Alan Wake

I'm sort of swaying toward this over Spider-Man, purely because it's the Halloween season. Also it's £43.95 on Shopto with £50 credit.

I feel like Alan Wake 2 is the higher risk for buggy launch than Spider-Man 2, but it’s more my jam.

Not very scientific, just feeling based on SM2 being a major release for Sony that they have a lot riding on, and Remedy being just some guys.

I think I've got every remedy game at launch and can't remember any issues with any of the brilliant games they make. (Awful fps in control but that was on ancient console on its last legs)

I think Quantum Break had issues on PC. It didn't feel great to play even when it came to it a few years later.

Control I believe was fine at release though, along with their other games. Still, outside of first-party console games, I still think it is best to wait on reviews to make sure there aren't tech issues.

I see people are losing their mind over the pc requirements.

Torn on this. I liked the story in the first one but found the gameplay boring. But Control was fucking outstanding both story and gameplay, and this looks really good. Review embargo up soon?

Just watched it..no where near enough detail for me. I'll find a much beefier recap.

Yeah. To play at the highest settings you need the highest performance GPU available. Oh the humanity.


I honestly don't get the point of ray tracing. I've tried Cyberpunk with all the RT on or off in photo mode and I *still* can't tell the difference. I sometimes can convince myself maybe but I'm really not convinced I could articulate the improvement I'm seeing, and suspect it's placebo. Every game I've tried it is I just get a loss of FPS and fuck all perceptable difference. It's this Gen's anisotropic filtering.

The problem with a lot of what ray tracing does is that devs have gotten so good at faking it with rasterised graphics that it often isn't particularly noticeable or it is only noticeable under certain circumstances. Plus, a lot of games will say they have ray tracing, but only use it for shadows, which only give a very, very minor difference.

With global illumination you can get quite a big difference, but even then it is often only noticeable with side by side comparisons. Even with those, if you don't know what you are looking for, you may not see the differences.

I think path tracing is different though. The recent patch for Cyberpunk, with path tracing combined with the DLSS 3.5, gives a fantastic boost to the quality of the image. I would be surprised if people couldn't see the difference.

CP2077 is the only game that has graphical moments that peak above Elden Ring where it stops you in your tracks and you can't help but think 'fucking wow' (in my experience). ER is carried by its artstyle but CP has both the tech (path tracing) and a similarly wtfwow artstyle.

I imagine they then look another step above on a nice OLED display.

I don’t get Chopsens anisotropic filtering reference, it’s doesn’t negatively impact framerates much, and makes textures that are far away look much better. Hairworks would be a better example I think.

I hope they'll do a physical release with this, maybe with Limited Run Games?

I can kind of understand the comparison. Again, if you don't know what anistropic filtering does (basically, make textures that are at an extreme angle less blurry - mostly evident with distant texture), then you probably aren't going to see the difference. The difference isn't that subtle when you do know to look at distant textures, but it is missable and I could see a lot of people not overly missing it if it weren't there.

As you say though, the performance impact is really negliable, so there isn't much reason to not use it.