Selnors Graphics prediction Alan Wake review thread.

[MikeB]

aragod said:

MikeB said:

@ Booh!

Remedy couldn't overcome the limits of the xbox360

I want to add Remedy is a great developer, IMO Alan Wake's technical flaws and weaknesses are primarily due to XBox 360's technical limitations.

As I said before Alan Wake looks like a solid single player experience, if the 360 was the only HD console out there it would sit on the top of my wishlist for this year. If the short campaign and darkness doesn't bother you too much and you like this sort of game, IMO [360 owners] buy the game and support these great developers.

I'm not so sure about that, the second part specificaly. It's important to take in account that Alan Wake had a custom built X360 engine like one of the few games out there and certainly the newest. If Gears 2 still looks better than AW with UE 2.5 which is old and multiplatform, than it seems to me like someone didn't outdone themselves. I still think we'll see more impressive games on the Xbox, than the current library (well it's about time, 2 years and counting) and personally AW seems like an unfinished business.

Gears of War 2 does not do 'proper' anti-aliasing (and like Alan Wake does not do 'proper' HDR neither), however Alan Wake features good anti-aliasing, this is the primary reason why they are rendering in sub-HD. Probably they could have gone for 720p with less anti-aliasing but one has to consider the quality of used assets, if this quality is not high enough from an end product perspective it can make more sense to render in Sub-HD and try to smoothen things afterwards.

Gears of War 2 may look more detailed, Alan Wake is however a very different game. I can imagine Gears re-using assets a lot more than Alan Wake. If you need more varierty in your assets and lack enough disc capacity to do this you have to resort to lower quality assets to fit the disc.

I hope this provides some insight on why people may be comparing apples to oranges if they want to compare Gears of War 2 to Alan Wake with regard to graphics.