Remember when this was top tier?
I mean, I am a firm believer in Art Direction>Fidelity, but there is no reason you can’t have both, too. Anyone who’s played Alan Wake and then Alan Wake 2 directly after will probably agree that yeah, better graphics can have a pretty damn big impact.
But better graphics is something you can just throw money at, while art direction requires skill and letting artists free. From the point of view of investor, putting all in graphics is the les risky choice.
Also it is a lot easier for investors/leadership to see graphics at any point in the process compared to gameplay, which can change all the way up to release and takes time to work. Throwing money at something that can be seen is easy!
Thats me. Even when young, cared nothing for graphics. I still have fun with Atari 7800 games and get absorbed and transported to the game world.
Peoples imaginations suck now, is my hypothesis. Theyre never ever bored, constantly stimulated, and depressed. They think shiny graphics will help them.
Thankfully indie games have been killing it with great gameplay recently !
If a game is good then to hell with the graphics.
Unfortunately AW1 wasn’t that good. Makes me wish there was a mode that just played the combat for me, because it gets stale fast, and I’d rather just slowly learn the lore.
Article is kinda trash, dude goes into it with the bias that this guy is wrong. But hes not. Play the original Thief. What he is saying is graphics have now eaten the industry to the point that it effects gameplay itself. Hes right.
Personally, I see graphics and gameplay as separate dimensions. Great games are more about gameplay than graphics, but I still love beautiful games like Subnautica, or that Horizon VR game (which was a meh game but I enjoyed just looking around when I first started playing). Though games can also be beautiful without going just for photorealism, like Valheim.
That said, at some point it becomes more interesting as a tech demo than a game when going for extreme photorealism. You don’t even notice the difference between realistically simulated hair vs simply simulated hair except for a few cases (like it would probably be good in a porn game), other than the framerate hit.
And then there’s the direction nvidia wants to go in where it’s not photorealism but highly detailed slop.
It was also kind of dull in the gameplay department? I love horror games and Alan Wake is perhaps the only horror game I’ve bounced off 3 times. I’ve beaten a lot of stinkers. I kinda liked parasite eve 2 and fucking played all the way through galerians ash.
I’m a big Remedy-head, so I’m very biased here. But I will argue it’s worth pushing through it. The story is interesting and the payoff is worth it. AW2 is an incredible game. The first game definitely haven’t aged well though, even though I like the story and characters and think it has some charm.
Would you recommend Alan Wake 2 to someone who didn’t play the first one? I’ve been tempted to buy the sequel but i often wonder how much it ties to the first.
Control is the best of em all IMO!
I mean… that’s kind of a hard question. Alan Wake 2 is the culmination point of everything Remedy has done up to that point. You’ll get paid off for having played all of:
- Max Payne 1
- Alan Wake
- Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
- Quantum Break
- Control
- Control’s AWE DLC
AW2 is a direct sequel to Alan Wake, so that is of course the single most important previous game to play. The story is directly built on top of AW1. But at the same time I will say… Alan Wake 2 is such a good game that if you are absolutely certain you have no interest and never will have an interest in playing the other Remedy games first, you should probably just play Alan Wake 2 then, because it’s really just fantastic.
I would still recommend watching some kind of recap of the previous games on YouTube, it might be better than nothing.
Its great if you enjoy reading. A lot of gamers I know have never read a book so dont want that type of game. The chainsaw men in the forest did get old I’ll say that!
Control is way better imo, AW1 just doesn’t play all that well in my experience, makes getting all the pages really tedious
I’m an avid horror reader and the story of Alan wake 1 didn’t really pull me, (maybe it’s the fact that i don’t like stephen king or the whole midwest americana. )
Ahh yeah. I love Stephen king myself. Long as I don’t read a lot of them in a row.
I loved the original Xbox 360 Alan Wake.
