Alan Wake (Time to WAKE UP again!)

[Carnivol]

Slapping the logo on the box is a start. Getting people to log in with a LIVE account while playing games is a solid step 2 (this requires the LIVE logo to be present, of course). Step 3 would be to actually do something more about it than just general stat/progress tracking from step 2.

Also, yeah, I'm still a bit surprised by the lack of the dedicated server thing... I can't even think of many console titles that have ever let a regular user host a dedicated server (other than that one GC Online RPG that let you use a console as a dedicated server and the official PC server app EA released for Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for PSP)

Anyway, I still think the dedicated server thing in many cases might be a tad bit overrated (especially as far as the majority of the public goes). Unless the systems are already choking on everything, the fact remains that in the majority of the cases there's at least gonna be one player that literally sits on top of the server. So he'll still sit on the advantage... unless the way the server handles lag compensation is proper and fair for everyone... which just as well could be the same lines of code that lurks within a player hosted game. Of course, system resources could be an issue at times, but fortunately (for the consoles, anyway) the hardware remains a constant on all units at all times.


Anyway, the cross-platform multiplayer thingy is a bit of an icky-zone. Although it's a neat feature, Lost Planet Colonies brought in way too many point & click kills from PC users (I still have nightmares about the VS Rifle) and I recall hearing a ton of PC users bitch and moan about whatever system supposedly was in play in Shadowrun to sorta even the playing field between players on both platforms (in the same way I hear people cry about fighters on consoles if they don't get to have an arcade stick and the only way to properly shut those people up, if you can stomach the 5 minutes of "I'LL NEVER PLAY THIS FUCKING GAME EVER AGAIN!"-ranting, is through beating them -fair and square- with a gamepad while they're on their ultimate arcade stick of +3 Superiority )


Anyway, enough bla bla bla;

What DLC is confirmed for Alan Wake so far?
Is the commentary from the C.E. gonna be some sort of DLC feature?

[Member_of_STARS]

Also, yeah, I'm still a bit surprised by the lack of the dedicated server thing... I can't even think of many console titles that have ever let a regular user host a dedicated server (other than that one GC Online RPG that let you use a console as a dedicated server and the official PC server app EA released for Medal of Honor Heroes 2 for PSP)

This is actually damn awesome.

Anyway, I still think the dedicated server thing in many cases might be a tad bit overrated (especially as far as the majority of the public goes).

Actually, considering the opinions and false information passed on in mainstream gaming (console shooter fanbase especially), dedicated servers solution is severely underrated. There are 4 major chriterias which are overlooked. Naturally, dedicated servers at this moment are only really significantly superior to P2P with shooters, but its because shooters require so much more in such a small timeframe. Any other game? RTS, even MMORPG (networked peers sharing the load).

1) Dedicated servers are usually set up by people (or server providors/companies) to match the dedicated internet connection with the number of people that line/server rig can hold. There are exceptions, when some stupid idiot is hosting a 50 player COD4 server on his Pentium 3 rig in his basement while he has his torrents clocking, but those are not that common and you can easily segment the servers with one click of a mouse to find the best one for your needs (literally, one click of a mousekey)

2) Mods. The strongest anti-mod pro-P2P supporting argument is that everyone should play the game the way its designed to be played (so wrong on so many levels). With games like Half Life and Battlefield series, you bought a game, and got ~5~10+ free games along with them. Dont like WW2 BF? Here, play this Vietnam era, modern era- free of charge. Amusingly, modding the game is pretty much forbidden by the EULAs, haha.

3) Least ammount of lag. Servers are finetuned to hold a specific ammount of players in relation to the connection. If you find a server which isnt, you can easily just disconnect and find another one (one click). In most cases they are either set up on premium residential connection on a dedicated box (private or small clans and their own servers) or in serverfarms in game server providors (in which case they are on businessclass pipes). Which means that unless youre being hit with force majeure or your sibling/spouse is downloading something, you get no lag.

You can easily segment the servers into a list (one click- part of why I mention this a lot is that people have this idea that a server browser is really difficult to navigate) by the ping. However, due to the steady and high bandwidth connection (and of course if the games netcode is well written) you get pretty much no disadvantage in hit-reg if youre at 100 ping while playing against someone pretty much on top of the server (5-30 ms ping).

You have probably seen the complaining about matchmaking pitting Europeans against Americans. With dedicated servers, from Estonia to East Coast, I get 130 ms of ping which will only put me at a disadvantage when Im playing against someone with a ping below 50, and we meet up around a corner, and the only advantage he has is the fact that he sees me 80 milliseconds faster. Thats it. I get rocksolid hitreg, so if he cant capitalize on that first bullet he will be able to shoot out sooner (theoretically), hes going down. No lag, no warping, no stuttering.

You could even play completely stutterfree if the server was in Texas. ~200ms ping. Hitreg would be bad if you didnt compensate for lag, but in case of COD4 which has fantastic hitreg and lag compensation, I can stay competitive on a server even with this kind of ping.

the fact remains that in the majority of the cases there's at least gonna be one player that literally sits on top of the server.

Even if he is, and this is going to sound completely clishé, but "trust" me, he doesnt have an advantage. In P2P/matchmaking for FPS games, the host sits on a 0 ping, and depending on his connection people will have a ping of 100+ (around 100~200 in Modern Warfare 2, ideally). His hitreg is going to be perfect, while his residential connection is probably going to be less than optimal, his sister is sitting in MySpace (and the other players sisters/brothers/parents/spouses are doing the same) so not only does he see everyone a full reaction time faster, he also doesnt have to deal with severe packet loss, terrible hitreg and lagspikes. With dedicated servers, its simple. You dont have any of those issues, and if you stumble into a server where you do- you just disconnect and join another one.

4) Communities/clans/"friends"/gamer solidarity and comraderie (this would take another 10 minutes, haha)

I may come off a little preachy and you may or may not know most of this. Im just writing it up just in case, because back when the whole MW2 catastrophe went down, I realized that console gamers in most part have absolutely no idea about the benefits dedicated servers hold. I see the transition from P2P to DS a necessary step to a more united and less splintered gamer-community. And the community is terribly divided indeed.

Anyway, the cross-platform multiplayer thingy is a bit of an icky-zone. Although it's a neat feature, Lost Planet Colonies brought in way too many point & click kills from PC users

I agree, the precision and multifunctionality per second the KB/Mouse combination offers would potentially give the PC crowd a significant advantage, but only if the game is faster paced would that advantage be gamebreaking. COD4 has shown that a very good console player can keep up with the "higher than average" group of PC gamers, at least in that particular game. Slower shooters like Rainbow Six Vegas would even the playing field up even further. Advanced matchmaking and platform limitation could be used to keep the less-than-uber players in their playing field without being raided by those who have the skills but dont like the challenge (Quake Live matchmaking = disaster).

Crossplatform, SourceTV are two things I see unifying gaming community and evolving it further.

Sorry for the longwinded post. Feel free to read it in short cuts.

[Zombie Fred]

new trailer/gameplay here.

Utterly fantastic, the music just gives me chills.

[Mr_Zombie]

Enemies screaming "DIE!" and the voice coming from the light at the end were kinda weird and, I think I can say, funny, but the overall atmosphere: WOW! :O

[doomed]

I wish the game wasn't that good, then I wouldn't care much that I'll never be able to play it.

But, unfortunately for me, it really looks like something special..

The "- Alice where are you? -Upstairs!" part reminded me of the beginning of Max Payne 1.

[Member_of_STARS]

Enemies screaming "DIE!" and the voice coming from the light at the end were kinda weird and, I think I can say, funny, but the overall atmosphere: WOW! :O

The atmosphere was amazing, but I think the enemies talking is a big mistake.

[Stu]

As if the ghost of Alone In The Dark isn't stalking this enough, the developers are talking about how it's based around different episodes, and that the main game is season one etc.

Scary in itself.

[Rombie]

Remedy only have themselves to blame for that (probably very unfair) comparison... it's taken them what, 5 or 6 years for this?

They are the main studio aside from the axed DNF dev's to say "When It's Done" but at least they get it done in the end.

[randomwab]

They are the main studio aside from the axed DNF dev's to say "When It's Done" but at least they get it done in the end.

Valve too. Six years for Half-Life 2, and speaking of which, where's my Episode 3? You release Left4Dead2 instead of fresh Half-Life? Why do you hate me Valve?

[Rombie]

^ Good call. Forgot about Valve.

Admittedly I've still not got around to finishing HL2 E2 yet, but if they announced all of a sudden the game was going to launch in a month or something I'd be up to completing it all over it like a dirty rash.

Back on topic, sadly I am sans 360 and with there now being plans for PC edition of Alan Wake I will have to miss out... which is a shame because aside from the fact it looks visually awesome, the concept and gameplay is entirely up my alley.

[Zombie Fred]

Looks like Remedy have really cooked up the game to run great on 360.

Part 1

We hate dithering and aliasing just as much as you I think. Hardware 4xAA on the Xbox360 is nice for a lot of things - it did take us a while to get the most out of it (E.g, refactoring the renderer quite a few times).

Shadow aliasing doesn't really have anything to do with the generic framebuffer resolution or aliasing quality, but having the game run with 4xAA in the framebuffer is kind of rubbing in any other visual quality problems there might be.

We don't like ugly things, so we fix them before shipping.

Part 2

We like 4xAA. Due to the alpha-to-coverage feature on the Xbox 360 GPU, it's one of the key reasons we can render a lot of "alpha test" foliage like trees and bushes without them starting to shimmer or dither (as alpha-to-coverage with 4xAA effectively gives us 5 samples of alpha "blend" without actually using alpha blend). Of course that leads into a lot of interesting ways how to get the the other "standard" z-buffer based rendering schemes to not alias, but let's not get into that discussion right now.

Part 3

The game is locked to 30 FPS (well, except menus, manuscript pages, etc which run at 60 FPS). All cinematics are guaranteed to run 30 FPS (as we actually background load the next location, in case there's a location change). If you saw video tearing in the published press material, it's 99% due to video sync issues (E.g, PAL video cams or 59.97 Hz vs. 60.00 Hz screen update).

While playing Alan Wake on a Xbox 360, if the game framerate drops below 30 FPS we resort to screen tearing (same idea as Gears of War uses).

We're right now just fixing bugs and making sure nowhere in the game would the framerate never dip below 30 FPS. I know there's still a few heavy locations in the game where we resort to dipping below 30 FPS, but we're working very very hard to get all those solved.

So it's going to be a solid at 30 fps, with 4xaa, and no screen tearing. Cover me excited!

[aris13]

Remedy explains why Alan Wake isn't coming to PC

"Saying that Alan Wake is best played of a sofa with 5.1 surround and a big TV screen, I think is more of a preference than anything else," states franchise head Oskari Häkkinen. "We’re not going out there to say that PC gamers can’t enjoy it from their own PC set-up. We’re certainly not saying that. We have a strong heritage in PC gaming as well.

"But, frankly, we’re a small studio. We’re 50 people, and being a small studio, it makes a lot more sense for us to focus on one platform. Currently we’re fully focused on the Xbox version, and [as for] what the future holds, we haven’t got anything to announce, and we haven’t thought that far right now. We’re fully crunching towards the Xbox 360 version."

[doomed]

They talk about it like it was a conscious choice, when they've previously explained it's MS that doesn't want them to make a PC version.

Also let's not forget how the very first builds were PC only, and even in 2008 they said that all promotional material (trailers, screenshots, etc) they released are from the PC version. So it's not like the game was designed for the 360 and would require a massive effort in porting it to the PC because they've never made any PC builds.

I really don't want to hear any more lame excuses from them about how they love their couches or how targeting the 360 only will make a better product. Guess what? Targeting the PC only will make an even better.

All they managed to do is alienate their fanbase.


edit



Oh and they release screenshots of the editor running on Windows only to make me even more angry..

[himher_elle]

This game will be outstanding, I can feel it, i always say games that concentrate in an interacive STORY are the best, like for example Bioshock.

[Zombie Fred]

Oh my. Hail the tech-gods!

So beautiful.

[randomwab]

[jagger916]

Oh, Sam Lake. Why has Remedy forsaken me?

[Mr_Zombie]

New trailer- Alan Wake: Building the Thriller

And some GIFs from the trailer:
Spoiler:

show spoiler

The game looks marvellous. I so want to play it.

[BBboy20]

This trailer has so many .gif worthy shots.

Glad to hear some more Poets of the Fall.

I also find it funny that Wake runs and holds weapons very similar to Payne.

Where is that Sam Lake gif from?

[Carnivol]

Oh and they release screenshots of the editor running on Windows only to make me even more angry..

What did you expect to be their development environment? That they were still using those daisy chained G5 macs that some people were using for preliminary 360 development?

He looks so... Finnish...



Anyway, even though the game looks spectacular in general (and unlike before, I fear I might actually grab this on day 1), the facial animation still looks kinda "meh" to me in all footage that's been shown. The lip sync seems so basic and the facial mocap/animation appears to be almost non-existent at times.