (IIRC, 720p & 4xAA). Can't remember if the compression was any good considering it still looked better than the in-game stuff. :p
 
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