Alan Wake 2

[conkerman]

Anyone else interested in this?

I have not seen much online about it, but I am a big fan of Remedy and am considering breaking my own rule and pre ordering.

If you have not played the original game, it is an absolute cracker. The pulp novel influences come through loud and clear.

[SmithCorona]

First one was great - played it first time round and now have it on PS5 too. Didn't know about this. Exciting!

[WhisperingWasp]

Count me in. Although all I seem to play these days is the PS Plus free games!

Loved the first one first time round and recently played the remaster. Cheesier than I remembered!

However, Control is top-3 all-time for me so expecting AW2 to be great.

[Jamescrs]

Didn't know it was a thing but I loved the first one, thought it was a fantastic game, played it all the way through twice so i'll definately be interested in a sequel

[Snubs]

I heard about this via Gamescom back in August. Having been aware of them when they were first released but not played them, I figured I'd give the original a go. Handily, it's only about £8 on Steam. Yep, great game. Not perfect by any means; I found a lot of the flashbacks just repetitive and annoying (as i do in any game that has them), but overall the storyline is very different, the role of lighting in the game is fairly unique and the difficulty is spot on. I bought the DLC and I can see why people at the time said the DLC was better than the original game. Felt like the devs had the time and opportunity to do things a bit differently and it really paid off. Looking forward to the sequel. It'll be interesting to see if they've added a broader variety of gameplay mechanics rather than solely 'shine and shoot'.

[snuffy]

I ordered it yesterday.

Then canceled it today.

And then ordered an RTX4070 and it comes bundled with...Alan Wake 2!

[conkerman]

I did see the offer, but only for 4070 and above. My lad wants a 4060 for Xmas and was hoping to take advantage.

I have already bought a rx6800, rtx4070 and a rx6650xt this year! (HTPC, my gaming pc and my other son)

[conkerman]

Pre-Ordered the Deluxe edition. Used my humble choice discount.

Don't let me down Remedy.

[Brasshande]

Possibly the game i've been looking forward to most this year, although it's going to be a bit more of a survival horror than the first one apparently. Not really the direction i'd have gone with it but it's by Remedy so i'm sure it'll turn out great anyway

[The OG Jester]

First one was a genuinely scary game, I'd say that The Evil Within was the only other game I felt some real terror while playing it.

Be interesting to see how it pans out, if it gets close to the first game it will be good.

[Digger]

snuffy said:

I ordered it yesterday.

Then canceled it today.

And then ordered an RTX4070 and it comes bundled with...Alan Wake 2!

Is that from any specific retailer or board manufacturer?

[SV_WDC]

Excited yes. Will see what the reviews are like. And howlongtobeat times to judge whether it's worth the full RRP.

Strange to have seen almost no marketing on it whatsoever.

[snuffy]

Digger said:

snuffy said:

I ordered it yesterday.

Then canceled it today.

And then ordered an RTX4070 and it comes bundled with...Alan Wake 2!

Is that from any specific retailer or board manufacturer?

From what I can see, it's all manufactures, regardless of retailer.

I was going to buy a Gigabyte one, until a mate told me about the cracking boards and how they refuse to replace them under warranty. I bought a Gainward one instead.

Ah:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/alan-wak...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/campaigns/ala...

Which made me check where the code was ? Seems it will be emailed shortly.

Edited by snuffy on Tuesday 17th October 18:57

[snuffy]

That will explain why it's bundled with a 4070 or higher then:

[Lucas Ayde]

It will be interesting to see how this looks .. resolutions are going to be lower than what people expect to see BUT it appears that they are prioritising picture detail and quality over raw screen resolution.

I've long thought that pursuing higher pixel counts is the wrong way to go for making games look better - we should be adding more graphical detail first. This should maybe provide a chance to see how a really detailed game running at what is now considered a low resolution, can look.

I'm still using 1080p tellies and they look great. I never look at a TV show/film and think to myself 'that looks too lo-res, needs to be 1440p/4k'. I game on the same TV from my PC using Steamlink and it all my PC games look great. I've got a G9 monitor so its not like I couldn't game at 1440p (and up to 5120x1440 pixels) if I wanted to.

(Of course, high detail AND high resolution would be even better but this should be intesting to see what they can do with a limited res)

Also notable that all the recommended setting use DLSS so the raw, rendered resolution is actually going to be below 1080p. DLSS does an excellent job though.

[Brainpox]

Lucas Ayde said:

It will be interesting to see how this looks .. resolutions are going to be lower than what people expect to see BUT it appears that they are prioritising picture detail and quality over raw screen resolution.

I've long thought that pursuing higher pixel counts is the wrong way to go for making games look better - we should be adding more graphical detail first. This should maybe provide a chance to see how a really detailed game running at what is now considered a low resolution, can look.

I'm still using 1080p tellies and they look great. I never look at a TV show/film and think to myself 'that looks too lo-res, needs to be 1440p/4k'. I game on the same TV from my PC using Steamlink and it all my PC games look great. I've got a G9 monitor so its not like I couldn't game at 1440p (and up to 5120x1440 pixels) if I wanted to.

(Of course, high detail AND high resolution would be even better but this should be intesting to see what they can do with a limited res)

Also notable that all the recommended setting use DLSS so the raw, rendered resolution is actually going to be below 1080p. DLSS does an excellent job though.

Problem with resolution is once you’ve seen it it’s difficult to go back. A bit like moving from 30fps to 60fps

I play mostly on a 165hz 1440p ultra wide OLED and very happy with the quality

But sometimes I’ll move to the 120hz 4K OLED and the extra detail is very obvious to my eyes

If you are happy with 1080p then great but if you ever experience higher you will soon see what you’ve been missing out on

[Lucas Ayde]

Brainpox said:

Problem with resolution is once you’ve seen it it’s difficult to go back. A bit like moving from 30fps to 60fps

I play mostly on a 165hz 1440p ultra wide OLED and very happy with the quality

But sometimes I’ll move to the 120hz 4K OLED and the extra detail is very obvious to my eyes

If you are happy with 1080p then great but if you ever experience higher you will soon see what you’ve been missing out on

I can experience it right now on my 5120x1440 G9 monitor (which can go up to 240Hz).

Playing the games in 16:9 1080p with 60Hz on my TV screen, sitting in a comfortable chair a few metres away, is absolutely not a hardship. I much prefer it in fact to sitting at my desk right in front of the monitor. That's great for work, not optimal for most games (excluding stuff like RTS type games).

One of the reasons resolutions kept getting higher and higher and people focus so much on them was the shift to flatscreens with their rigid pixel structure (vs CRTs prior). You kind of have to run natively (or at an exact multiple) and on top of that, if you are sitting close then the sharp edges stand out more so you need to go to higher resolutions (as well as employ various anti-aliasing etc). Digital Foundry did a good series of videos where they showed a HD CRT monitor. They showed how running something at 1280x960 on it could look as subjectively stunning as a 4K OLED:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BVTHxc4LM

[Digby]

Lucas Ayde said:

One of the reasons resolutions kept getting higher and higher and people focus so much on them was the shift to flatscreens with their rigid pixel structure (vs CRTs prior).

We were there for the dawn of PC gaming and the jump from say, 640x480 to 800x600 was glorious. Sli down the line allowed 1024x768 on our Voodoo cards and there was no going back. Things just kept getting better and better hardware wise, all making our often huge CRT monitors shine. In fact, it became all about the resolution for us, because graphical options were mostly quite limited in earlier games and if you had a decent card / cards, many of those options made little difference to the performance, so you pushed the resolution. IIRC, we got to the stage where GPL could be run in 1600x1200 and it looked phenomenally better than it did in 800x600.

I would go as far to say for almost every PC gamer I knew back then, it became all about the resolution. And this was at a time when flat screens were only available on the odd sci-fi movie. We never dreamed we would ever have them in the home.

Nothing much has changed, either. I went the 2k route and the 4k route and can now also upscale 4k (4k native + 175% res upscale in Forza for example). The difference on my 4k OLED is as obvious as it ever was on a CRT to me.

I would politely suggest the focus was almost always on the resolution and had virtually nothing to do with LCD type screens which appeared decades after our pursuit of sharper visuals began.

[snuffy]

I think I can resist getting up at 5AM on Friday morning to play it!

Not that I've received any codes yet anyway. Epic must not do the Steam preload thing I assume?

[snuffy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-67204018