Ok so here's the deal. In the Alan Wake forums, the devs have said the following:

Q: What is with the "touched up" screenshots?

Remedy has never touched up (or Photoshopped details into) screenshots of any of our games. Ever. I'm dead serious about this stuff.

We've published a lot of screenshots over the years (from various platforms). We do have a special game mode (like the Halo guys have etc) which can render shots in a "magazine covershot" resolution with a lot more AA detail than normally expected - that's kind of given, just like using camera angles and lenses (FOV) not seen during normal gameplay. But they always come out of the game engine and not from an offline renderer.

But as I said - we've never released concept art as screenshots or screenshots which have been retouched.

SamiV.

Q: So the shadows will look just as good in the final game? No dithering at all?

While dithering is a commonly used technique to hide resolution detail (or lack of), I think you'll find our current method to be extremely elegant. Unfortunately I can't describe the algorithms in detail, but the shadows are really nice. Trust me, we've spent a few years iterating different ways to do this stuff and we're now finally happy with what we have.

SamiV.

Q: How many polygons does Alan's model currently have? I understand if you can't answer this question..

From the top of my head I'll just say about 10k-20k triangles. There's several versions of the character (hmm, did I just spoil something?) and with various item attachments so it's not that exact.

SamiV.

Q: Dithering is my biggest annoyance this gen after brown. I would honestly prefer games to run in standard def than have dithering.

I'm pretty sure you'll be very happy with our shipping solution. 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. 

SamiV.

Q: 4xAA? Thats pretty beefy for a console game isn't it? Most games are usually at 2xMSAA.

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. 

SamiV.

Q: to samiv, the only complaints i'm hearing is screen tearing in the videos. is that being polished or is it more to do with video quality?

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.

SamiV.

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Enjoy.

wow it sounds like they are really polishing the game to the max
great to read those words from a dev
cant wait to play the game

You look like Steveo

Whoa there man, totally random no?

OT: alrighty then.

We do have a special game mode (like the Halo guys have etc) which can render shots in a "magazine covershot" resolution with a lot more AA detail than normally expected - that's kind of given, just like using camera angles and lenses (FOV) not seen during normal gameplay


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Doesn't that mean they are not what you get in gameplay, therefore touched up? (doesn't matter if it's game engine or not, if it's not what a player is getting when he is going through the game...) Okay, they're not making them prettier afterwards or whatever, but they are using a method that the player will not be experiencing in the game?

I'll take that as an personal offensive comment since i cant stand him

Remedy is awesome.

Alan Wake 94% Meta, 3 million copies, I stand by my original prediction.

This is a problem...how exactly?

You seem optimistic... but then again, I thought you were optimistic over Assassin's Creed II, and I think you were dead right

So what they are saying is that many of these images were are seeing are not reprentitive of gameplay, but those aren't what they call screenshots.... They are, however, produced by the engine, so the in-engine cut scenes will look better than the gameplay, but I think that most games have that

i dont feel bad since i know what i got 

but its bothersome that i got compared to a loser hahahaby the look only i guess